Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(97)
The Bodyguard didn’t step onto the barrier. It was insubstantial for her. She came down through it and searched Unar for weapons without a word, rifling through torn skirts and hacked-off sleeves.
When she whisked away, agile as a lizard, Unar couldn’t be sure if the woman was returning to fetch the god she served, or simply evacuating in the wake of determining the nature of a threat.
“Gardener Unar,” Odel’s voice said. “You return to us much changed.”
He stood on a wooden platform in the shape of an orchid, its four corners pierced and threaded with rope, holding a lit taper in his left hand as he had before. Unar looked up and could barely make out the shape of the Bodyguard, stretched panther-like along the branch where the end of the rope was secured. The lights of Canopy were above her, illuminating roads out of Unar’s reach.
“Understorians, Holy One,” she told Odel. “They want to kill you. You and the others, thirteen gods and goddesses, between sunrise and sunset of one day, to bring back the Old Gods. They have Ilan. It may be that Airak is dead. They’ve killed the Bodyguard of Ehkis and have gone to capture the rain goddess right now. That’s why the monsoon is over. They’ll go after Audblayin next.”
“Come through the barrier.”
“I can’t. That’s why I had to call you. Please, open it for me.”
Odel cupped his chin in his gloved right hand.
“You told Aurilon that my life depended on speaking to you. She owns the power to read truth. My life does depend on what you’ve told me. The question is, will I die if I open the way for you, or die if I do not?”
Unar knew what she looked like: a spined Understorian coming to invade Canopy. Yet she had no weapons. Her clothes were torn, and her skin was dirty and scratched.
“There isn’t much time,” she said hopelessly. A flicker of movement from above suggested that the Bodyguard, Aurilon, grew impatient. So she began to tell her story from the beginning. She told Odel of being passed over at the choosing, of Sawas and Edax teaching her to swim. She told him of how she’d leaped from the Garden while roped to Ylly and Hasbabsah, of the home of the three brothers and of the arrival of Frog.
She spoke of Kirrik and her imprisonment at the dovecote. Without sparing her part in Edax’s betrayal, Unar told of Kirrik’s capture of him, and of Aforis. She told him of the sleeping warriors, wakened, and Marram’s flight towards his home.
“Gods grant that he reaches it safely,” she finished gruffly.
“Gods grant that,” Odel said, and sighed.
He put his hand into empty air, curled his fingers, and made a pulling motion. There was a sound like cloth tearing.
“Come to my Temple, Gardener Unar,” he said. “You gave tribute to protect the child Audblayin while you were there, though you did not know that the child you prayed for was she. Putting your hands on that tribute will allow you to speak across the distance between us and Audblayinland. You can warn the girl’s guardians of what comes.”
Unar had been stuck in one place for so long that she forgot to retract her spines, and gasped as she tried to raise an arm that wouldn’t move. Then she remembered. The points slid back into her, springing out as she drove them towards a higher section of the tree. She lifted her knee, her body moved upwards, and she didn’t strike the barrier.
As she dragged herself fully back into Canopy, she shuddered. A familiar sensation filled her. Earthy smells. Juicy roots. Fruit sweet and sour and bitter. It was Canopian growing-magic, life-magic, returning. Her magic, as powerful as it had ever been, and more. And at least half of it flowed from Marram’s amulet, the bone seeming awakened by the mere act of crossing the barrier.
Strength flowed through her arms and legs. All the weariness of her heartbreak, the flight and the climb were gone. Part of it was the lightness that came from musical magic, the two inner sources now completely meshed, sound and sight and smell working together. Unar paused to wonder.
Then, with new energy, she scaled the sweet-fruit pine as far as the winding Canopian road where Odel and Aurilon waited for her.
Unar knelt before him and kissed the ground in front of his sunset-hued boots, careful not to seem like she was even thinking of touching him.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh, thank you.”
The heartbreak was still there, after all; returning power could not redeem her. In the pit of her stomach, despair still lay in place of desire. Her final obligations were to secure Audblayin safely within the Garden and ensure that Oos was out of Kirrik’s reach, that no Servant could be used to sever the trunk of the great tallowwood.
Then she would do what she had been going to do before Marram put his hands out and caught her.
“The Temple is this way,” Odel said. “Put those spines away. The king’s law forbids them, and you may need them before the sun rises. The amulet is forbidden, too; I should hide it beneath my shirt, if I were you.” Unar obeyed him, tucking the bone amulet out of sight. Odel hesitated before turning towards Aurilon and telling her pointedly, “Ehkis is vulnerable without her Bodyguard.”
Aurilon bared her teeth at him. “No.”
“You must do as I say, Aurilon.”
“I must stay with you. My duty is to protect you.”
“You know where she sleeps. You’re faster than they can ever hope to be. Go, before it’s too late and we end up forced to trade for rain with One Forest. They’ll demand we abolish the barrier. If we refuse, the monsoon will never come again, and children will not be the only ones to die.”