“It’s going to crack and fall,” she shouted at Frog as the other tree trunk abruptly loomed ahead. Unar plunged her magic into that tree instead. It was a greenmango, the sour fruit fit only for birds and slaves. Unar thought she’d seen its crown in daylight, made rainbow-coloured by parrots and toucans. A new branch erupted out of the side of it, arching to meet the one they held on to. Frog leaped across the gap between branches before they could cross. Unar followed close behind her.
When she turned to look back the way they had come, she saw Marram, running barefooted along the tallowwood branch, without ropes or chimera-skin wings. Without the bow and arrows he usually carried.
“Go back, Marram!” Unar shouted. “The branch is breaking.”
His face looked grim. He could feel it, magic or not, but he kept coming.
“I will kill ’im if ’e does not go back,” Frog said, crouched at Unar’s heels, holding her little knife in a white-knuckled hand.
“Oos will wake soon.” Unar’s voice was haggard. The futility of Marram’s determination broke her heart as surely as the tallowwood branch was breaking. “Go back. You love her. You should be there when she wakes.” A twinge pulled at her even as she said this. She loved Oos too, but for now she had to follow Frog and find out more about her powers.
“You took me in.” Unar tried to convince him a third time. “You fed me. Protected me from demons. Go back, Marram. Please.”
The tip of the tallowwood branch, which had been perfectly horizontal, silently slanted towards the forest floor. Marram sprang at the greenmango branch, hands and spines outstretched, but it was four or five body lengths away from him.
He fell into darkness. Unar watched his flailing arms and legs with horror until she couldn’t see him anymore.
FORTY
DIZZINESS THREATENED to send Unar over the edge.
She sat down abruptly on the greenmango branch, her gorge rising, still staring into the space where Marram had vanished. The wet bark felt unreal beneath her palms. Rainwater ran down the back of her collar and along the curve of her spine.
“It’s your fault,” she said, and there was no magic in her broken voice at all. She felt as empty as the day Oos and Aoun had drained her. “You killed him.”
“If you wanna blame me for it,” Frog said, “I do not care. Just grow us a big bracket fungus to lie down on and rest, and another one to keep the rain off. In the mornin’ we can go on to the next tree, and the next.”
Unar hardly registered the words. Marram had been kind. He’d been banished from his society for refusing to help strike at gods he didn’t even serve. Now he’d fallen just as surely as if he’d made that attempt and failed.
The only one who can fly.
Minutes later, Unar heard them calling across the void. Bernreb’s voice, and Ylly’s. Even Hasbabsah’s. They called for Marram and Unar and Frog. Unar bit her lip to keep from calling back to them. Oos wasn’t calling. Maybe she was dead. Maybe Frog had killed her after all. As for Esse, he would be too angry to call, but busy putting together some contraption capable of coming after them, even in the monsoon.
Frog’s small hand landed on Unar’s shoulder and shook her impatiently.
“I can’t grow anything,” Unar said.
“Yes you can. Of course you can. If your voice is tired, use this.” The hand tapped her back with something round and hard. Unar twisted to take it from her, a white rock the size of her two hands, shaped like a wishbone stuck into a flatcake.
“What is it?”
“The ear bone of an Old God.”
Only when Unar turned it did she see the hole bored into the long end of it.
“There’s only one hole. Where does the sound come out?”
Frog hesitated.
“It comes out in another world. In the place where the Old Gods dreamed while they were sleepin’. Just blow into it.”
Unar blew. It seemed that the whole forest vibrated, yet the long, dark leaves of the greenmango didn’t move. Not a single gemlike bead of water fell that hadn’t been about to fall already. There was no moss on the new branch and no spores had had time to fall, but back at the main tree trunk, life surged, and the sheltered beds that Frog had asked for sprang, smooth, orange and gleaming, into being.
“Come on,” Frog said, leading her by the wrist again. They lay against each other, wet but warm, and waited only a little time for first the urgent, calling voices and then the pale Understorian day to fade completely away.
FORTY-ONE
IT WAS still dark when Unar woke.
She peeled the leeches off her skin and rubbed the sores they left behind. Then she lapped a drink of rainwater from the edge of the enormous bracket fungus that unyieldingly took their weight.
“Are you ready?” Frog asked, proffering the ear bone, which glowed a gentle green. She had a leech sore on her eyelid, barely discernible.
“I’m ready,” Unar said. She breathed in life and breathed out magic. The greenmango stretched a new-grown arm in the direction Frog indicated, and a fig, like the one at the great crossroads on the border of Ehkisland in Canopy, reached its new arm out until the branches crossed. Unar hesitated. This was more a crossroads than the other. If she made this crossing, it was one she could never return from, and she didn’t know whether to feel anticipation or fear.
Then she remembered how she’d jumped off the head of the dayhunter. How she’d left her parents’ home. That seeds were ambitious, desperate, single-minded, and strong.
Audblayin favoured boldness.
She and Frog stepped off the tree behind them just in time for it to slough the dying overextension of itself.
Fig branch met myrtle. Myrtle met sweet-fruit pine. Sweet-fruit pine met false palm. False palm met quandong, complete with ripe blue fruits that they ate for a morning meal.
“If you had been patient,” Frog said reproachfully as she spat a seed into the rain, “and not alerted them until we were ready, we would have supplies with us. Proper food, rope, nets, and knives. Tinder and firestarter and sand.”
“How far are we going?” asked Unar, who had never crossed more than one or two niches, never travelled further than she could walk in a day.
“To the far edge of Canopy. It would take a week in the dry. Maybe five days in the monsoon. To make a new branch, most of all a great tree needs water.”
“You can’t teach me about trees. I’m a Gardener. Teach me something else, sister.” A thrill went through her when she said it. Why should she be afraid? She had done the impossible and helped two slaves to escape certain death at Servant Eilif’s hands, while eluding the punishment of denying her power. Confident in her destiny again, she straightened her back and lifted her chin.
Nothing could deny her. She would be the greatest Bodyguard Audblayin had ever had. When she found him. After all, not even a season had passed in Understorey, and she had already found her sister.
“The Master will decide what you are to be taught,” Frog muttered.
“Who is the Master?” Unar demanded, but Frog didn’t reply, only pointed in the direction they had to go. Quandong crossed branches with metal-stone tree, metal-stone tree with bloodwood, bloodwood with floodgum, and floodgum with ironbark.
“I’m tired,” Unar panted, hours later. Using the song-magic of Understorey didn’t seem to deplete her the same way as using magic in Canopy had; there, she could never have raised so many mighty branches before exhausting herself. Here, the power came from the sounds. A person singing didn’t tire as quickly as a person digging ditches.
Still. A person singing grew hoarse eventually, and concentration faltered.
Frog looked unimpressed.
“So make a bracket fungus and sleep.”
“Now? It’s barely midday.”
“We can travel in the dark if we must. If you are tired, rest. I have no more stolen bones to help you.”
“Stolen?”
Frog’s little mouth tightened again. When Unar
lay down on the shelf between orange fungi, feeling her body heat sink into the velvet surface of it and hearing the rain strike the upper bracket softly, Frog stayed crouched on the edge, staring into space between the great trees.
“What’s your earliest memory?” Unar asked. My earliest memory is of you. Do you remember it? Do you remember me? We looked into each other’s eyes.
“My first foster parents fightin’,” Frog said. “My foster father asked for fermented greenmango juice to drink. We call it bia. ‘Gimme some bia, wife,’ ’e said. She said, ‘I given it for taxes.’ You see, the villagers usually pay tax to a Headman. My foster father knocked ’er down and cut ’er in the face with ’is spines. There was blood everywhere.”
It wasn’t funny, but Unar wanted to laugh.
“If you’d stayed in our house,” she said, “it would have been the other way around. Mother hitting Father with a stick, so that his legs looked like striped snakes. I’d run to him and hug his legs, kiss his bruises, and he’d pretend that I hadn’t hurt him.”
“You should have pushed ’er out a window,” Frog said.
“Not me. I don’t serve the god of death.” Unar thought of Marram, and the urge to laugh died.
“I tried to kill my foster father,” Frog said, unmoving where she squatted at the edge. “’E was a big man, though. Bigger than Bernreb and with a stomach like a barrowful of melons. ’Is job was to set the bridges. In daylight, ’e set them, when most demons are sleepin’ and it is safe to cross and to trade. But most of the time, ’e just stayed home and drank bia. ’E drank some of the poison I put in ’is bia, but not all of it, and I had been wrong about how much I would need. Then ’e knew I had done it, and I had to run away.”
Unar tried to glance at Frog’s face, but could see only the back of the girl’s head from where she lay. Frog had apparently not been bluffing about using Unar’s power to kill. There was no squeamishness in the child. Nor any sense of loyalty towards the man who presumably had made the choice to take her in of his own free will. Frog, like her big sister, was desperate, ambitious, and single-minded as a seed. Unar could hardly judge her for it.
“If you ever decide to kill me,” she said, “you’ll tell me what I’ve done wrong first, won’t you?”
She was joking, trying to lighten the mood, but Frog’s slight shoulders shrugged.
“If it is my decision, I will. If it is an order from the Master, probably not. The first thing you will learn, if you wanna perfect your magic use, is never to disobey an order.”
Unar didn’t ask again where they were going. She didn’t ask who the Master was, or what sort of orders she might be expected to carry out. To perfect her magic use, she knew she would do almost anything that Frog’s superiors asked of her. Anything but damage the Garden or hurt her friends. There was no sense in freeing Ylly and Hasbabsah only to have them come to harm, and certainly no reason to involve Oos in anything. Oos had Ylly to take care of her now. She didn’t need Unar.
“You’re my sister. I trust you. You came to fetch me for a reason.”
Whatever the reason was, Frog was not forthcoming.
You want my advice, do not love anyone. Or anythin’.
Unar sighed, closed her eyes, and wished she were dry. Her stomach grumbled, but a benefit of having nothing to eat, she supposed, would be not having to dangle her bare arse over the edge of a mushroom and defecate into the dark. Whatever Frog said, Unar shouldn’t have had to put up with the added indignity of blood everywhere, not if she could do something about it. Frog wasn’t old enough yet, but when she found out for herself what a mess menstruation made, she would apologise and beg for Unar’s help.
Just like Aoun would, when he realised she had returned with Audblayin.
Behind her eyelids, Unar imagined the look on his face when she led Audblayin to the Garden Gates. Frog at her side. Aoun four or five years older, like Unar. He would gasp, But nobody has ever found Audblayin so young, before.
Unar would say, There’s never been a Gardener like me, before. Open the Gates.
Aoun would open the Gates. A Servant—not Servant Eilif, most likely she’d be dead of old age—would fall to her knees and wail for Unar to become the god’s Bodyguard at once. They’d take her to the night-yew. They’d perform the ceremony. Aoun would find her, later, alone in the Garden, and beg her to forgive him for pulling away from her kiss. The neutering magic of the Servants had severed him from his true heart, but now he knew that he and Unar were a single spirit with separate flesh. She would do with him what she had done with Edax.
And at last, laughing with the joy of it, Unar would fly.
PART III
Drowning Season
FORTY-TWO
IT WAS near dusk on the fourth day since Marram had fallen.
“Will I make a shelter for us for the night?” Unar asked, hiding a yawn with the back of her hand.
The skin she pressed to her lips was wet and wrinkled. She could barely remember what being dry felt like. Frog had made a tiny fire, two days ago, to cook a roosting fish-owl. Owls were poisonous in large quantities, but birds in Understorey were rare enough that the travellers couldn’t be choosy. Unar had trapped the owl’s feet with a sudden growth spurt in the branch it rested on, trying not to think of Edax, and Frog had wrung its neck, suffering a bite right through the palm of her hand for her troubles.
Unar healed the bite almost at once, but Frog still plucked the feathers with a vengeful sort of violence. The fatty flesh had been rank, and the warmth from the smoky flame negligible.
“No,” Frog said, staring in the direction they had been travelling. “We are close. We should keep goin’. We are almost at the dovecote.”
“The dovecote?”
“It is what we call it. The place where we meet. Where the Master rules.”
“You’re sure you can find it in the dark?”
“Yes. Over there. That way.”
Unar lifted the ear bone and blew. Her body lifted with the freedom of it. She knew the ear bone, at this point, better than she knew her own bones. Every unseen filament. Every concealed coil. There were gaps in and around it that should have been filled with living tissue, and it was these spaces where inaudible sound echoed and magic answered, as though a great being of spirit answered the cry of its naked child.
It was more powerful, more resonant, in the last several hours. Either Unar was growing stronger the more she flexed her magical muscle or there was something linking the bone with the location.
“Where are we?” Unar asked as the spiny plum they stood on sent softly uncurling spearhead-shaped leaves thrusting towards the gap-axe tree across the way. Rain wet down the new leaf fuzz as it grew. “What part of Canopy lies above us?”
“Airakland,” Frog answered absently.
The realm of the lightning god. Unar had heard that the trees here, mostly floodgums, were taller than the rest of Canopy, even the emergents that housed the Temples, and their bare crowns were blackened from absorbing the lightning strikes that might otherwise set fire to the forest.
Frog left Unar’s side, then, running lightly through the rain along the branch, and Unar followed, lifting the ear bone again, calling the gap-axe tree to meet her in the middle. The leaves meshed in patterns of dark greeny-black against pale pink.
Soon enough, with the sun fading, it was too dim to make out the colours of the leaves. Frog didn’t hesitate to take Unar’s hand and indicate direction in the dark. Seven crossings later, Unar thought she could see something glowing, like the moon behind clouds.
“That is the dovecote,” Frog said. Unar was too tired to answer her. Wordlessly, they crossed again, floodgum to myrtle, myrtle to another floodgum, and then there was no need to grow any new branches, for a branch level with them, old and with a flattened top like a low road in Canopy, led from the trunk to a wide, round, flat-roofed building perched at the intersection of five roads.
Four of the roads were lit, each with one of Airak’s
blazing, blue-white lanterns. The lanterns were topped with wide, gleaming golden cones to keep the blaze from being directly visible from above. Unar realised that the fifth road, the one without a lantern, was broken.
If that was where they were going, there was no point standing around in the rain. Three tiny windows in the building, close to the roof, flickered with firelight, and she wanted to be where those fires were. Unar was halfway to the lantern before Frog cried, “Stop!”
Unar stopped. A door opened in the building, and a tall, narrow-shouldered silhouette with spreading skirts emerged, standing for a moment, fingers flexing, in the orange rectangle of the entrance.
“It is Frog,” Frog called. “Frog the Outer. I have brought ’er, Core Kirrik.”
“I felt her coming, Frog the Outer,” the woman called back in a high, musical voice. “Strong enough to wake me from a future-searching. Wait and I will quench the lamp. The Master will see you right away.”
Unar looked at Frog, whose eyes were wide and her grimace anxious. Neither demon attack nor Marram’s fall had disturbed the girl so much. She was afraid of something.
“If there’s some test to gain admission,” Unar told her, “I’ll pass it.”
“The test is of your ability to serve,” Frog said softly without taking her eyes from the dovecote, “and I am not so sure of that.”
Now it was Unar’s turn to grimace. Ungrateful child! If she had ever served anything, it was her desire to find her sister. She would hardly endanger this chance for them to be together. How bad could these people, this so-called Master, possibly be? No worse than Servants who threw worn-out slaves off the edges of Garden beds.
The image came to her, again, of Marram falling, and she shook her head to rid herself of it. She’d told him to go back. Three times, she’d begged him to go back.
The woman that Frog had named Kirrik emerged from the dovecote, holding something like a blackened, upturned bowl on the end of a long stick. As she came closer, towards the light, Unar saw black hair with a silver streak swept back from a pinched and pointed face, as cooked-fishmeat-white as the hunters’ faces had been, with bloodless lips and a cleft chin. Her coat and full skirts were black, too, but finely woven, and she carried something on a second stick, leather stretched over a basket frame, to keep the rain off.
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