“That’s for Servants to know.”
Unar shot a sideways glance at him as they walked, but his expression was blank. She couldn’t tell if his word choice reflected her rudeness to Oos in the grass plot.
“Unless somebody pushes Servant Eilif off the edge of the Garden, I will never be a Servant!”
“Is that something you have considered? Pushing Servant Eilif off the edge of the Garden?”
“Of course not.”
He hesitated within arm’s reach of the Gate. “Go to bed, Unar. Go on.”
She left him, fuming, but she didn’t go to bed. Instead, she crept back to her old listening post in the pomegranate bushes, directly across the moat from the treatment room where Oos had once cured her tiredness.
There were voices. Wife-of-Epatut’s voice. The words were indiscernible, but the sounds drifted out of the round, open windows in the white egg of the Temple.
Unar stripped off her robe, leaving her loincloth and her breast-bindings in place. She was too angry to care about fish or drowning. She was going to see, at last, the Servants’ way. She would be tutored whether her tutors wanted her or not.
The water was icy, as it hadn’t been during daylight. So high, and exposed to winds that normally broke against the green roof of Canopy, it was probably the coldest water in all the land; it was rumoured to have frozen, once, many centuries ago, when Audblayin had fallen to Floor but not been killed, so that he was the farthest he could be from the Temple and not have his spirit returned to a body that was closer.
Unar tried to think of a seed in warm earth. It was spring, after all. She convinced her body that it wasn’t cold. Using a fraction of her magic, she summoned a raft of watercress to hold on to and floated across, not high and dry as Aoun had done, but neck-deep and gasping.
When she reached the little island, she crouched on the tiny ledge of rotted leaves under the window, arms around her knees, shivering and listening.
“I’m so afraid, Servant Eilif,” Wife-of-Epatut said. “And I’m tired of being afraid of my husband’s wrath. But if this doesn’t work, I don’t think I could bear to try again.”
“It will work,” Eilif said comfortingly. “Lie down, please.”
There were sounds of clothes being shifted and feet shuffling. Unar forced her frigid body to uncurl. She had to look through the window if she was to see with eyes of power the procedure that Eilif was about to perform.
When she peered over the edge of the open window, Eilif stood there, waiting calmly. Her eyes met Unar’s. Her hood and cloak blocked Unar’s view of anyone else in the room.
Unar’s rage died. She felt like crying, again.
“Wait only a moment, Wife-of-Epatut,” Eilif said without turning. Without blinking. “My assistants must see to a troublesome weed that is growing by this window. Go.”
The unseen assistants left the room, but Unar knew who they were even before she saw them wading in the muck, one hand each on the outer wall of the Temple, the other holding their robes away from the rotted leaves that their sandals sank into. She thought about running away from them, but it would only have postponed her punishment.
“Oh, Unar,” Oos said, lip trembling in the light that came from the window.
Aoun said nothing.
They slung her arms over their shoulders so that she was between them. It seemed like a group embrace until their combined magic groped around inside of her, seized hers like a weed, and pulled it out by the roots.
Unar did cry, then. She had no strength to speak or to stand. Those she had once called friends supported her weight between them. They walked across the moat without sinking, carrying her all the way to the loquat grove, and laid her down in her hammock. The lorikeets roused, but none of the other Gardeners so much as raised their heads.
She was still crying long after they left her alone.
TWENTY
BLOSSOMS RAINED on Unar’s bent back that spring.
As the season drew to a close, the first stirring of her magic sprouted up again. She’d spent those months on her knees, weeding the orchid garden, and the sensation was strange enough for her to cradle her midriff, mouth open in surprise and relief. She had wondered if it would ever return, so deep and dark had the empty places seemed.
There was nobody for her to share her excitement with. Nobody to tell. As the weather warmed, Ylly still accepted her help in silence. The other Gardeners had given up trying to get to know her, both in response to her brusqueness and in the full knowledge that she had been drained as punishment for trying to spy on Temple proceedings.
It was just enough magic for her to unlock the Gate.
For the first time in a long time, Unar left the Garden.
Her first thought was to find the House of Epatut, to check that Sawas and baby Ylly weren’t being ill-used. Maybe if she brought news of them to old Ylly, she’d be forgiven.
But she didn’t know where it was, and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by asking for directions from strangers. Her second thought was to practice swimming by herself. She couldn’t do it in the moat, and she couldn’t do it in the Garden pools without the slaves seeing.
Ehkisland. The home of the rain goddess received more rain than any other part of Canopy. There were hundreds of pools, claimed by no one.
Unar crossed the border at the Falling Fig.
She found a suitably desolate pool just as a light rain began to fall. It wasn’t quite yet time for the summer monsoon, but many dry-season shops and dwellings had been shuttered in anticipation. Some of the drizzle penetrated past the leafy roof over the pool, but most collected on the leaves and fell, slightly delayed, as fat drips, heavy with dust and dead insects.
Very little light came down from the high paths lit by the lightning god, but it was enough that Unar could see the complex and hypnotising patterns formed by the drops. Tiny fish and frogs came to eat the dead insects. Unar made herself look at them with determination.
Eilif had sensed her approach because of her magic. She must learn to swim without it. She was not beaten, would never be beaten.
Unar disrobed, keeping her loincloth and breast bindings as before. She put her toe in the water.
“She’s not in that one,” an oddly familiar voice said.
Without her magic and without proximity to the Garden, people could creep up on her unawares, but this man, she suspected, could creep up on anyone he wanted to. She looked up and around for him but didn’t withdraw her toe.
“It’s you,” she said steadily. “Edax. The Bodyguard who doesn’t sleep.”
He walked, upside down, along the underside of a branch too small to form a safe path in its own right. Talons didn’t need to dig into the bark. In his own niche, he walked where he wanted. His long black hair hung like moss. The tear-scores on his cheeks bunched as he smiled, turning his brown skin to polished tigereye.
Upside down, the effect of his bared teeth was gruesome.