“There’s a tree growing out of a tree.” The boy’s hands relax. They rest by his sides. “The night-yew, I mean. It’s the first tree, the beginning of the forest, but it’s a parasite, like all babies when they’re new. It grows out of the host tree. When Audblayin’s a goddess, like she is now, it flowers at night and is the night-yew. When Audblayin’s a god, it flowers in the day and is the day-yew. It wakes up the magic, if you have it. And if you have it, you can serve.”
“I have it,” Unar says at once, her certainty making her louder than she would have liked to be. Magic. That’s what she has, and she has it without even visiting the tree that grows out of the tree. Does that mean she’s something better than a Servant? Does it mean she really could be a goddess of her own? She remembers how Oxor glowed. How the seed in her chest tugged her towards the Garden. “I saw some Servants in Oxorland. Six women and a fighting man.”
“I suppose the fighting man was Oxor’s Bodyguard. Deities in male bodies each have a female Bodyguard. The ones in female bodies have male ones. My grandmother told me that my brother drowned and I lived for a reason. She said I felt drawn towards Temple service because the deathless ones had a use for me. I’m not so sure. There’s nothing special about me. How could there be? I was a twin. There was always a spare one of me.”
Unar stares at him. His eyes are wide, searching her face for some sort of reassurance, but she’s barely seeing him; she’s thinking about what he said.
When Audblayin’s a god, it flowers in the day and is the day-yew.
Deities in male bodies each have a female Bodyguard.
I felt drawn towards Temple service because the deathless ones had a use for me.
Possibilities branch in all directions.
Audblayin is a goddess now, but in her next incarnation, she could be a he.
Maybe I’m to be the Bodyguard of the god of life.
The seed in Unar’s chest bursts into vibrant, thrumming tangles that fill her from fingertips to toes. The smell of quince and wood fern comes again, stronger than ever. It startles her afresh. Twitches her. Sinks from her feet into the platform of living wood. The first smells are washed away, replaced by the scent of turned-over, month-old mulch and pungent tallowwood sap. The boy stares, drawing back slightly, as though he can feel it, too.
Slowly the smells and sensations fade. Unar can’t find any trace of the seed inside her. Bats still screech and owls still hunt, but everything is changed. The goddess of life has called to her. Marked her out. Pulled her close, filling her with the belonging and warmth she has rarely felt in her mother’s presence.
Saved her, but not her sister, from her parents’ neglect, for a reason.
“Why don’t you want to serve Ehkis, then?” she asks the boy, as though nothing unusual has happened. The seed is gone, but the memory, the powerful conviction that she is on an ordained road, remains.
The boy’s mouth makes a flat line, and his wide nostrils flare.
“The rain goddess drowned my brother,” he says. He rubs his skinny left shoulder with his right hand. “He punched me in this arm, the last time I saw him alive. It went numb and then it hurt for the rest of the day. I wish I could still feel it hurting.”
So. He might say he wants to submit, but not to the rain goddess. Not yet.
Unar almost tells him about her baby sister, Isin. She almost shows him the indents in her skin from the cot she lay in, tells how it smells of emptiness and death, and how her cold mother thought nothing of making her sleep in it.
After Isin fell.
Instead, she sits down cross-legged beside the boy. Together, surrounded by the sounds of falling water, whining mosquitoes, and musky night-parrots making small branches creak and crack with their weight, they wait for the break of day.
PART I
Dry Season
ONE
MOONLIGHT HAD followed Unar in the hours since she’d slipped out of the Garden, and now, as a shadow on a branch resolved into a rain-silvered silhouette, she realised something else had followed her, too.
Unar wanted to ignore the crouching outline above and to the left of her. Barefoot on her own broad bough in loose leaf-trousers and a red Gardener’s tunic, she was impatient to see if she could reach the thing, several body lengths below, that she’d come for. There, barely discernible in the dark, a cloth-wrapped bundle was stuck in the fork of the next lowest lateral branch, tantalising her, but half-heard myths of the Understorey kept her gaze fixed to the silhouette.
She gripped her bore-knife. It had proven useless in her descent through the mighty forest. This was a gap-axe tree and couldn’t be bored into by any means short of magic. The knife should puncture a lung easily enough, though.
“Who’s there?” she called defiantly.
“You climb well,” a man’s low, amused voice replied. “For a Gardener. But you’re trespassing. You crossed the border many minutes ago.”
“Which border?”
“Both of them.”
Unar had been aware of it even before she reached the crossroads. She’d felt the Garden’s power shrinking as she crossed horizontally from the realm of the birth goddess into the realm of the rain goddess. Then she’d felt queasy in her gut as she’d climbed lower and lower, crossing the vertical border from Canopy into Understorey.
Here, none of the Canopian gods or goddesses held sway. All the magical gifts of Unar’s mistress had faded completely. Only Unar’s physical strength and stamina mattered here.
“You’ve crossed the border, too,” she said. “Who are you?”
The man leaned forward out of the tree’s moonshadow. A lined brow suggested he’d seen at least twice as many as Unar’s sixteen years. Water dripped from his glossy, tousled hair. Raised, charcoal-rubbed scars in the shape of tears streaked down cheeks that in daylight would be dark brown, naming him neither Understorian, nor slave, but a Canopian dedicated to the rain goddess, Ehkis. The tears of her Servants were said to have terrible powers, but below the magically defended border, they could do nothing but mingle harmlessly with the rain.
Unar relaxed her grip on the bore-knife.
“I’m Edax,” he said. “Bodyguard of the Bringer of Rain. Shall I tell you her birth name while she’s sleeping?”
“You’re not her Bodyguard,” Unar said, shocked. “If you were, you’d be with her, watching her.” As if the rain goddess’s Bodyguard, her most trusted, feared, and beloved, would betray childhood secrets from a time before the nature of her soul became apparent.
“She sleeps in the bottom of a lake. Who can harm her there? Meanwhile, I’m cursed with a Bodyguard’s sleeplessness.”
“It’s a gift.”
“You think you want that gift, little adept from the Garden Temple? You think you want to be a Bodyguard to the next incarnation of your goddess, when she is reborn a god? And what if she is a woman, again, and then another woman, and then a woman a third time? Mulch for brains!”
“You’re the mulch for brains if you think you can guess the next gender of the one I serve.”
The goddess that Unar served, Audblayin, the birth goddess, had been a woman for three incarnations. She was old now, so old. Surely she would take a turn at being a man. She must be a man. Then she would need a woman Bodyguard, and Unar would be waiting, ready to take the power that being a Bodyguard would bring.