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.