“Oos,” she whispered, but Oos was lost in exhausted sleep. Her tears had dried on her face, Unar thought, but there were plenty more where they had come from. Yet here in Understorey, Oos could tell her what she needed to know. How to enhance fertility. How to heal.
How to drain an enemy of power, as Unar had been drained.
She couldn’t use her magic now, but it would return to her, and when it did, she wanted to have new information in store. Have patience, Aoun had said. Watch. Listen.
Your turn to have patience, Aoun. Your turn to wait for what you want to know.
“Hush, my beautiful little Issi,” Ylly crooned. “My changeling child. Wife-of-Epatut holds my blood in her house, now, but you’ve been given by Audblayin in exchange. I’ll hold you. I’ll love you. I will never drop you.”
*
WHEN UNAR opened her eyes again, it was to the sound of someone pulling a blade across a whetstone.
Oos, breathing deeply beside her, hadn’t so much as rolled over in her sleep. A low-burning candle showed Ylly asleep, too, slumped facedown over the cradle with her arms enfolding it. Baby Issi snored inside it. Hasbabsah’s coughing floated into the storeroom from the hearth room beyond the workshop.
The person sharpening the knife was Esse.
“Is it morning?” Unar asked him.
“You slept through the day,” Esse answered with a small smile. “It is midnight.”
“Is that the only knife you have for gutting fish?” She said it scornfully. Metal blades were valuable enough in Canopy. She imagined they were even more costly in Understorey. Esse might be sharpening his knife over her neck but he hadn’t murdered them in their sleep. She was starting to believe Hasbabsah about the sanctity of monsoon-rights.
“It is your knife,” Esse said.
Unar realised he was right, even before her hand could fumble at her empty sheath.
“Give it back.”
“I have taken it as payment for the net that you ruined.”
“I’ll mend the goddess-forsaken net.”
“Can you use a shuttle and thread without magic, then?”
“Of course I can.” Unar kept her voice lowered with difficulty.
“I have already mended it.”
“I’ll gut fish, then. Give the knife to me.”
His smile only deepened.
“Fine,” Unar said, folding her blanket on her pallet and standing up beside him. “So you won’t give me the knife. Tell me how I can earn it back. I’ll need it when I leave.”
She noticed that the white spikes which had protruded from his forearms and shins while he was climbing were retracted, somehow, into the flesh. They’d seemed to accumulate no debris, nor become stained by sap. She couldn’t imagine how it was accomplished without magic. Then she remembered that Esse had said the party could be sunk by the wicked words of Floorian bone women. She remembered Hasbabsah’s talk of the bones of the Old Gods, and the bone-magic of the princess’s floating bed.
Bones hold magic in Understorey and in Floor, Unar realised, her breath catching. Esse saw her looking at his arm, where only a thin, dark seam marked the place where his spikes had been. He could have been a slave with the spines snapped off, if Unar hadn’t seen them moving in and out.
“You will never have those,” he said. “They are not for you. I might not need you to gut fish or to mend nets, but there are leaves whose stems must be stripped for fibre. There is fibre that needs to be twisted into twine. If the twine is coarse and clumsy, you will have to untwist it and begin again. But if you fill nine sacks, I will give you back this knife.”
“I agree,” Unar said at once.
Esse led her to the workshop. He showed her how to pull down the racks layered in dark green, sharp-edged, strap-like leaves. They were different from the wide, waxy, light green leaves used for plates, which were different again from the papery, absorbent leaves used for wrapping and storing the smoked fish. Unar recognised the strapleaves, and the sandpaper fig leaves that Marram and Esse must use to keep their beards from growing and that Oos used on her hands. The others were foreign to her. Perhaps the trees Unar was used to didn’t grow nearby and to the great tree size that would make them accessible. Or perhaps the unfamiliarity of the three brothers’ harvest indicated that the flowers of their host plants were unbeautiful, or that they came from trees that didn’t bear fruit. Only the rarest or most glorious of colours, textures, or tastes found a home in the Garden.
“Here are the leaves. Go to the fishing room and make your toilet. Then I will show you what to do.”
“The fishing room?”
“The dark room by which you entered this place. The bucket by the right side of the river door is for filling with water, adding bodily wastes and then tossing back into the stream. Do not confuse it with the other bucket, which is for bringing drinking water into the hearth room.”
“Hasbabsah said nobody lived downstream of the Garden because the water was polluted.”
“This river is clean. It is the overflow of a pool that you Gardeners use for your own drinking water in the dry. The other side of the tree is foul, I grant you.”
“And there’s nobody downriver of you that might object to the fouling at this point?”
“Floorians have bone women for the cleansing of water. I am tired of talking to you, Gardener. Go on.”
On her way out of the workshop, Unar brushed past a cold forge which reminded her uncomfortably of her mother, ropes and bundled nets in various stages of repair, animal whiskers waiting to be made into fishing line, and bark to be made into bootlaces. In the hearth room, Hasbabsah closed her eyes tight as she coughed, twisting in seeming delirium beneath a blanket she shouldn’t have needed so close to the roaring fire.
Bernreb was with her. He wiped the sweat from her forehead and the bloody sputum from her lips with a woven cloth.
“What’s the matter with her?” Unar asked.
“I do not know. She bleeds from the tongue. The sickness has spread from there, down into her lungs.”
Unar felt stuck to the floor, glued by guilt at the stupidity of her mistake. She’d thought their escape was in the service of saving Hasbabsah from certain death, only to discover that her people’s cruelty was more cunning than that; in the old and long-encumbered, the mark couldn’t be completely removed, not even by passing beyond the scope of the magic that had placed it there. Ylly had proven recoverable. Hasbabsah was not.
“Oos could have healed her,” she said. “Oos should have healed her. Couldn’t you climb with Hasbabsah, and with Oos—”
“No,” Bernreb interrupted. “We cannot pass through the barrier, and by now, neither can any of you. We must do our best for her here, without the working of gods.”
“Are there no healers? Herb women? Blasphemers of that sort?”
“Not in the monsoon. Nobody travels in the monsoon.”