IT WAS still dark when Unar woke.
She peeled the leeches off her skin and rubbed the sores they left behind. Then she lapped a drink of rainwater from the edge of the enormous bracket fungus that unyieldingly took their weight.
“Are you ready?” Frog asked, proffering the ear bone, which glowed a gentle green. She had a leech sore on her eyelid, barely discernible.
“I’m ready,” Unar said. She breathed in life and breathed out magic. The greenmango stretched a new-grown arm in the direction Frog indicated, and a fig, like the one at the great crossroads on the border of Ehkisland in Canopy, reached its new arm out until the branches crossed. Unar hesitated. This was more a crossroads than the other. If she made this crossing, it was one she could never return from, and she didn’t know whether to feel anticipation or fear.
Then she remembered how she’d jumped off the head of the dayhunter. How she’d left her parents’ home. That seeds were ambitious, desperate, single-minded, and strong.
Audblayin favoured boldness.
She and Frog stepped off the tree behind them just in time for it to slough the dying overextension of itself.
Fig branch met myrtle. Myrtle met sweet-fruit pine. Sweet-fruit pine met false palm. False palm met quandong, complete with ripe blue fruits that they ate for a morning meal.
“If you had been patient,” Frog said reproachfully as she spat a seed into the rain, “and not alerted them until we were ready, we would have supplies with us. Proper food, rope, nets, and knives. Tinder and firestarter and sand.”
“How far are we going?” asked Unar, who had never crossed more than one or two niches, never travelled further than she could walk in a day.
“To the far edge of Canopy. It would take a week in the dry. Maybe five days in the monsoon. To make a new branch, most of all a great tree needs water.”
“You can’t teach me about trees. I’m a Gardener. Teach me something else, sister.” A thrill went through her when she said it. Why should she be afraid? She had done the impossible and helped two slaves to escape certain death at Servant Eilif’s hands, while eluding the punishment of denying her power. Confident in her destiny again, she straightened her back and lifted her chin.
Nothing could deny her. She would be the greatest Bodyguard Audblayin had ever had. When she found him. After all, not even a season had passed in Understorey, and she had already found her sister.
“The Master will decide what you are to be taught,” Frog muttered.
“Who is the Master?” Unar demanded, but Frog didn’t reply, only pointed in the direction they had to go. Quandong crossed branches with metal-stone tree, metal-stone tree with bloodwood, bloodwood with floodgum, and floodgum with ironbark.
“I’m tired,” Unar panted, hours later. Using the song-magic of Understorey didn’t seem to deplete her the same way as using magic in Canopy had; there, she could never have raised so many mighty branches before exhausting herself. Here, the power came from the sounds. A person singing didn’t tire as quickly as a person digging ditches.
Still. A person singing grew hoarse eventually, and concentration faltered.
Frog looked unimpressed.
“So make a bracket fungus and sleep.”
“Now? It’s barely midday.”
“We can travel in the dark if we must. If you are tired, rest. I have no more stolen bones to help you.”
“Stolen?”
Frog’s little mouth tightened again. When Unar lay down on the shelf between orange fungi, feeling her body heat sink into the velvet surface of it and hearing the rain strike the upper bracket softly, Frog stayed crouched on the edge, staring into space between the great trees.
“What’s your earliest memory?” Unar asked. My earliest memory is of you. Do you remember it? Do you remember me? We looked into each other’s eyes.
“My first foster parents fightin’,” Frog said. “My foster father asked for fermented greenmango juice to drink. We call it bia. ‘Gimme some bia, wife,’ ’e said. She said, ‘I given it for taxes.’ You see, the villagers usually pay tax to a Headman. My foster father knocked ’er down and cut ’er in the face with ’is spines. There was blood everywhere.”
It wasn’t funny, but Unar wanted to laugh.
“If you’d stayed in our house,” she said, “it would have been the other way around. Mother hitting Father with a stick, so that his legs looked like striped snakes. I’d run to him and hug his legs, kiss his bruises, and he’d pretend that I hadn’t hurt him.”
“You should have pushed ’er out a window,” Frog said.
“Not me. I don’t serve the god of death.” Unar thought of Marram, and the urge to laugh died.
“I tried to kill my foster father,” Frog said, unmoving where she squatted at the edge. “’E was a big man, though. Bigger than Bernreb and with a stomach like a barrowful of melons. ’Is job was to set the bridges. In daylight, ’e set them, when most demons are sleepin’ and it is safe to cross and to trade. But most of the time, ’e just stayed home and drank bia. ’E drank some of the poison I put in ’is bia, but not all of it, and I had been wrong about how much I would need. Then ’e knew I had done it, and I had to run away.”
Unar tried to glance at Frog’s face, but could see only the back of the girl’s head from where she lay. Frog had apparently not been bluffing about using Unar’s power to kill. There was no squeamishness in the child. Nor any sense of loyalty towards the man who presumably had made the choice to take her in of his own free will. Frog, like her big sister, was desperate, ambitious, and single-minded as a seed. Unar could hardly judge her for it.
“If you ever decide to kill me,” she said, “you’ll tell me what I’ve done wrong first, won’t you?”
She was joking, trying to lighten the mood, but Frog’s slight shoulders shrugged.
“If it is my decision, I will. If it is an order from the Master, probably not. The first thing you will learn, if you wanna perfect your magic use, is never to disobey an order.”
Unar didn’t ask again where they were going. She didn’t ask who the Master was, or what sort of orders she might be expected to carry out. To perfect her magic use, she knew she would do almost anything that Frog’s superiors asked of her. Anything but damage the Garden or hurt her friends. There was no sense in freeing Ylly and Hasbabsah only to have them come to harm, and certainly no reason to involve Oos in anything. Oos had Ylly to take care of her now. She didn’t need Unar.
“You’re my sister. I trust you. You came to fetch me for a reason.”
Whatever the reason was, Frog was not forthcoming.
You want my advice, do not love anyone. Or anythin’.
Unar sighed, closed her eyes, and wished she were dry. Her stomach grumbled, but a benefit of having nothing to eat, she supposed, would be not having to dangle her bare arse over the edge of a mushroom and defecate into the dark. Whatever Frog said, Unar shouldn’t have had to put up with the added indignity of blood everywhere, not if she could do something about it. Frog wasn’t old enough yet, but when she found out for herself what a mess menstruation made, she would apologise and beg for Unar’s help.
Just like Aoun would, when he realised she had returned with Audblayin.
Behind her eyelids, Unar imagined the look on his face when she led Audblayin to the Garden Gates. Frog at her side. Aoun four or five years older, like Unar. He would gasp, But nobody has ever found Audblayin so young, before.
Unar would say, There’s never been a Gardener like me, before. Open the Gates.
Aoun would open the Gates. A Servant—not Servant Eilif, most likely she’d be dead of old age—would fall to her knees and wail for Unar to become the god’s Bodyguard at once. They’d take her to the night-yew. They’d perform the ceremony. Aoun would find her, later, alone in the Garden, and beg her to forgive him for pulling away from her kiss. The neutering magic of the Servants had severed him from his true heart, but now he knew that he and Unar were a single spirit with separate flesh. She would do with him what she had done with Edax.
And at last, laughing with the joy of it, Unar would fly.