Help me, Ylly. Tell me what to do. You were always the quiet one. Gentler than Imeris. Trustworthy and kind.
It was still too far for his human eyes to see, but through Hunger’s eyes, he saw the goddess and all her Servants and Gardeners standing just inside the open Gate. There, they were protected by wards well known to keep out humans, but could those wards stand strong against the winged?
The lanterns on the platform were lit, and the Gatekeeper carried a larger lantern, held out from white robes that fluttered in the breeze. Aoun, who was a friend to Unar and to my youngest-mother, Oos.
Audblayin’s Bodyguard stood in a ready stance beside the goddess, white tunic and long split skirt stained by bark at bosom and knee. Her big pale feet, shod in studded sandals, were braced wide. Blue Understorian eyes blazed above a pair of bared steel blades. Nirrin. You were our neighbour in Understorey. Imeris’s friend.
Ylly looked beautiful and brave, tall and slender, draped in pale green and purple silk. Her hands relaxed at her sides. Living, purple-flowering pea plants twined lovingly up her wrists, and the wind tugged at her long, loose hair.
It’s me, Ylly, he ached to tell her. It’s your little brother, Leaper.
But then he remembered how the man who hosted Atwith had begged Unar to heal the wound in his soul so that Atwith could never control him again, and he felt nauseated at the thought of quiet, gentle Ylly being used by what Hunger had derisively called one-fourteenth of a titan.
They landed in a cloud of splinters made by Hunger’s hind claws against the tallowwood platform. Servants and Gardeners gasped and stepped back, but neither the goddess Audblayin, nor Gatekeeper Aoun, nor Bodyguard Nirrin, flinched from the threat.
Leaper laid the winged one’s sinuous neck down flat. He half clambered, half fell from Hunger’s mouth. Dimly, he was aware of Unar and Aforis helping each other down onto the platform. As soon as they were clear, he closed his mouths, both monstrous and human, and tried to find some moisture with which to speak.
My teeth are wrong.
Hunger’s teeth.
The lines were blurring again. His tongue was long and forked. No, short and round. He tried to hold Ilik’s face in his mind but couldn’t seem to find it.
Ylly recognised him and ran forwards through the invisible wards, arms outstretched.
Almost as soon as she did, the will of the eternal goddess within seemed to clamp down on her, as Leaper’s will had clamped down on Hunger. It brought her to a standstill, arms tightly crossed. Nirrin and Aoun promptly moved forward to flank her protectively, leaving the others behind and inside the wards.
Leaper went to meet her in his human body, his own pair of protectors to either side.
“Holy One,” Unar and Aforis chorused tiredly, swaying as they bowed.
“Leaper,” Audblayin said, ignoring them, eyes on Leaper’s face. Impossibly, the single word contained love, hatred, fear, and longing. “What have you done?”
Nirrin’s eyes stayed on the winged one.
“Holy One,” the Bodyguard said tightly, “it would take all of your power, and more, to destroy that monster. We could do it, but the wards around the Garden would fail. The barrier, also. Chimeras and other demons would come, and a hundred Hunts would not be enough to vanquish them. Many would die. Their faith in the Temple would be lost, and who would worship you then? Without worship, the barrier could never be raised again. It would be the end of Canopy.”
One Forest, Frog whispered with glee; she had gotten loose in Leaper’s head again, and he had nothing left with which to resist her. Just look at that stinking, slinking slave, mauled by a demon but still eager to leave her people down in the dark with them to die. Yes. Release Hunger. Make them fight. Make them do it. Destroy the barrier!
“I’ve come home,” Leaper said, and Hunger’s lips moved fruitlessly behind him, for she hadn’t the voice box or syrinx for sounding out words. “That’s all I’ve done, Ylly. Ulellin cursed me, but the curse is broken, and I’ve come home. Aren’t you glad to see me? You loved me once.”
“Leaper!” Audblayin said again, but this time it was Ylly who embraced him, hard, against all laws forbidding contact between mortal and godly flesh, and this time it seemed the goddess inside could do nothing to prevent the transgression. “I love you. Please tell me what is happening.”
“I’ve stolen Orin’s magic and used it to temporarily tame the last of the winged. But the magic only lasts until I fall asleep. Then she’ll be herself again. She’ll want to murder me.” He looked past Ylly, despairingly, at Nirrin. “You can’t protect me, after all. Can you?”
Nirrin’s head twitched sharply in the negative.
The Bodyguard’s fierce dedication filled Leaper with sorrow; it was perhaps the saddest he’d ever felt. Even worse than when he’d thought Ilik was dead, because that had been a sadness mixed up with wrath and self-recrimination, and this was simply a repeating pattern that he saw no way to break. It was never me being not good enough for the gods. It was always them not being good enough for all of us. For every Floorian or Understorian who railed against the unfairness of the structure of the forest, there would be a hundred like Nirrin, who accepted that they were born less, that they deserved less; who had taken that lie and made it such a part of themselves that they’d defend to the death not only the people who snapped off their spines and tossed them off tree branches, but the very barrier that kept the downtrodden from climbing to safety.
“Can’t you order the winged one away, Leaper,” Aoun asked, “the same way that you ordered her to come here? Could Orin not order her away, if it was Orin’s power that you used?”
“Orin alone is no more powerful than Audblayin,” Unar answered grimly, “and Orin’s influence wanes with distance from Canopy. Hunger would go. She’d come straight back. Her children are dead, all of Canopy has seen her, and she’s no reason to keep to her bargain anymore. Killing her is the only answer.” She spread both arms wide, appealing to Ylly. “Holy One, please. Reach out to the neighbouring niches along the barrier. I can help you draw on their power. There wasn’t a goddess or god I hadn’t found besides Atwith, and I found him in Hunger’s lair, in the end. Use me as a conduit and destroy her. If the barrier falls, so be it.”
“No,” Leaper said. Both his hands rested on Ylly’s shoulders. He stood at arm’s length from her. “Killing her isn’t the answer.”
His attention turned inward. He ignored the slavering of Hunger, who anticipated his imminent descent into unwilling slumber. He ignored Frog’s raving at him to tear down the barrier forever. In his mind, he saw again Yran’s desperation in the palace at Wetwoodknee.
What happened to your oath against killing? Yran had cried as he hit Leaper, over and over, with the Bag of the Winds. We shared the same liver, and you’ve killed me!
The oath against killing. How Leaper’s skin had crawled as he’d ended those hideously transformed Servants of Orin, and how natural and easy had come his vow never to kill again. Although, looking back years later, he hadn’t been able to think of any other way besides blasting the beast with Airak’s power. What would he do, given a second chance, if he were standing eye to eye with Orin’s monster again?
“What is the answer, Leaper?” Ylly asked.
“Slap him,” Unar said sharply. “He’s falling asleep. He mustn’t fall asleep!”
I mustn’t fall asleep. To one side of the Garden Gate, the potbellied cottage with the arched entrance where his middle-father, Bernreb, had lived, stood cold and empty. Unar had created that home. She’d grown it from the tallowwood tree, moulded its rooms, and filled it with comfortable beds, though Bernreb hadn’t needed them, because Bodyguards didn’t need to sleep.
Ylly slapped him.
Bodyguards don’t need to sleep.
“Make me your Bodyguard,” Leaper said, staring into his sister’s eyes. Ylly gaped at him. Nirrin reacted by raising her weapons higher and taking a step back.
“I will die if my g
oddess commands me,” she said.
“There’s no need for you to die,” Aforis said.
“The position can’t be rescinded from an adept,” Aoun said. “Ten years ago, Orin was helpless to withdraw the gifts she’d bestowed on her Bodyguard, Anahah, when he betrayed her. Our goddess was able to replace Bernreb with Nirrin, but only because Bernreb had no magical talent. Nirrin has no choice but to serve until death.”
“Or until the goddess dies,” Ylly said, not looking away from Leaper’s face.
“There’s another way,” Aforis insisted. “Leaper is the proof and precedent.”
“Aforis and I,” Unar said, “can cut Nirrin off from your power, Holy One. We can graft her onto the god of lightning. We’ve done it before with Leaper. Nirrin will become Airak’s adept. She’ll wield his power. Then Leaper will be free to become your Bodyguard, though you’ll need to bring a branch of the night-yew to him, since he can’t pass through the Garden’s wards any more than I can.”
Silence.
Leaper swayed. His grip on Ylly’s shoulders was suddenly the only thing holding him up. The fate of Canopy, of Hunger, of the barrier, seemed to matter less with every second that passed by.
So tired.
He locked his knees desperately to keep from collapsing. The Garden Gate was turning grey.
“Go ahead, Godfinder,” Nirrin said. “I’ve prepared myself. Do it!”
Ylly’s eyes roved over Leaper’s face.
“Is it what you want, Leaper?” she whispered. “To be Audblayin’s Bodyguard for the rest of your life?”
She was talking about the goddess as if about another person, the same way that Aoun’s brother had talked about Atwith.
“I tried Kirrik’s way,” he whispered back, “and it got me killed. I tried Audblayin’s way, and lived in the dark. Airak’s way, and I was a slave who thought he was free. Killing is not the way, but neither is meekly waiting for death. I’m finding us a new way, Ylly. If any part of you is still my real sister, please help me to find a new way.”
Grey Gates, skies, and goddesses turned to black.
A new way.
Leaper smelled tallowwood sap melded with scorched black sand. It was Unar and Aforis, working together. Ylly’s shoulders turned to an insubstantial mist of wood fern and quince blossom and his hands went through them; Leaper felt himself falling. Heard the crisp clank of Aoun setting his bronze lantern down on the wood and the pounding of the Gatekeeper’s feet as he raced back into the Garden.
There was no fear. Only relief.
Leaper sighed and closed his eyes.
THIRTY-FIVE
WHEN LEAPER opened his eyes, the tableau had hardly changed.
Ylly stood in front of him, her wrists clutching his forearms, the living vines she wore as bracelets tangled around his body, holding him up and on his feet. Nirrin stood beside her, tear tracks down her cheeks but weapons still at the ready.
Aoun held a yew branch in one hand, green-needled and bearing both tiny white flowers and tiny red fruit.
Leaper realised he could taste sweetness and a turpentine tang. Concurrently, with his other tongue, sweaty clothing and filthy sandals overlaid the metallic salt savour of Atwith’s Bodyguard, his most recent meal. Forcing focus to his human form, Leaper straightened.
All his tiredness had washed away.
Leaper gratefully kissed his sister, the goddess, on both cheeks. He kissed Nirrin, who had allowed him to usurp her place. She grimaced, but allowed it. Then Leaper turned his back to them, now facing Aforis, Unar, and the winged one.
In place of her burned and blackened pinecone-like scales, Hunger now wore a new coat of waxy, gleaming, dark green tallowwood leaves. Each long leaf curved in its characteristic tallowwood shape, ending in the type of drooping, slender tip that would channel monsoon rain away. Hunger’s claws were the grey-brown of tallowwood bark, her teeth the colour of its pale heartwood, and her eyes the colour of its amber.
“Now, that,” Unar said, “is a fine new Bodyguard you have there, Holy One.”
“Even I,” Nirrin murmured, “could not guard you so well as one of the winged.”
All the scents of the rainforest that Leaper had missed since being separated from his magic by the floodwaters carrying him away from Floor assaulted him now.
The normal gift of enhanced senses given to an adept, on top of Orin’s magic, alerted him to wild animals both near and far. He smelled wet monkey fur, the damp powder of moths feeding in night-blooming flowers, fruit bat stink, rotting mulch disturbed by the toe pads of frogs, ulmo perfume, honey kiss fruit, and the caramel of scented satinwood in Unar’s farm, where the flowerfowl were still just wild enough for his yearning for Ilik to reach them.
Ilik. I’ll come to you.
Tears stung his eyes.
I can’t come to you. I’m the Bodyguard of Audblayin. How I swore I’d leave them, and take all of good-hearted humankind along with me, and now I’m serving them again. There’s no escape.
He scrubbed at the tears with the back of his arm, which shocked him again with its smoothness, since the spines were gone.
There is a way. A new way. Things can’t go back to the way they were.
“Ylly,” he said. “Unar. Can I speak to you in private, please?”
And before the astonished, half-protesting faces and voices of Aforis and the Servants, he dragged both women into Middle-Father’s cottage, dodging the trickle of water that divided the opening, and slammed the door behind them.
“It’s pitch-black in here,” Unar observed. “Already homesick for the tunnels near Time?”
“Be quiet, Unar!” Leaper all but shouted. “We solved the immediate problem, the problem of me falling asleep, but our problems aren’t over, and thinking about the tunnels near Time is the opposite of helpful. The only thing that’s stopping Hunger from taking me over is thinking of Ilik.”
“Queen Ilik of Airakland?” Ylly asked quietly. “But she’s dead.”
“She’s not dead, Ylly. I need her. I have to go to her. Not only that, but I have to leave the forest. I have to take Ilik, and as many of her subjects and your Servants as will agree to come, far away, to some place where you and the other goddesses and gods can’t hunt them or drown them or trap them in the dark anymore.”
“That could be an even bigger problem.”
“Because I’m your Bodyguard, I know. And because you need human worshippers to maintain your power, but you’ve ruled for a thousand years. Isn’t that long enough?”
“No. I mean, yes, it is long enough.” Her voice trembled. “I mean, those are not the reasons why you cannot go. It is because the only thing stopping Audblayin from taking me over is being with you, Leaper. Near this home, which is a copy of the home we left in Understorey. Where our three mothers and three fathers raised us. If she does get control again, she will never let you leave.”
Airak’s teeth, Ylly. You are still your old self inside. It never occurred to me that you needed rescuing. After all this time.
More tears threatened. Leaper blinked rapidly. It was instinct for him to try to peer at her face, and after a moment he realised there was a blue-white light coming from somewhere. It was the ripped carrysack on his back. The broken thieves’ lantern.
Smashed glass panes or no, the light had returned to life at the heart of it. Leaper drew it free of the leather by its bronze handle, being careful not to put his hand into the light, lest he be transported through it to Unar’s farm.
“Sturdily constructed, that frame,” Unar said. “So let me get this straight. If we’re to keep that winged one from tearing down the forest, Leaper has to stay with Ilik. If we’re to keep the immortal soul of Audblayin from resuming control of our Ylly, and killing Leaper for his intent to betray her, Ylly has to stay with Leaper. I could try to convince Ilik to come and live here in this house with you, Leaper, but you should know that she doesn’t much like being a prisoner indoors, and also you’re planning on fleeing the forest wit
h what sounds to me like quite a crowd of people.”
Leaper and Ylly stared hopelessly, silently at each other.
“Even if Audblayin didn’t hunt you down, Leaper,” Unar went on, “as soon as you left the forest, you’d lose the gifts bestowed on you as a Bodyguard, which includes the ability to stay awake forever, and once you went to sleep, Hunger would have control of herself again, and we’d be straight back where we started.”
More silence.
“I’ll die,” Ylly said.
“What? No!” Leaper exclaimed.
“If I die, Audblayin will have to start again as a newborn baby. You’ll have something like twelve or sixteen years to build your new city, Leaper. Between twelve and sixteen years before she becomes self-aware and chooses a new Bodyguard.”
“Less than that,” Leaper said, glancing at Unar. “Canopy has a Godfinder.”
“Not if I go with you,” Unar said.
“I wish we could all go,” Ylly cried.
“No new children would be able to be born,” Unar said, “if you left Canopy, if the law that governed Atwith holds true for you, too.” Then her eyes widened.
“What is it?” Ylly asked.
“The law that governed Atwith,” Unar repeated, chewing her lip in speculation. “He asked me to heal the hole where Atwith’s soul had been. That poor boy. When I ate that nasty bone, I perceived the hole, the place that he meant, but I thought it would take too much magic, and there was a limited amount available to me. This time, if Ylly is willing, there will be enough. The barrier would be weakened, but only for a while, and we have a winged one here to defend against demons. Yes. Yes!”
“Are you saying what we think you’re saying?” Leaper demanded.
Unar’s expression was terrible and joyful.
“Yes! The fact of the dead boy’s personality and soul remaining inside the shared body wasn’t the only thing we learned from Atwith. I think I can cut Audblayin’s soul away from Ylly’s without harming Ylly. It would be as if Audblayin’s body had died. Only, Ylly would get to keep the body, going back to her old self while Audblayin’s soul drifted off into the ether to find another newborn to be reincarnated into.”
Tides of the Titans Page 29