Unar turned on her heel in frustration. In the fishing room, thin beams of moonlight struck the edge of the river where it flowed over the entrance, making a moonbow overlaid on a soft wall of white. She stopped to gape at it. As she watched, the fleeting moonlight faded, leaving the room cold and dark and wet again.
She filled the toilet bucket with water, then with waste, and finally, wrinkling her nose, she poured it away. She crushed a soapleaf and lathered her hands before rinsing them. Then she cupped the river water directly for drinking.
It tasted a little like tannins, a little like rotted leaves. Not much like rainwater, but at least she hadn’t caught any fish in her hands.
As she was backing away from the water, ready to go back to Esse, something came through the entrance, splitting the water—something that she couldn’t quite see, which she assumed in a panic was a demon. She groped for her knife a second time and loosed a cry of startlement and fear.
“Hush,” said Marram. His voice was higher pitched than Bernreb’s, not as coldly menacing as Esse’s. “What were you doing? I hope I did not walk in through a tossed bucket of solid waste.”
“No,” Unar managed, mortified.
Marram pulled something like a blanket away from his head and the dark bulk resolved into his slender, pale shape. He carried a long, curved stave and a basket on his back. A thick coil of sodden rope hung at the waist of his short wrap. Coarse-woven cloth to provide better grip was laced onto his insteps and the tops of his knees, leaving his shins bare with their spikes hidden in the seams. The rope coil ended in a metal spike with a round eye for attachment, and when Marram turned to drape the blanket from a hook, the glow of luminescent fungi revealed that the stave was an unstrung, powerful-looking longbow of three different laminated woods.
The blanket took on the colour of the fungi-covered wall, and Unar gasped.
“Chimera skin,” she said. She couldn’t help but look into the basket as Marram unstrapped it. “Those aren’t tallowwood leaves.”
“No,” Marram admitted.
“But nobody travels from tree to tree in the monsoon. Hasbabsah said so, and Bernreb, too. Where did these leaves come from? How did you get them, if you stayed only on this tree?”
Marram smiled. “Nobody travels in the monsoon,” he said, “because wet bark means that resin glues for sticky-climbing will not properly attach. Spikes may not penetrate properly through loosened, sodden bark to the safety of the wood. And traditional leather skins for gliding hold too much weight in water. The glide cannot be sustained, and the hapless hunter falls to Floor.”
Unar glanced at the chimera skin again.
“Traditional leather,” she repeated. “Is that why Bernreb hunted a demon for you?”
“It is.”
“So you can glide from tree to tree, even in the rain?”
“I am the first one. The only one. Only I can move through the trees during the monsoon.”
“You,” Unar said, “and your two brothers, you mean.”
“No. Bernreb is too heavy, and Esse is a barkclinger; he does not fancy flight. But I do.”
Hope rose in her chest.
“Then you can go to this barbarian village, Gannak, or whatever you call it. You can find medicines for her. Save her life.”
“You forget,” Marram said, shaking his head, “we are exiles. I would be killed on sight if I showed my face in Gannak.”
“Let me go, then!” Unar grasped his hand. “Teach me to fly!”
“Flying is the easy part. Flying isn’t the difficulty.”
“What is the difficulty, then?”
Marram pulled his fingers out of her grip. He raised his forearm, held it vertical high above the level of her eyes for a moment, and then brought it down sharply against the fishing room wall.
When Unar looked closely, she realised he had extended his spikes and driven them deeply into the wood.
“The difficulty,” he said, “is landing.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
WHEN OOS woke, she emerged into the workroom where Unar was busily stripping fibres from the strap-like leaves.
Oos’s white robe was stained by bark, glue, and fish slime. The beads and ribbons in her hair had congealed with woodchips and pallet-straw into an awful-looking, trussed-up, kicked-beehive shape.
“I’m hungry,” she said to Unar in a small voice.
“Go on, then,” Unar replied, jerking her head towards the hearth room. “They’re in there, the three of them. There’s fruit and fish.”
Since his return with the leaves via the fishing room, Marram had shrugged off his clothes, dried himself, dressed in a clean waist-wrap by the fire, slept for three hours in the bedroom barred to guests, and then risen, refreshed, as if three hours sleep per day were all that he needed. Bernreb had passed Unar once or twice to check on the baby, Issi, only to find Ylly had everything in hand. As for Esse, Unar didn’t think he’d slept at all.
“I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to see them. Can’t you…?”
Unar sighed and put the leaf to one side. After six hours or so of stripping, her fingers had blisters aplenty, but there was something soothing in the leaf sap that allowed her to keep working stubbornly through the pain. She needed that knife back. From her sitting position on the wooden floor, she looked up at Oos.
“We wouldn’t be here at all if only you’d helped instead of hindered.”
“How can you say that? You’re the one who dragged us into the river, to death, as far as you knew, but you did it anyway. Besides, how could I turn against the Servants? I am a Servant. I can’t turn against myself.”
Unar didn’t say haughtily that they wouldn’t have died because she had a destiny, even if she was the only one who could see it. Aoun knew. Aoun said that the wards had stood four hundred years, that Unar had the power to destroy everything, that she was practically the goddess reborn.
“You can still think for yourself, can’t you?” Unar tossed her head angrily. “You can decide which traditions are important and which are needlessly cruel. Is Audblayin a god in want of human sacrifices?”
“Of course not—she is the giver of life!”
“Then you failed her when you failed to give life to Hasbabsah. Can’t you hear her, coughing, dying in the other room? You can’t fool me, Oos. We were friends for too long. It’s not those men you’re afraid of, it’s watching an old woman die.”
They glared at each other for a moment. Then Oos brushed past Unar, kicking her pile of fibre in petty vengeance as she went. Unar scraped the pile together again, silently, on her hands and knees, before moving to where she could eavesdrop on the conversation in the hearth room.
“Is it morning?” Oos’s voice sounded timid through the curtain.
“The last dawn that your ex-slave is likely to see,” Esse said. Hasbabsah’s hacking halted the conversation momentarily.
“If I could send a message up to the other Servants,” Oos said into the pause. “Servant Eilif could come down here. She could do something to help.”