‘It is quite a startling sight, I promise you that, but it cannot harm you.’ In truth, the boy would already have seen Ygseril, at least partly. The tree-god’s great cloud of silvery branches burst up above the roof of the palace, and it was possible to see it from the Wall, and even the foothills of the mountains; or so she had been told. The boy and his father, the wine merchant, could hardly have missed it as they made their way into Ebora. They would have found themselves watching the tree-god as they rode their tough little mountain ponies down into the valley, wine sloshing rhythmically inside wooden casks. Hestillion had seen that in their dreams, too. ‘Here we are, look.’
At the end of the corridor was a set of elaborately carved double doors. Once, the phoenixes and dragons etched into the wood would have been painted gold, their eyes burning bright and every tooth and claw and talon picked out in mother-of-pearl, but it had all peeled off or been worn away, left as dusty and as sad as everything else in Ebora. Hestillion leaned her weight on one of the doors and it creaked slowly open, showering them in a light rain of dust. Inside was the cavernous Hall of Roots. She waited for Louis to gather himself.
‘I . . . oh, it’s . . .’ He reached up as if to take off his cap, then realised he had left it in his room. ‘My lady Hestillion, this is the biggest place I’ve ever seen!’
Hestillion nodded. She didn’t doubt that it was. The Hall of Roots sat at the centre of the palace, which itself sat in the centre of Ebora. The floor under their feet was pale green marble etched with gold – this, at least, had yet to be worn away – and above them the ceiling was a glittering lattice of crystal and finely spun lead, letting in the day’s weak sunshine. And bursting out of the marble was Ygseril himself; ancient grey-green bark, rippled and twisted, a curling confusion of roots that sprawled in every direction, and branches, high above them, reaching through the circular hole in the roof, empty of leaves. Little pieces of blue sky glittered there, cut into shards by the arms of Ygseril. The bark on the trunk of the tree was wrinkled and ridged, like the skin of a desiccated corpse. Which was, she supposed, entirely appropriate.
‘What do you think?’ she pressed. ‘What do you think of our god?’
Louis twisted his lips together, obviously trying to think of some answer that would please her. Hestillion held her impatience inside. Sometimes she felt like she could reach in and pluck the stuttering thoughts from the minds of these slow-witted visitors. Humans were just so uncomplicated.
‘It is very fine, Lady Hestillion,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it, not even in the deepest vine forests, and my father says that’s where the oldest trees in all of Sarn grow.’
‘Well, strictly speaking, he is not really a tree.’ Hestillion walked Louis across the marble floor, towards the place where the roots began. The boy’s leather boots made odd flat notes of his footsteps, while her silk slippers gave only the faintest whisper. ‘He is the heart, the protector, the mother and father of Ebora. The tree-god feeds us with his roots, he exalts us in his branches. When our enemy the Jure’lia came last, the Eighth Rain fell from his branches and the worm people were scoured from all of Sarn.’ She paused, pursing her lips, not adding: and then Ygseril died, and left us all to die too.
‘The Eighth Rain, when the last war-beasts were born!’ Louis stared up at the vast breadth of the trunk looming above them, a smile on his round, honest face. ‘The last great battle. My dad said that the Eboran warriors wore armour so bright no one could look at it, that they rode on the backs of snowy white griffins, and their swords blazed with fire. The great pestilence of the Jure’lia queen and the worm people was driven back and her Behemoths were scattered to pieces.’ He stopped. In his enthusiasm for the old battle stories he had finally relaxed in her presence. ‘The corpse moon frightens me,’ he confided. ‘My nan says that if you should catch it winking at you, you’ll die by the next sunset.’
Peasant nonsense, thought Hestillion. The corpse moon was just another wrecked Behemoth, caught in the sky like a fly in amber. They had reached the edge of the marble now, capped with an obsidian ring. Beyond that the roots twisted and tangled, rising up like the curved backs of silver-green sea monsters. When Hestillion made to step out onto the roots, Louis stopped, pulling back sharply on her hand.
‘We mustn’t!’
She looked at his wide eyes, and smiled. She let her hair fall over one shoulder, a shimmering length of pale gold, and threw him the obvious bait. ‘Are you scared?’
The boy frowned, briefly outraged, and they stepped over onto the roots together. He stumbled at first, his boots too stiff to accommodate the rippling texture of the bark, while Hestillion had been climbing these roots as soon as she could walk. Carefully, she guided him further in, until they were close to the enormous bulk of the trunk itself – it filled their vision, a grey-green wall of ridges and whorls. This close it was almost possible to imagine you saw faces in the bark; the sorrowful faces, perhaps, of all the Eborans who had died since the Eighth Rain. The roots under their feet were densely packed, spiralling down into the unseen dark below them. Hestillion knelt, gathering her silk robe to one side so that it wouldn’t get too creased. She tugged her wide yellow belt free of her waist and then wound it around her right arm, covering her sleeve and tying the end under her armpit.
‘Come, kneel next to me.’
Louis looked unsure again, and Hestillion found she could almost read the thoughts on his face. Part of him baulked at the idea of kneeling before a foreign god – even a dead one. She gave him her sunniest smile.
‘Just for fun. Just for a moment.’
Nodding, he knelt on the roots next to her, with somewhat less grace than she had managed. He turned to her, perhaps to make some comment on the strangely slick texture of the wood under his hands, and Hestillion slipped the knife from within her robe, baring it to the subdued light of the Hall of Roots. It was so sharp that she merely had to press it to his throat – she doubted he even saw the blade, so quickly was it over – and in less than a moment the boy had fallen onto his back, blood bubbling thick and red against his fingers. He shivered and kicked, an expression of faint puzzlement on his face, and Hestillion leaned back as far as she could, looking up at the distant branches.
‘Blood for you!’ She took a slow breath. The blood had saturated the belt on her arm and it was rapidly sinking into the silk below – so much for keeping it clean. ‘Life blood for your roots! I pledge you this and more!’
‘Hest!’
The shout came from across the hall. She turned back to see her brother Tormalin standing by the half-open door, a slim shape in the dusty gloom, his black hair like ink against a page. Even from this distance she could see the expression of alarm on his face.
‘Hestillion, what have you done?’ He started to run to her. Hestillion looked down at the body of the wine merchant’s boy, his blood black against the roots, and then up at the branches. There was no answering voice, no fresh buds or running sap. The god was still dead.
‘Nothing,’ she said bitterly. ‘I’ve done nothing at all.’
‘Sister.’ He had reached the edge of the roots, and now she could see how he was trying to hide his horror at what she had done, his face carefully blank. It only made her angrier. ‘Sister, they . . . they have already tried that.’
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Fifty years ago