“Dunderhead! She does not care about them because it is dangerous to care. I will tell you somethin’, and then maybe you will stop makin’ stupid assumptions about me.” Frog gestured with her chin towards the closed door of the dovecote and lowered her voice. “Core Kirrik had a daughter too, once. Before she had any of ’er four sons. That daughter was gifted, and Core Kirrik loved ’er, but bein’ close to a sorceress means bein’ burned by the flames. She killed ’er own daughter. By mistake, but it could not be undone. I do not want Core Kirrik to love me. Why would I wanna end up dead? If you love me, and you learn from ’er, you could kill me, too. So stop it.”
“What do you want, if you don’t want her to love you?”
Frog’s smile echoed that of the woman in the black skirts. The woman who had accidentally killed her own daughter and deliberately driven away a hate-filled son. The woman who did not love.
“I want revenge.”
*
THEY LET Unar back in at nightfall.
Core Kirrik sat at her desk, writing, seemingly oblivious. Sleepy birds perched above and around her. The men’s voices rumbled in the corridor, though the door to their bunkroom was shut.
“Dry off by the fire,” Frog said. “Change your clothes if you must. Hang your wet things by your bunk. Then go and make supper.”
“No,” Unar said. “Things have changed. My obeying your orders was before. This is now. We have an arrangement. I’m not your slave anymore.”
Kirrik didn’t look up from her work.
“You never were,” Frog said. “You jumped out of the Garden to save a slave who held ’er tongue for seventy years, and you could not even hold yours for two weeks. Not even for me.”
She went into the corridor and Unar followed her, furious. She had held her tongue. This past fortnight she’d let Kirrik treat her like dirt, when Unar was the one with the power. Unar was the one who deserved respect and obedience.
“Aren’t you coming to watch me? I might poison the supper.”
“Go ahead. You poison everythin’. Our parents’ hearts, so they didn’t want more daughters. Audblayin’s Garden. You were the poison in the home of the three hunters, and you are the poison between my mother and me.” Frog slammed the door again, this time to the bunk room they were supposed to share.
She’s still a child, Unar reminded herself, and she’s wrong. Wife-of-Uranun wanting Frog to fall had nothing to do with her. The Garden wasn’t poisoned, it was healthy and strong. Its strength would only increase when Unar returned with Audblayin. As for the three hunters, she had begged Marram not to follow. But she couldn’t help feeling uneasy about Frog’s heated words.
And Frog called Core Kirrik her mother. She does want to be loved, no matter how she denies it.
Instead of going to the kitchen, Unar went up the stairs, alone, without a lantern. Now that the Master deception was over, the barrier wasn’t needed. Marram was where Kirrik had put him, sleeping the sleep of the almost dead, surrounded by Understorian warriors. All of them had the spines.
I’ll wager none of you screamed, Unar thought, ashamed.
She used the quietest possible sound, the tiniest wheeze of her breath, to send a filament of magic into Marram’s chest. There was no injury there for her to find. Nothing for her to pull, to draw his waking mind back into his body.
Well, she’d gotten some information out of Frog by pandering to her vanity. She could do it again. Frog would tell her what she needed to know. Unar moved away from Marram, examining the next man, and the next man. They were all the same. There was nothing to find. It seemed a healthy sleep, except for the interminable slowness of their beating hearts and all-but-absent breath.
The next rag-shrouded figure seemed a little small for a warrior. When Unar probed the body, she gasped. Beneath the swathe of cloth lay the gangling form of a girl about the same age as Frog. When the thread of magic touched her, it vanished.
“She is Ilan,” Kirrik said softly, and Unar spun on her heel. “Protector of Kings.”
“How have you done this?” Unar cried. “How have you captured a goddess and kept her secret?”
Kirrik made no retort about Unar only speaking when spoken to. Instead, she gently stroked Unar’s forearm, sending pain through Unar’s spines.
“Her body is a girl’s body,” Kirrik said. “I was able to put her to sleep with all the rest. It is eighteen years since the old incarnation of Ilan died, only eight since I captured this one. She was not self-aware. Her powers had not manifested.”
“Her Servants must be frantic not to have found her.”
Kirrik smiled.
“They have started starving themselves to atone. Other Servants will take their place, and may those fools starve, too, for all the good it will do them.”
“Is this how you’ll do it, then? Capture them one by one, and keep them here, until you can kill them all at once? Between sunrise and sunset of a single day, is it? Does she dream? Are her powers manifest now? How do you know she won’t wake?”
Kirrik waved a dismissive hand.
“She cannot age, and so she cannot manifest her powers. While she sleeps here, the strength of kings’ rule fades. Disorder and injustice reign. It will help to keep them from organising against us when the time comes.”
Unar stared at the sleeping goddess and felt afraid for Audblayin. Kirrik must not be allowed to find him first while he was vulnerable.
“Try to wake her,” Kirrik commanded, and Unar jerked with surprise.
“What do you mean?”
“Try to wake her, I said. You gaze at her. You wish you could wake her and age her with your ability to manipulate the stuff of life. You wish to watch her destroy me. Is it not so?”
Unar blinked.
“Core Kirrik, you’ve given me these.” She raised her forearms where the spines were still extended, ragged and bloody as though she had used them to kill. “I will give you what I promised.”
“Frog tells me that your face heats when you mention this man, Edax, Bodyguard of Ehkis. She says you will never betray him.”
Unar remembered the upside-down kissing. The animal sounds she had made in Edax’s expert hands. She remembered how careless he had sounded, telling her about the foot bones of would-be assassins he had fastened to the bottom of a fig-tree lake, careless of anything and everything but the need to keep his goddess safe.
She looked at the small form of the child on the floor.
I will keep my god safe.
“There is a place,” she said, “where we used to meet.”
*
THE BROAD myrtle branches that had formed the rim of the pool spilled water like thin sheets of crystal.
Unar gazed at the place that had seemed safe to her while she dallied with Ehkis’s Bodyguard. She and Edax had met after dark. This was the first time she’d seen the myrtle pool during the day.
Trapped fragments of scarce, grey light from the clouds above Canopy gave body to the vertical river. It twisted like a woman’s waist seen through a window. The air was cooler, perfumed by summer blooms and fresh foliage.
Sounds Unar had half forgotten wove in and around the fall of water. Monkeys howling. The too-woo, too-woo of amorous fruit doves. Silvereyes pip-pip-pipping. Lorikeet trills, bowerbird wheezes, and the high-pitched chatter of fantails. Toucans croaking and manakins warbling, birds of paradise stuttering and catbirds screeching.
“You swam here?” Core Sikakis shouted into Unar’s ear over the animals and the roar of rain and river.