To protect or to avenge.
Canopy’s roads were crowded, both high and low. The fruit harvest had peaked and the season of nuts and seeds was waning. Though it was past sunset, slaves and citizens alike carried baskets brimming with macadamias or windgrass grain, green oilseeds and orange oilseeds, some for eating and some for burning, some for leaching of their toxins to make them edible and others for pounding into sealant or adhesive. Several hours passed before Unar reached the crossroads of the Falling Fig, and several more before she’d squeezed through the press of bodies along the snake path and found her way into Odelland.
It wasn’t Odel’s emergent, the sweet-fruit pine, which Unar sought first, this time.
She went to the palace of the king of Odelland, and stared for a long while at the parapets from which Ylly’s mother had been pushed.
The palace, built in a blue quandong tree, swayed in the stiff winds like a giant bird’s nest, polished timber after polished timber placed in a seemingly unstable fashion. Though the breeze bent the boughs that the building rested on, not a plank fell out of place. Hidden dovetails and dowels held snowy sweet-fruit pine branches snugged tight to scarlet bloodwood. The steep roofs of fresh, grey windgrass thatch, highly valued as insect-repellent bedding and for driving the foul flavour from cooked monkey meat, not only trumpeted the king’s wealth but completed the image of Odelland royalty as colourful toucans nesting where fruit would fall on them like rain.
Yet they had killed a woman for the crime of growing old. Perhaps the death god, Atwith, approved of such things, but Unar didn’t, and Atwith was not her god.
Unar sat where the trunk of the adjacent floodgum obscured her from the guards who watched from crooked towers at the corners of the ever-swaying structure. Ostensibly kicking her sandalled feet out in a pose of relaxation, she felt for defects in the path, and in a moment when all human traffic was moving away from her, she swung herself underneath it, hanging like a sloth from ropes of torn floodgum bark.
Hand over hand, wary of the scorpions, biting ants, and tarantulas that called the cracks and bark curls home, Unar made her way to the place where floodgum branch met quandong, directly below the palace.
There, she began to scale the walls in darkness. Nothing could have been easier. The untrimmed ends of the artfully stacked timbers would have given purchase to a child. Soon, she was so high that not even the light from lamp-carrying merchants below could show her the contrast of her fingernails against the fine finish of the multicoloured woods.
Her magic was faded this far from the Garden, but it was still strong enough to inform Unar whether there were any women in the princess’s apartments before she climbed into them. A screen of fragrant smoke filled the window, to keep the insects out, and Unar felt a beetle abandon the back of her jacket in a panic as she passed through the smoke. She had known these west-facing rooms would be the princess’s, but she hadn’t known how a royal daughter would sleep: on a pink, orchid-shaped mattress floating above a lily-pad-shaped platform of pale bone.
How had the royal family traded for such a thing from Odel? Unar hadn’t realised the gentle god owned any powers besides keeping children from falling. Then again, Audblayin could make sky-coral and her Bodyguard float; why not all the goddesses and gods? Unar tried to examine the mattress with her magical senses, but her link to the distant Garden was too strained. She couldn’t see the threads of power holding it in place, nor could she smell anything arcane.
The ostentatiousness of the bed and the sound of Ylly’s voice in her head made Unar want to burn it and its feather-filled pillows. That would make a fine smell, but she’d come for one thing—an object suitable for tribute to Odel, to keep Ylly’s granddaughter safe from falling—and she mustn’t become distracted. She must escape the palace without any alarms having been raised.
Gold combs and charmed anklets covered the dresser with its opal-studded silver mirror, but every item was stamped with the toucan crest of the king of Odelland, and soldiers would be summoned if she offered any such thing at a Temple. The goblets and pitcher on the mantel were the same. Even the iron pokers by the smoke-producing braziers were marked with the symbols.
Her attention was caught by railings that had been plugged into place by the bed and by the armchairs. She threw back the veil surrounding the squat, where the covered hole for piss and shit to fall through had a sort of harness in place, suitable for an old woman whose knees wouldn’t hold her weight while she squatted.
The princess was old. Much older than Ylly’s mother had been at the time of her demise, Unar would wager. It made her blood boil. Without magic, this room would probably smell of urine, too. The beautiful bed no longer seemed a girl’s flight of fancy, but a hag’s need for the bed to rise in order to roll herself out of it.
Unar had wasted too much time. The decrepit princess could retire to her apartment any moment. Unar expanded her tenuous ability as far as she could, her nostrils filling with the smell of sweet-sour quandong fruit, bitter kernel and clean, fresh crushed leaf, in the hope she’d be warned of women approaching.
Instead, something hidden in the floor under a silk carpet tickled her mind.
Unar threw herself to the floor. She peeled back the carpet. A hexagon of bloodwood pulled out of place like a puzzle piece. Inside a small, revealed hollow lay bundles of something black, cool and supple to touch, but difficult to see; as Unar lifted the edge of the cloth, it rippled to brown, taking on the colour of her hand.
Chimera skin. It changed colour, like a chameleon’s, even after the animal’s death. There was something inside. Bits of old bones. She shook them out of the cloth.
Then Unar stuffed the cloth into the front of her jacket, making a false paunch above her belt, before putting the piece of bloodwood back in place and smoothing out the carpet. She leaped for the window, but the smoke solidified, throwing her roughly back.
Stunned, Unar waited for her dizziness to clear. She tried to make sense of the swirl of sound that had thickened around her.
You are a thief, the window had accused her.
It was something similar to the wards around the Garden.
Unar climbed to her feet. She went to the window and laid her fingers tentatively on the sill. The smoke buzzed angrily.
“I’m no thief,” Unar told it softly, trying to link her mind to it the way she linked her mind to the Garden. “The five pieces of cloth I’ve taken are payment for the life of a murdered woman.”