The much-reduced river sang to one side of her, and the autumn wind made the forest moan. Gods died and returned to life, but Unar was seventeen years old, significantly older than the girl child who would be Audblayin. Unar would die before Audblayin was reborn a man. When Unar was born again, unlike Audblayin, she wouldn’t remember anything of her past lives.
With the finding of the last deity, she was set adrift. How strange to feel, while not performing Understorian magic, less solid than the trees that turned the wind. To have felt for so long that she was a tool constructed for a single purpose, only to discover she was as fit for being a Bodyguard as a frog was fit for flying. But there was still the question.
She would have an answer.
The opening she’d made into the brothers’ home was now neatly fitted with a door. It opened when she pushed against it, and she walked down the stairs into light and warmth. The new addition had been modified to accommodate candle niches. A second fireplace had been built in the enlarged storeroom-turned-permanent-bedroom. Unar smiled at the candles. The bear that had died so that its fat could produce that smoky, flickering light; the grasses whose twisted fibres had made the wick and the trees, not pillars of the world as the emergents were, but smaller, unnoticed in the dark, that had provided the wood for fuel for the hunters’ dwelling; those transient things were her kin, unmourned and unremembered, interchangeable as individual breaths.
“You are back,” Hasbabsah said, sounding surprised and pleased, a knitted cap pulled down over her almost-bald head. She looked up from the rope jig with its metal weights, where she and Oos formed uniform lengths that must have pleased even Esse the perfectionist.
“I’m back,” Unar agreed. “How is Sawas settling in?”
Hasbabsah grunted.
“She will take some more time to adjust. You kept your word. You have done what you promised to do in the Garden and more. You do not need to worry about Sawas anymore.”
I have not done what I promised, Unar thought, because the Garden has not kept its promise to me, to raise me into the sun.
But the Garden hadn’t made that promise. Unar didn’t know why she’d promised herself something that could never come true. Nobody else had stood over her, insisting that she take what she deserved; it had been her own inner voice, all along, and she had trusted it. But why not? Who else in the world was trustworthy?
“Where’s Esse?” she asked. “I must make more rooms.”
“He is sleeping,” Oos said. “He has been making more defences around the tree, further down. He said that those men should never have reached as high as they did.”
Unar walked through the brothers’ house. She smiled at faces that smiled at her, but didn’t speak to any of them. Ylly and Issi fought over a floppy black hat that had golden imitation chimera’s eyes sewn onto the sides of it. Sawas sat in Bernreb’s lap, picking bones from her plate of roasted fish.
The brothers’ bedroom was cramped. Unar pushed back the curtain to enter, and tried to straighten once inside, but her head brushed the curve of the spherical ceiling, and the three free-standing bunks in the centre of the room looked like a stack of rough-cut, storm-felled debris. Esse slept on the top, covered in an itchy-looking fur.
Unar sang the godsong to herself as she reshaped the bed into a thing of elegance and added space, waking up the last still-living cells at the timber’s rim. They’d been part of a sweet-fruit pine tree, once. The tallowwood walls of the room were easier to flex and widen. The great tree told her which parts of itself were safe to hollow and which must remain sound, which carried the sap and which carried the incredible burden of the weight of the top of the tree.
Before she had finished, she saw Esse’s grey eyes, open and watching her. He didn’t move a muscle of his long body.
“I’m sorry for disturbing you, Esse,” she said. “But there’s one more favour I need from you. Not monsoon-right, this time, but a right to sleep here, in the new part of this room, for fourteen or fifteen monsoons, or however much time passes before the younger Ylly feels in her bones it’s time to wake me.”
“Is this Canopian double-speak?” Esse asked. “Is it death that you want?”
“Not yet,” Unar answered. “I must deliver the goddess Audblayin to the Garden first. Help me to get up there, please.”
Esse sat up. Before she’d changed his bed, he would have struck his head, but now there was room for him to stand on the top bunk, if he wished, without touching the domed ceiling. He examined the niche she’d made, high in the wall, with its brackets shaped like loquat trees, and a hammock-sized space that a large human or a small dayhunter could have crawled into.
“How will you breathe in there?” he asked.
“I’ve made a small, hidden, ventilation hole. The mesh over it is magic. Nothing will crawl down it, I promise you.”
“That is good. I would not want cockroaches gnawing on you while you are sleeping. Mind your spines, Canopian. You still do not use them very well.”
Esse lifted her to kneel on his shoulders. From there, she was able to use her forearm spines to pull herself into the space. It was cold, but her body heat would soon be enough to keep her warm. Esse took a few steps back and peered in at her.
“What if Ylly dies?” he said. “What if she never decides it is time to wake you?”
Unspoken prophecies can come true, too.
“Good night, Esse,” Unar said, forming the pattern that she had seen Frog form outside the Great Gate. She wrapped the deep, hibernating sleep around herself like a blanket, being careful not to let it touch any of the other lives nearby.
And she closed her eyes.
PART IV
Season for Growth
SIXTY
UNAR HAD hoped it would be dreamless.
I love you, Isin.
Edax died over and over again in a world made of steam.
I love you, Isin.
Frog’s body fell apart into blobs of muscle and bone.
I love you, Isin.
Unar beat against the wards that protected the Garden, with no hope of passing through. Not unless she sabotaged her own memory, and if she did that, her desire to enter the Garden might be lost, too; her memory of how to do magic, how to find goddesses and gods. What if she died, was reborn, and walked into the Garden as a supplicant, with no power of her own?
It would be better to sleep until Audblayin grew as old as Hasbabsah and died. Sleep until he was born a man. But, no. She must wake sooner than that. She must ask the question.
*
SOMETHING PRESSED down on her.
The ceiling had collapsed. Kirrik had returned and was cutting down the tallowwood tree.
No. Not that. It was two small, muffled, giggling bodies. Sitting on her. Crushing her so she couldn’t breathe.
“Ylly! Issi!” Oos was a threatening presence below and to one side, outside the sleeping place. “Come out of there, right now!”
Hands scrabbled around in Unar’s clothes, catching dirty feet and pulling hard. Wailing children’s voices receded. Unar slept again.
*
I LOVE you, Isin.
*
BREATHING BESIDE her. Sharing the air.