“Your mother told you to keep them for your wedding, boy, but these women can help you to get more when—” Hasbabsah’s interruption was interrupted in turn by a coughing fit that forced her to let go of the edges of the chest. She covered her mouth to keep the bloody sputum from spraying over all of them. Ylly passed the baby to Oos without a word of acknowledgment and forced Hasbabsah back into her chair, bringing water for Hasbabsah to sip and rubbing her back until the coughing eased.
“I don’t think your hand will be steady enough, old woman,” Marram said, smiling sadly.
“Your hand will do,” Hasbabsah managed, and he gaped at her in sudden distress. She gulped at the water and went on in a rush, “I have heard that in Gannak a man does not paint a woman’s face except on the occasion of their marital consummation, but that is not the custom in Nessa.”
“I was born in Het,” Marram said, but Hasbabsah ignored him, speaking over him.
“Do this for me, Marram, third son of Moonoom. Bring my old friend’s daughter to this life soon, today, before I leave it.”
Marram, contrite, did as she asked. He mixed different kinds of coloured dirt with oil and traced them on Ylly’s arms and face. He combed out her hair. Until then, it had resembled an egret’s straw nest tangled with white moulted feathers; when Marram finished winding it tightly around crossed pairs of polished purpleheart sticks, it formed a complex tower of violet and silvery-yellow almost too wide for the crown to fit around. He wrapped her tightly, breast to ankle, in an indigo silk blanket woven with the same white and orange designs he had drawn on her.
Then he stood behind her, his back to the fire. Only the top half of his face showed above Ylly’s carefully arranged hair. He lowered the ugly woven thing from the chest around her neck, saying sentences that sounded the same backwards and forwards, and made no sense to Unar at all.
Hasbabsah glowed with contentment, though, and Ylly seemed as shy and pleased as a girl half her age.
Marram blushed deeply when his hands came to rest on Ylly’s painted collarbones, but Unar suspected it wasn’t over what he considered to be the inappropriate intimacy with Ylly. He wasn’t looking at Ylly at all. His cloud-coloured eyes lingered on Oos.
Oos, for her part, had eyes only for Ylly.
Probably just wished she was still in the Garden so she could try doing her hair with those fancy crossed sticks.
And then Hasbabsah slipped back into unconsciousness, and the small happiness brought by the ceremony turned to cheerless deathwatch once again.
THIRTY
OOS’S BLEED began before Unar’s.
She reacted the way that Unar expected her to react, which was with more crying. It was while Unar was holding the back of Oos’s shirt, to keep her from falling headfirst into the river as she washed her red-streaked legs, that they both heard the crack, like a lightning strike, and the great tallowwood tree shook as they had never felt it shake before, even in the strongest winds.
“What was that?” Oos whispered.
“Maybe one of the big branches breaking,” Unar said. It happened sometimes. The poor hollowed their homes out of the load-bearing parts of too-thin limbs without regard to structural integrity. Nervously, the two women pressed back against the fungus-covered wall. Unar wondered if they would hear another crash when the branch hit Floor, whether it would be too distant or whether the rush of the river would disguise it. One-handed, Oos pulled on a pair of borrowed breeches, the crotch stuffed with dried moonflowers. Her other hand held the door latch down, keeping it from being lifted while she was still half naked.
“What was that?” Ylly bellowed from the other side of the door, trying to lift the latch.
Unar threw herself to the floor, arms protecting her head, as splinters and spray exploded through the wall of water. The tallowwood shook again, hard. Unar imagined Gardeners on swinging bridges in Canopy being tossed to their deaths. Something blocked the thin light that came through the water entrance. Luminescent fungi went dark in long, black scrapes.
The tree hummed as vibration slowly died. The wet tallowwood beneath Unar’s cheek became still.
She sat up. Through the falling water, the trunk of a yellowrain tree protruded far enough into the fishing room that it brushed the door where Oos had held the latch. Ylly shouted and pounded on the other side of the door, managing to open it only a handbreadth before it jammed on the intruding beam. The tree trunk parted the river. Its hard, black, close-pattered bark was blotched with frost-green moss and it led like a log road out into sheeting monsoon rain.
There was daylight out there, glimpsed in a narrow pair of triangles beneath the log, in between its rounded edge and the room’s floor. Unar searched for Oos, horrified by the thought that she might have been crushed. Then the silhouette of a heavy-breathing head popped up beside the log, close to the river. Oos’s shape scrambled up onto the log, rolling up her breeches so that her bare feet could get a grip on the bark.
Taking a deep breath, Oos then clawed her way, on all fours, through the vertical river, to freedom.
“Oos, wait,” Unar screeched. Oos didn’t wait. Unar went after her.
The river water was relentless, as if a whole tree-crown had fallen on her. Though only a few days had passed, the weight of water was twice what it had been when they had first come to the three brothers’ house. It almost carried her away, but then she was through, and she saw Oos ahead of her, fleeing down a road straighter and longer than any that existed in Canopy. The other end of it, where the fallen tree’s roots must have been, was lost in murky greyness.
“Where are you going?” Unar shouted, but Oos didn’t hesitate or even turn her head.
Rain, everywhere. Rain and gloom and the river. The trunks of the closest trees to the tallowwood were shadowy giants. The sound of Oos’s breathing was already lost in the downpour, and the Servant’s shape was indistinct with distance. A mosquito half the size of a sparrow whined at Unar’s ear, and she slapped at it.
The yellowrain trunk that she stood on might not be stable. She might get a few more footsteps along it, only to join Oos in the abyss. She was not Marram, to extend her spines and stick like a burr to the closest tree.
But Isin, Unar’s sister by blood, had fallen. She couldn’t let Oos fall, too. Not her sister by soil, seed, and the Garden. No matter how much Oos liked hats and hair-sticks and wouldn’t tell Unar what she’d learned in the Temple.
Unar touched the empty sheath at her waist, which she wore to remind Esse of what he owed her. If she slipped, she wouldn’t even have the bore-knife to save her.
“Audblayin’s bones,” she swore, and dashed through the rain after Oos.
THIRTY-ONE
WITH HER arms out for balance, Unar sprinted along the fallen tree.