Unar looked down and saw the bones in her own hands beginning to glow. There was uneasiness in her midriff, too, a feeling like the cramps in a stomach empty for weeks suddenly finding itself full of food. At the same time, her stomach was breaking into floating fragments with the rest of her. She had no body. She needed no body. Only the pure vibration of sound. The glow of her bones strengthened as she sang the final verse.
Ilan guards rights of the royals, whose heights
are not for the stricken unclad.
Together, they raise all the meek who give praise
to the skies with a green, glowing hand.
Disembodied, hot and cold at the same time, a collection of motes floating on currents of music, her mote-fingers tangled with Frog’s mote-fingers, Unar sensed it for sure.
Frog was her sister.
They had come from the same mother. They had come from the same father.
The song ended. Unar’s body solidified as if her soul had been suddenly coated in clay. Frog let her hands drop. She looked at Unar with satisfaction.
“You will hafta practice singin’ in that octave,” she said. “Your voice is terrible. Not that anyone will know, if you use it for magic. The use of it will render it silent. But remember that your friend Oos has always been sensitive to music. She will feel it. Not the makin’, but the usin’. ’Er bones are already awake.”
Unar wasn’t best pleased to hear that just as she herself had not needed the Garden to wake her Canopian magic, Oos was a natural at musical Understorian magic. But she tried to stick up for her friend.
“Then why keep it secret from her? You said she … we … couldn’t get back up through the barrier. What harm, if she has her magic to help her heal, down here, the same as she did before? She could show me—”
“She will never show you! I am the only one who will show you. I am the only one you ’ave, Unar.” Frog’s teeth showed again in that characteristic grimace that Unar thought she could grow to love. “The only one who loves you.”
Unar closed the distance between them, trying to fold Frog in her arms, but the girl flinched back.
“What’s wrong?”
“Hold me when you mean it. Only when you mean it.”
“I mean it. I tried to find you, Isin, but I was too small. I tried to find other babies that fell because of you. I went to the Garden because becoming Bodyguard to Audblayin was my chance to find you when you were reborn. Yet here you are, in the same body. You are my sister.” Frog allowed the embrace, this time. Her thin body quivered, and she didn’t relax into it. Unar sighed. “Oos was my sister too. I wish you could—”
Frog pulled away.
“No. Only me. I am your only real sister.”
Unar bowed her head in acknowledgement.
“You are my only real sister.”
When she lifted her head, Frog had gone back to her blankets. Unar stood there alone, listening to the sound of her own breathing, feeling the tiny increments of Audblayin’s birth magic expelled with every vibration, as though the Garden lived inside her.
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE TEMPTATION to test her new power was almost overwhelming.
Unar listened to Marram and Oos play the pipes in the morning. They each had an instrument now, and harmonised with one another in complex ways. To Unar, it was like watching two painted bronzebacks entwined, one living and one dead, and the living snake looked at her with crystalline eyes and promised to obey her, if she would only give it a command.
Frog ate her breakfast fish fastidiously, lining up the bones, and gave Unar a single, severe, meaningful glance. Ylly and Issi slept late, as did Esse, recovering from the sleep debt accumulated from building the new platform and the demon trap.
Unar and Frog finished making the rope together by midday. Esse woke in time for that meal and made a spicy, oily mush of legumes and orchid bulbs that tasted better than anything Unar had eaten in Understorey so far.
“Is this our reward for finishing the rope?” Unar asked.
“What rope?” Esse replied. “I need a new net. I think I see a way to use glue solvent to make the fibres all but invisible.”
“What fibres?” Bernreb grunted. “I’m not killing any more bears for their whiskers. It’s wasteful.”
“Hookvine spines for strength,” Esse said, hardly listening to Bernreb. “Caterpillar hairs for length, I think. You know the ones. As long as my hand. They are so hairy the wasps cannot lay eggs in them. The hairs are orange, but I think I can soak them till they turn transparent.”
“I know the ones. You want Marram to go out in the monsoon, risking his life, to collect caterpillars?”
Esse’s distracted grey eyes flickered to Marram’s amused face.
“Unless he is busy with something else.”
“I am not busy,” Marram said. “We need more moonflowers for the women. Ylly needs soapleaf for the sheets. Hasbabsah has asked for green leaves from this tallowwood to rub on the baby’s chest. Issi is sick, she says.”
“That explains all the crying last night,” Unar said, rubbing her face, but her tiredness wasn’t really because of the baby. She longed to return to bed right there and then.
“Honey might soothe her throat,” Oos said, and Unar couldn’t help but sense the potential for seeds to sprout in nothing more musical than Oos’s ordinary speaking voice. If Oos’s bones were awake, too, why couldn’t she hear it when Unar spoke? Unar’s speaking voice was simply not musical, she supposed.
“Honey is for Canopians,” Hasbabsah said. “The tallowwood leaves will do to clear her blessed little head.”
“Esse can climb for those,” Unar said, looking Esse in the eye. Maybe he would get angry enough to take her with him, out of the warmth and into the rain, and if he climbed close enough to the barrier, maybe she could examine it for weakness, now that she had her magic back.
She had her magic back. That was all that mattered. How could Esse make her angry? Even exhaustion couldn’t lead her to lose her temper today. She had known, from that first moment in the hovel, and again at the Gates of the Garden, that she had an important purpose; that she was born to serve a god. Let others lose their magic when they fell. She would never lose hers. Not for long, anyway. She squashed the urge to tell them the baby would be well by the following morning. Frog had promised to show her how to heal Issi by magic later that night.
“You will prepare the extract,” Hasbabsah said to Oos. “I know you have memorised the method. It is time to demonstrate what you have learned.”
“Yes, Ser—I mean, yes, Hasbabsah,” Oos said quickly, colour flooding her cheeks at the lapse, but Hasbabsah didn’t comment on it.
Unar thought, So obedient, Oos. So obedient, my sister, and too stubborn to teach me, but I won’t hold it against you. I will take you with me to Canopy when I go, no matter what Frog thinks.
Then she remembered Oos and Ylly writhing around under their too-small blanket. Maybe Oos wouldn’t want to come with Unar by the time she was ready to go. Frog had much to show her before that day of departure.
Perhaps at the end of the monsoon, when all of them would be forced to leave the banished hunters’ lair. Yes, that would be a good time to go.
In another room, Issi screamed. Ylly got up from the table to go to her, with Oos right behind her. When Oos sang a lullaby to calm the child, Unar sweated from the effort of not wresting the sound away and sinking it into something just to see it change, just to be sure she was as great as she had been before.
Frog sank the tines of her fork into the back of Unar’s hand, and she yelped.
“Watch what you’re doing, Frog!”
“Sorry.”
“Why don’t you go sweep the water out of the fishing room, if you’ve nothing better to do?”
“And what will you be doin’?”
Unar grunted.
“Making myself some new clothes. Esse keeps reminding me that I’m no longer a Gardener. It’s time I put off red and green
and put on something darker. More depressing. Better suited to my future life as a … what did you suggest, Esse? A floor sander? A mattress stuffer?”
Her bitterness was feigned. Inside, her spirit danced. She was greater than a Gardener now, for no mere Gardener could operate here, divided so sharply from the seat of Audblayin’s power.
If Frog’s name was a testament to her intent—that she move in a single direction, and that movement towards the sun, in step with an Understorian invasion or whatever it was she planned—then perhaps Unar should take the name Unaranu, because she would not stay down. She would feel that warmth on her skin again.
THIRTY-NINE
THE RILLS of Oos and Marram’s music ran through the room where Unar reclined comfortably on a coil of rope.
It was ten days since she and Frog had crept into the storeroom, stood by Issi’s crib, and healed the chill that had taken root inside her. Frog had done it, but this time Unar had been able to watch closely, to see with her second sight what her little sister had done, and she knew now that she could do it again. All parts of the body, it seemed, were potential seeds, not just the ones that came together to make children, and Unar could give them what they needed to grow, and in the growing, to heal over the broken places.
Frog had said sternly, You must remember to stop them from growin’.
Unar had asked, Why? If this much growth recoups her usual strength, would it not be better to make her twice as strong?
Frog’s face had shown panic. You are a deep well, she said, deeper than your friend, deeper than anythin’ I have ever seen. With Oos, this warnin’ would not be necessary. She has not the strength, but you … you would not make Issi twice as strong. You would make ’er misshapen, maybe even kill ’er.
Unar said calmly, I thought my powers were useless. I thought you couldn’t use them against enemies. Whoever these supposed enemies are. I thought you wanted me to kill.
So dank, Frog had said through clenched teeth. So dunderheaded. You cannot heal this way without love. Can you not feel it? You love Issi, or you could not heal ’er. Maybe you do not even admit to yourself that you love ’er, but you do, or this would not have worked. The old woman, too, or I could not have used your strength to heal ’er. Do you love my enemies? Can you fall for strangers quickly enough to kill them?
You said Oos was your enemy. I love Oos.
Frog’s eyes had narrowed at Ylly’s sleeping form.
You are not the only one. The ex-slave and the young hunter love ’er, too, but they are both fools and so are you.
In the ten elapsed days, Unar had conferred with Frog twice more, both times by the river in the fishing room. Frog had allowed her to transform Esse’s rope from a woven thing to a single, unbreakable strand by growing the vestiges of life deep in the fibres into an interlocking matrix that still made Unar shake her head with awe.
“Does this mean I love the rope?” Unar had asked, somewhat clumsily, hating to appear stupid but wanting to understand.
“You want my advice,” Frog said darkly, “do not love anyone. Or anythin’.”
“I love you, Frog.”
“Lucky for me if I should be wounded and need healin’!” Frog tossed her head and folded her arms. “I do not love you.”
“Yes, you do. You told me before that you love me. You found me before I found you.”
“I lied.” Unar glared at her, but she went on carelessly. “I found you at the Master’s bidding, and it is the Master who will teach you what lessons you must learn about love and the kind of magic we use here.”
“The Master? Who is that?”
Frog shook her head and refused to answer.
The second time they met in the fishing room, Frog had made the drifting spores of the luminescent fungi burst into life while still floating and unattached. The room had blazed with bright beauty. Unar, with her mouth wide to sing the godsong, had fleetingly, with her mind’s eye, placed Aoun in that room, so that his face could light with pleasure as she knew hers was lit—until Frog punched her in the stomach to make her stop singing, anyway.
Now, with her back resting against the ropes, Unar probed inside her own body with such a minuscule amount of power she hoped neither Oos nor Frog would sense it.
They couldn’t have sensed it, or Frog would have been there already, berating her. The child nagged like an old woman. Like a Servant of the Garden. Unar’s body was only a few days away from bleeding again, and she could feel, with her thin thread of magic, the thickening that preceded it. She shouldn’t have to accept the mess and aching of the whole ordeal. There had to be a better way.
Yes. The extra thickness could be reabsorbed. The body would resist, she sensed, but it could be forced. Tiny layer by tiny layer, each one of them invisible to the naked eye, could be returned to the body, to the constituent nutrients that ran in the blood, like thatch being torn apart and its constituent reeds returned to the river.
Unar thought irritably, I shouldn’t have to suffer what ordinary women suffer!
And she drew, hard, on the thread of magic. Much more than a thread. She forced her body to obey her, and it obeyed. The extra thickness was gone. Even the egg was returned to the nest of eggs that lived inside her.
Then she realised that Oos’s part in her duet with Marram had been completely muted by the surge. Now that the magic was over with, it seemed the musicians had stopped playing altogether, no doubt confused by the sudden silence of Oos’s instrument.
Frog rushed into the room, snatching up a length of rope and whipping Unar’s arms with it.
“You slow grey mould!” she cried. “You one-fingered worm!”
Unar tried to grab the rope. She opened her mouth to say that she was finished, that her experiment had worked, that she wouldn’t do it again for another month, when she realised Oos stood in the doorway, wide eyes pinned to Unar’s face.
“You did magic,” she said in astonishment, just as Frog hit her in the side of the head with the metal weight from the rope jig. Oos crumpled to the ground. Unar leaped to her side.
“You’ve hurt her!”
“We must go right now,” Frog snarled.
“Go where?”
“Out, out! Before the brothers stop us, you fly-catching stink-hole!”
“It’s still raining out there, and Marram’s the only one, he says, who can fly in the wet.”
Frog pushed her, hard enough that Unar almost joined Oos on the floor. Crying out, using the sound of it to reach out to Oos, Unar found a healthy body temporarily unconscious. Frog had bruised but not broken Oos’s skull. Unar sighed with relief.
Then she allowed Frog to drag her by the wrist into the hearth room. Bernreb lounged by the fire, eyes closed, with the baby asleep on his chest, Issi’s fingers gripping his beard. Esse wrapped portions of smoked fish and meat in layers of dried leaves to stow in storage crates.
Marram filled the doorway to the fishing room.
“Where is Oos?” he asked.
“Fixin’ ’er flute,” Frog said. “Can you move? My bladder is full.”
Marram slid into the hearth room with a smile on his lips. Unar didn’t look up or speak to him; there would be plenty of time for that later, after he found Oos’s body crumpled in the storeroom and went outside to find Unar still standing stupidly with Frog on Esse’s platform, wet and helpless.
Frog placed Unar’s hand on the rope that ran out through the vertical river.
“Hold it tight,” she said. “Sing the godsong.”
Unar obeyed, resigned, but no sound came out of her mouth. Magic flared around them, and the rope came to life, jerking her through the river as though a falling millstone had been tied to the other end.
By the time she’d sluiced the water from her face and blinked at the thin, grey, natural light, which was dreamlike after the golden, glowing confines of the hunters’ home, Frog stood beside her, small hands at the railing, showing her teeth to the relentless rain. Heavy droplets of spray from the stil
l-growing river struck Unar’s back and black breeches. She hadn’t finished the black jacket that would have replaced her Gardener’s garb.
“I cannot do this part,” Frog shouted. “You must. Feel the sap in the tallowwood. Feel the life in it and make it stretch out. Grow us a branch to the next tree.”
Unar gaped at her.
“Grow a branch to the next tree? That’s two hundred paces away. I can’t even see the next tree!”
“Do it!” Frog shrieked, sawing through the rope with a small, serrated knife Unar hadn’t known that she carried. “Marram will be here in seconds. Sing as loud as you can.”
Unar sighed again. She began to sing. The first hoarse, untuneful notes jarred her ears before she could catch the source of Understorian magic and sink it into the side of the great tree. With the sensation of splitting into weightless, floating pieces came the feel of sap flowing, and water, too. She could make it obey her.
A shock went through her as she drew on the life of the tree and a full awareness of it blossomed in her mind from the crown, throbbing with pain where it had been cut to form the bed of Audblayin’s holy Garden, to the roots, where power swirled in murky, unpredictable patterns.
She touched her face; it was wet, but not only from the rain. The song faltered.
“I’m sorry,” Unar said to the great tree, “for causing you pain. I’m sorry!”
“Keep singing, imbecile!” Frog climbed down from the platform onto a branch, and Unar saw with another shock that it was the branch she had started to grow, right below them, stretching into the grey screen of rain.
Unar climbed down behind her, uncertainly, singing and urging the branch on as she went, so that Frog, clinging like a sloth to the leafy end of the shoot, was propelled ahead of her, laughing, encouraging Unar to send it further and further. Soon, they couldn’t see the main trunk behind them. Unar sensed a slowing. She was straining the resources of the tree.
Tiny specks of life within the new branch began to die, too far from the tree for the flowing sap to reach them. Even as fresh green wood beneath Unar’s feet turned brown and hard, she felt the junction where the branch joined the tree decay and turn brittle.
Crossroads of Canopy Page 20
