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.