Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(99)

She could hear only the frogs and the wind in the leaves.

Kirrik had been far ahead of her, but how much time had she lost during her incursion into Ehkisland? Was Kirrik still battling in the rain goddess’s domain? Did Aurilon defend the submerged goddess at this very moment? Was Odel’s Bodyguard also dead? Or had Aurilon found Ehkis already missing, kidnapped, and Kirrik’s soldiers moved on into Audblayinland? There were too many possibilities, most of them awful.

Unar stepped out along the path to Ehkis’s sacred pool, then backed up and took a few steps towards the Garden. Her magic was returned to her. She would grow a new branch through Kirrik’s black heart, before the woman even knew she was there, if only she could find her.

Or Kirrik would use Unar’s power to triumph again. Steal her body, smash the Garden, and snatch Audblayin. She shrank from that thought as she shrank from the road to the Temple. The amulet was more than it had seemed, but could she trust it? Could she trust Understorian old wives’ tales? The amulet hadn’t saved Marram from Kirrik’s sleeping spell. Yet he had woken early. And his soul remained firmly embedded in his body.

I can’t risk meeting her. The consequences of her soul in my body are too terrible.

With stars wheeling overhead, Unar went away from Ehkisland, choosing the other road, over the border into Audblayinland.





FIFTY-FIVE

WITH THE crossing, Unar felt as though she doubled in size.

She blinked. One hand went to Marram’s amulet. The other hand went to the place below her ribs where her magic resided; her body hadn’t grown at all, but the well of power within had deepened, and now it pulsed, exerting pressure on her to be used.

No. I am not worthy of this.

I was wrong about everything.

Edax, Airak, Aurilon, and Odel died for nothing.

Audblayin’s Bodyguard will be a man. Not me.

Yet it was like nothing she’d felt before. It had to be something that Kirrik had done to her. Some wicked power entering her. Audblayin’s gift somehow twisted. She wouldn’t use it.

“Boy,” she said, grabbing the elbow of a dirty child who scampered along the road with his arms stretched as if to catch the stream of flat-faced white bats overhead. “Which way to the House of Epatut?”

“Maybe I know!” He tried to pull angrily away from her. “What’ll you give me?”

Unar put her hand up and caught one of the creatures, ignoring the razor-teeth that it drove into her thumb.

“I’ll give you this.”

Eyes shining, likewise enduring the creature’s gnawing, the boy paused to wrap the bat in his jacket before scampering off again.

“This way!” he shouted back to her, and Unar followed with her palms pressed to her sternum, as if she could keep the magic from oozing out. It had wanted to come out. It had wanted to make a cage for the bat from vines and leaves.

It doesn’t want anything. Audblayin doesn’t want anything, except for milk and arms around her. She’s only a baby!

Only a baby, and because of Unar, that baby had been sold away from the safety of the Garden. If Wife-of-Epatut had lost the baby she’d been carrying before the monsoon, she might have decided to love baby Ylly instead. Or, in a fit of jealousy, she might punish Sawas with hard labour.

If only Wife-of-Epatut knew that the daughter she’d dropped in the silk market now had an Understorian name. Rescued from the mouth of a chimera, Imeris lived with three huntsmen, below the barrier, in Audblayin’s emergent.

Old Ylly, grandmother of the child that Wife-of-Epatut knew, cared for Issi in baby Ylly’s place, while baby Ylly was cared for in the House of Epatut.

Unar felt dizzy just thinking about it.

Is this what you wanted, Audblayin? Was this your plan, when you chose to enter baby Ylly’s body with her first breath?

But Audblayin couldn’t hear prayers until she became self-aware at puberty and her memories merged with those of the body she had taken. Odel had said he might see her in his next life, but he couldn’t know for sure. His domain was neither birth nor death. Anyway, Unar wouldn’t survive him long. She had one last task to carry out before she joined him, maybe in the same chimera’s jaws. The demon could very well be following her.

“There it is,” the boy said. “In the gobletfruit tree. The whole crown, it’s his, isn’t it? My pa catches songbirds. Sold some in a cage to the wife. But if you need cloth, and obviously you do, he’s not open till morning. I’m going home.”

Unar didn’t answer him. She stared at the gobletfruit tree. Ruddy, skin-soft arms were twisted into a labyrinth of hollowed burls each as big as most men’s houses, connected by small bridges to a hollowed bulge in the wide main trunk. Fluffy white flowers that would open with the sun and bell-shaped nuts hung everywhere. If Wife-of-Epatut had caged songbirds inside, it would be a wonder if she could hear them over the screeching of parrots that would arrive at daybreak to feast on those nuts, and daybreak was not far away.

Unar marched up the front ramp and beat her fist on the heavy door. Smoke to keep insects out oozed under and around the oval-shape; the wheel and cocoon of the silk merchants’ guild were carved over the more humble loom symbols of the family of weavers from which Epatut had come. Unar beat on the door a second time. When it was finally thrown back, the short and dumpy human-shape that answered was too smoke-wreathed to identify for a long moment.