“What superstition?”
He laughed.
“That a pendant of bone from the Old God whose essence now belongs to Audblayin protects the wearer from sorcery. Floorians find the bones sometimes under the roots of Audblayin’s emergent. The amulet I brought was given in trade for a bundle of furs. I snatched it up when I saw what Frog had done to Oos.”
Unar frowned, trying to remember where she had seen the amulet last.
“Maybe it’s not superstition,” she said slowly. “Maybe it does protect you. From having your body stolen. Frog put it in my … Frog betrayed me a second time. She thought she’d replaced my weapon with something ineffective, but she didn’t know that Kirrik wanted to steal my body.” Didn’t she? “Kirrik can’t have told her. The amulet is outside. I’ll fetch it.”
But when she tried to give it back to Marram, he wouldn’t take it.
“You put it on,” he said. “If it is your body the sorceress wants to steal, you had better be the one to wear it.” And Unar acquiesced, not believing that the long curve of bone had any power. It felt inert to her, as it had before. Most likely it was not the bone of an Old God at all.
The bathtub wouldn’t go through the front door of the dovecote. Marram set to with a hatchet, enlarging the opening. Unar couldn’t make herself care whether anyone might come, whether messengers or wounded soldiers returning.
Nothing really mattered.
Marram sweated as he worked. Unar watched his strong, slender body in motion and felt nothing. Yellow hair fell over his young face and his odd, pomegranate-pink, Understorian mouth was pinched in concentration. She should have been relieved that he was awake. Saving him, bringing him away from the dovecote, had been one of her important goals. Vaguely, she remembered that before Frog had put him away like winter clothing, his collarbone had been broken and his leg had been all but chewed off. Nothing of those wounds remained, though the scars on his hands and feet remained. She didn’t remark on it.
Soon enough, he tossed the hatchet aside. Unar applied herself to her end of the tub. It scraped through the splintered edges of the newly widened doorway and out onto the path. Together, they wrestled it to the very edge of the circle of blue-white light, where Marram manoeuvred it so that it stood upright on two of its four legs.
“Now,” he said, “Unar, stand back.”
She obeyed and he heaved the tub so that it fell forward, encompassing the lamp, dousing the light.
For an instant, it seemed as if they had succeeded, and would be able to walk over the top of the copper tub and away from the dovecote. Then, the gleaming metal flashed white hot.
Unar might have stood there, gazing at it, until death came, but Marram had the presence of mind to seize her arm, throw her into the dovecote, and push her down among the coats and boots of the cloakroom.
The blast turned her deaf for a few confusing moments. Everything was white, and then black, and then Marram’s lips moved in front of her face, making no noise. She sat up, and realised half the wall behind her was missing.
A hand-sized piece of jagged copper pinned Marram’s hand to the floor.
She pulled it out. It was embedded deeply and she needed all of her physical strength. Marram didn’t shout, or maybe he did and she was still deaf, or maybe his words had been stolen.
No. She’s gone. She’s gone, and I do not hate Marram.
“I’ll find something to bind it,” he said. “Something to stop the blood.”
Unar sat alone for a while.
Baby Ylly. Your mother tried to teach me to dive like a duck. And I paid for that lesson in chimera skin.
“Chimera skin,” she murmured to herself.
When Marram returned, she made herself look at him. Really look at him. He’d dressed in odd bits of armour that he’d found inside the dovecote, leaving his shins and forearms bare. His demeanour was confident, but his eyes said he was afraid for his brothers’ lives. They were in danger because they lived in Audblayin’s emergent, but also because they had given shelter to two fallen, gifted women, two escaped slaves, and a little girl running from a demon.
“I know how to get past the lantern,” she said.
The piece of chimera skin that had held the floating fragments of bone was barely big enough to drape the lantern. Marram took a slew of already-deformed weapons from the cloakroom to nudge the colour-shifting cloth into position. When it covered the lantern, only a tiny circle of escaped light remained.
“I’ll go first,” Unar said, brushing past him. Holding up her black skirts, she leaped over the little circle, half expecting to be speared by lightning, but she passed by it unharmed. Marram came a bare step behind her.
“I wish you had thought of that before the bathtub,” he said, grinning.
“What are you doing?” Unar sucked in a sharp breath as Marram grasped the top handle of the lantern through the cloth.
“Bringing it with us.”
“What if it can’t be—” Unar fell silent as Marram proved that the lantern could be moved.
“It could be useful,” Marram said, and his smile turned grim. “If we encounter that charming friend of yours, I will throw it in her face before I let her cut our tallowwood in half with Esse, Bernreb, and Issi inside.”
FIFTY-TWO
NIGHT CAME.
There was no sign of Kirrik or her soldiers. Unar and Marram had gone quickly, but Unar suspected the gap between parties had neither widened nor narrowed. They trod the same path, and Kirrik had half a day’s head start.
Marram set the lantern down behind them and uncovered it so that nobody could creep up on them from behind while they were sleeping.
“I’m not tired,” Unar said, but mostly she was afraid of her dreams. Upon waking, stiff and uncomfortable from being wedged between branches, she felt more tears on her cheeks and the gut-wrenching aftermath of a nightmare whose lingering images she didn’t care to examine.
“We will need to leave the lantern,” Marram said softly in the dawn gloom, and when Unar twisted around to question him, she saw the demon crouched on the other side of the blue-white light.
Only its eyes, huge, round, and glowing yellow like twin suns, remained fixed, Unar’s height above the branch. The rest of the body flickered through umber, emerald, and sooty grey, but the shadow stretched behind and puddled beneath it betrayed its basic form: a four-legged predator with a sleek, muscular, long-tailed body. If it had ears, they were invisible, and its scaly legs were tipped by curved black claws.
The chimera tested the air with a forked tongue.
“I agree,” Unar said, shivering. “Unless you think the demon’s skin will protect it from lightning the same way the dead piece of its hide protected us.”
“I think it would have crossed already, if it could.”