NINE BAGS full.
Unar stood and stretched, knuckling the small of her back.
“Where are you going?” Frog asked.
“To ask Esse for my knife back,” Unar replied.
“He is sleepin’. We are not allowed in that room.”
“I’m going to wake him.” Unar smiled tightly. She’d been looking forward to this moment. With her knife in hand, she could whittle a flute of her own. She could work out what it was that Frog had done and do it herself.
She hadn’t been alone with Frog since the night of Hasbabsah’s recovery, not properly. Not with Oos slumbering and so insensible to the use of magic. When Unar asked questions, Frog only glared at her, tight-lipped, and made a sleeping gesture; she would not discuss her power or who had taught her to use it until everyone else was asleep.
Unar went into the hearth room, where Hasbabsah lectured a reluctant Oos and an eager Ylly. Issi crawled around on a blanket on the side of the great table that was away from the fire, clinging to chair legs, drooling and biting the wood, occasionally trying to pull herself up.
“Have you two come to join my classroom at last?” Hasbabsah asked drily.
In the wake of her near death, Hasbabsah had taken to teaching the other two women everything she knew about medicinal plants. Her knowledge was not inconsequential; as an Understorian warrior, she had learned field medicine, and once a slave of the Garden, she couldn’t help but expand on what she’d been taught. She said that Ylly and Oos would never be warriors, so that they might as well learn something useful to trade in at the little villages where they must soon settle.
Oos still resisted the idea of living in Understorey, but was easily bullied by Hasbabsah, while Ylly’s shoulders grew straighter and her chin lifted higher every day. Frog excused herself from the classes, saying she was a hunter and would trade for medicines if she needed them, and Marram and Bernreb looked appraisingly at her but did not contradict her.
Unar knew what had healed Hasbabsah, and it wasn’t herbs. She glanced back at Frog.
“Where are you going?”
“To watch you wake up Esse.”
Hasbabsah cleared her throat. “As I was saying. If the men had known the uses of this tree, their own home, they could have crushed the tallowwood leaves between two stones and rubbed the liquid on my chest to ease the coughing.”
Marram was nowhere to be seen. Unar supposed Bernreb was still busy skinning his latest kill, something large and brown with pendulous arms, in the fishing room.
“Except that the leaves are up in Canopy,” Frog said quietly, under her breath. Not quietly enough. Hasbabsah answered her.
“Not all of them. Low lateral branches have leaves, too. As for the tree that you came from, little Canopy-fruit, it is good medicine, too. Have you never heard of yellowrain tea? But all that our brave hunters could think to do with that priceless crown was cut it off and let it fall.”
“The crown was already cut,” Esse said, emerging from the hanging that led to his sleeping room, rubbing his head and looking out of sorts as always. “And I have heard of yellowrain tea. It is dangerous. Makes a man bleed on the inside. Turns his stool black.”
“Am I a man?” Hasbabsah scoffed. “By the bones!”
“You would be better off teaching them how to sand floors and stuff mattresses. That is all they will ever be fit for.”
“I will decide what they are fit for.”
“They are fit for boiling water. Bring me a full kettle, Gardener. Right now.”
Unar stared back at him, fists on hips.
“No. I’ve filled your nine bags with twine. Right now I want my knife back. You agreed.”
Frog chortled softly behind her.
“I am afraid,” Esse said, “that I made it into something else.”
“What? You had no right! It was mine!”
“It was necessary. To guarantee your safety. You have monsoon-right, do you not?”
Frog stopped laughing. Unar marched right up to Esse where he stood by the embroidered hanging, itching to slap his face. Maybe violence against a host violated whatever rights they had granted. Maybe not. Maybe it would be worth the satisfaction. His chin was prickled with regrowth, and his breath smelled like fish.
“If whatever you made out of my metal really was necessary, you should’ve told me.”
“You would have stopped working. Lazing in the sun is all you know. Meanwhile my brothers and I work ourselves to the bone. You want to see your precious metal? You want proof that it was needed? I’ll show you.”
He seized her arm and bundled her towards the corridor that led to the fishing room.
“Where are we going?”
“You will see.”
“Me too,” Frog said, but Esse pushed her out of the way.
“No. You stay. Only your big sister can come with me.”
“Big sister?” Frog said. She laughed, a little too loudly.
Unar turned to stare at her. That was why Frog looked familiar. Unar didn’t see her own face very often, but Frog certainly could have been her little sister.
Her heart raced. No, it was too much to hope. It was coincidence. Ridiculous. Frog said her mother in Canopy was going blind, and Unar’s mother hadn’t been blind. Before Unar could offer a different name—Isin?—Esse was dragging her away from the fire.
The fishing room was a horror of blood and stringy multiple stomachs, revealed by the light of a greasy lantern with translucent horn panes. Bernreb knelt on the floor, the broad muscles of his back working, lifting his head with a grunt when the door slammed behind Unar and Esse. There were clots in his beard and the carcass stank of rotten thatch.
“You are awake,” Bernreb said to Esse. “Where are you going?”
“Out,” Esse said, and shoved Unar, hard, in the back.
She went face-first into the river without time to scream. Monsoon-rights or no, Esse was going to kill her. Frog went right out of her head. She should have seen the warning signs. Esse was unstable. She should never have asked for the knife. She should have bided her time and then murdered him in his sleep.
A wooden railing punched her midriff. She seized it. Her feet fumbled on a platform twice the size and sturdiness of the one she had arrived on. She choked and cursed.
Esse came out beside her, a more controlled arrival, with a coil of rope over his shoulder that hadn’t been there before. He shook water out of his hair and eyes. His wet sleeves and trouser cuffs were rolled to elbows and knees.
“The yellowrain tree,” he said, knotting the rope into a harness for himself, “took away the old platform. I built it bigger, as if for young children.”
“You didn’t need my knife for this,” Unar croaked. Rain melded with river water on her lips and brow. She hugged herself and shivered. Since becoming a Gardener, she’d spent her monsoon seasons dry, indoors, like other reasonably well-off Canopians, but here she was getting used to the cycle of getting drenched by the waterfall and then drying to a toasted crisp in front of the hearth fire. Esse tied the other end of his rope to the wooden railing and clipped his harness onto it with an S-shaped curve of iron.
“No.” He turned his back to her, crouching down. “Not for the new railing. Put your arms around my neck. Make sure you have a strong grip.”
Unar blinked, frozen for a moment by the realisation that he intended that she cling to him while he swung down lower into Understorey. He hadn’t made another harness for her, nor offered to rope their bodies together, as he and Bernreb had been roped. No. If she weakened and fell, he wouldn’t be sorry. It would be, as he saw it, her own fault.
She threw her arms around him and closed her eyes as he kicked back, hard, away from the platform.
Then they fell.