“Mama will come later. Let’s go to the Garden.”
She wasn’t a thief. The Gates would open for her, though not in the way she dreamt. Nothing she could do would be enough to redeem her. Aoun wouldn’t welcome her with his arms around her. She would not be a Bodyguard, and she would not fly. But Audblayin will be safe.
Then she smelled it. Ozone in the air. She heard the crack of lightning. Felt the flow of a different river of power, this one coming all the way from Airakland.
Aforis.
Clutching Ylly to her chest, she began to run again.
Drawn to the screams of the occupants, people had come to stare at the House of Epatut. Perhaps they’d seen her pick up the baby disgorged by the house itself, but none of them got in her way. If they whispered to each other in her wake; if they reported to the king that the runaway Gardener had been seen; if soldiers came, then that was to her advantage. A heartbeat later, she began to shout at strangers in passing.
“Summon the guards! Rouse the army! Understorians are here!”
She didn’t stay to see if any took heed, nor did she angle towards another, taller gobletfruit which held the palace and its associated outbuildings; it must be in mimicry of the King of Audblayinland that so many wealthy merchants wanted gobletfruit crowns of their own.
Only the Garden mattered, and the blue-white blaze before its Great Gate, distant but growing larger as Unar approached.
She saw armoured Audblayinland soldiers in brown skirts and tunics wielding weapons against bare-limbed Understorians. The king’s men were here. She had rarely seen so many. Two hundred or so, and that was two-thirds of the soldiers that he commanded, with only a third left behind to protect the palace. Metal made dull sounds against bone. Some that fell screamed, but others fell in silence.
It was a battle like none the Garden had seen in Unar’s lifetime.
Unar thought the closeness of death in this moment made all the warriors’ lives blaze brighter to her magical senses. She sent threads out along the web of wooden paths, searching for Frog and Kirrik, the ones she must avoid until she could reach the Gate. If Kirrik sensed her, she might snuff her life out, stealing her body, to keep her from interfering, and then make off with Audblayin.
If only Unar had learned from the sorceress to see the future. Or somehow earned her sister’s loyalty. Two enormous men swung swords at one another right before her. Unar tried to take another path, but fighting blocked that way, too.
Lightning struck the brown-clad soldier. His skeleton glowed blue-white as he fell. The other man turned towards Unar, his sword turning with him. She skipped backwards to avoid the gleaming blade.
Only, there was no more path beneath her feet.
FIFTY-SIX
UNAR LOOKED down at nothing.
It occurred to her to try and heave the child back onto the branch, even as she tipped back and any attempted action became futile. She moved her arms briefly to throw, but the baby’s weight didn’t shift. The child wasn’t falling. Instead, under Odel’s protection, the baby bobbed like an empty barrel.
Unar clung to Ylly for her life, gasping. Another soldier had already engaged the Understorian man who had swung the sword at her. Nobody seemed to notice them floating there, to one side of the renewed battle. The men were too busy fighting for their lives. Unar’s kicking shin, spines extended, finally found the path. Writhing, she used the anchor point to draw herself and Ylly back to safety.
Thank you, Odel, she thought sacrilegiously.
Lightning struck, again and again.
Kirrik’s work, or Frog’s. There was no way for Unar to fight back without attracting their notice. She had no choice, though, and so there was no more need for her to stick to existing paths. Her power flowed in the trees, and the trees were in her. She was the pathway.
Merging her will with the tallowwood, Unar knew several things simultaneously. One, the home of the three hunters was sealed against intruders. The fishing room was flooded. Oos’s life force moved restlessly within the breathable space, a pale blob of tenuous power in Unar’s awareness. Esse, Bernreb, Marram, Hasbabsah, Issi, and the older Ylly were there, too. The bones of the lizard-like dayhunter had settled to the bottom of the trap that Esse had made, while other traps held the fresher corpses of warriors whose snake-tooth magic still lingered. Those, Unar presumed to be Kirrik’s men.
Two, Kirrik and Frog, stood with their backs to the Gate. Unar found the eyes of all the fighters, all the unguarded lives, abruptly available to her. In the vicinity of the Garden, she could see what she wished. Visions spun around her, answering what it was she desired to see. Frog and Kirrik must have sensed Unar’s magic in motion, but they had neither a clear line of sight to attack her with lightning, nor any melody to steal from her lips. The danger was an attack to displace her soul. How was such a thing accomplished? Audblayin, protect my soul. Aforis, a rope around his neck, knelt between Kirrik and Frog, his head bowed and his breath wheezing through a bone of the Old Gods.
Unar hugged Ylly close as she walked forward, using the eyes in her own head once more, new path bursting to life beneath her feet. Kirrik would have no fear of the Great Gate at her back. She would know that any Servant or Gardener emerging from its protection would be easy prey for her, or for Frog. But Unar would not be her prey.
“Stand aside, Kirrik,” Unar called when she was close enough.
The tall, maggot-white, black-skirted woman met her eyes and showed her teeth. Lightning didn’t immediately stab down at Unar, which meant that Kirrik supposed she still had some hope of controlling her.
“Stand aside,” Unar demanded a second time, with no fear that her voice would be stolen and used.
Neither Kirrik, nor anyone else, would be able to borrow her power again. Seeing Aforis, kneeling and humiliated, Unar knew she would have to kill him to deny his power to Kirrik and Frog, this poor man who had loved Edax. The thought of Edax’s memory being lost with Aforis’s death fostered her own self-loathing.
Kirrik tried to intercept the flow of Unar’s magic, Understorian meshed with Canopian, through the branch beneath her feet. Unar easily fended her off.
Kirrik’s eyes widened.
Unar continued to grow her inevitable path towards the Great Gate. She saw Servant Eilif standing beneath the beautiful, ornate archway, Aoun at her right hand, other white-robed Servants around them. Unar could hardly believe her childish self had wanted to kill Eilif once. That seemed so far behind her.
Frog, too, tried to take control of Unar. When she failed, she tried again, growing visibly angrier.
“How are you resisting? What bone of the Old Gods have you stolen?”
Unar didn’t bother to tell her.