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 still-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.
“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.