Unar sat up in the pitch-blackness. Was Hasbabsah’s spirit leaving them? Was that why Unar had woken instinctively? Hope and dread filled her. Maybe she was adjusting to this new level of the forest, no matter how impossible it seemed. Maybe her ability to detect fading life was returning, which meant Hasbabsah was about to leave them.
Feeling her way with her feet into the workshop, which was also completely dark, Unar lifted the embroidered hanging that led to the hearth room. The coals were banked but the room remained comparatively bright and much warmer than even four sleeping bodies could make an enclosed space. There hadn’t been floor area in the storeroom for another bed for Frog, so the brothers had put her pallet in the hearth room by Hasbabsah’s chair.
Unar looked down at the curled lump beneath the blanket as she passed it. Frog’s breathing was slow and regular. She was sleeping.
Hasbabsah’s breathing was erratic and barely detectable. Unar knelt by her chair and took hold of her cold, wrinkled hand.
“Hasbabsah, I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’m sorry for what your life has been like, and I’m sorry for how it’s ending. I thought I was saving you. I tried to save you.”
She swallowed, feeling the smoothness of her tongue on her hard palate, thinking about the markings the goddess Audblayin had allowed to be placed on Hasbabsah’s tongue. Unar had believed her goddess was wholly good, but now she couldn’t be sure of that.
No, Audblayin was good. He—she—had to be. It was the Servants who were stupid. The wasteful habits of Servants could be changed. They would change, when Unar returned to Canopy.
“I was stupid,” she went on, holding harder to the rough palm. “I made mistakes. I’ll do better. Your friend’s daughter, Ylly, is free, now, isn’t she? I promise I’ll do everything I can to free Sawas and baby Ylly as well. I’m sure wife-of-Epatut is treating them well.”
Unar paused and shook her head. She couldn’t be sure of that, at all. She was being stupid again.
“I wish I could help you.” Reluctantly, she let go of Hasbabsah’s hand. It felt like she was letting go of her at the edge of the Garden, leaving her to fall to Floor. Frustration crept into her voice. “I wish Esse would let Frog learn to fly, so that she could fetch medicines, or that Oos would teach me what I need to know to heal you.”
“Oos cannot teach you,” Frog said, and Unar’s head whipped around to find the skinny girl kneeling beside her, a strange gleam in her eyes. “Oos does not know. But I do.”
Unar reared back from her.
“What are you talking about?”
“Hush! Do not wake them. I have been waitin’ for you to come alone. Oos would sense it, the thing I wishta show you, and she must not. She must believe that ’er mind merely itches in ’er dreams, that it was ’er own yearnin’ and nothing more that she felt. Lately I ’ave thought the old woman would die while I waited. You are so slow. So dank.”
Unar had never considered herself slow. Her powers had woken before she’d even reached the Garden. Every trick the other Gardeners had shown her she’d learned instantly. More, she’d gone beyond them. She’d gone beyond the Servants, those fools who hadn’t chosen her. Absolute was her belief that the rules that applied to others didn’t apply to her.
I am not slow. Or dank. Whatever that is.
She peered at Frog. Their faces were close. Frog reminded her of someone, but who?
“What do you wish to show me? It had better not be handstands or shadow puppets or any of the things you showed Bernreb.”
Frog held up Marram’s flute in the firelight.
“Can you play this?”
“I’m going back to bed.”
“Of course you cannot play it.” Frog’s eyes still shone. Her mouth was small and stern. So unlike a child’s.
The thought came to Unar: Desperate circumstances have made this girl into something unusual. Perhaps extraordinary. Just like me. The child went on. “Music is not allowed in the Garden. They did not tell you why, did they? Maybe they did not even tell Servant Oos.”
“Music is the province of Orin, the bird goddess. Music in the Garden would be trespass in the territory of a rival deity.”
“That is not why,” Frog hissed. “Music is the lifeblood of all magic, but it can be borrowed from the gifted, and Audblayin’s Servants would not want that, would they? No! Magic, access to the gods, whatever you wanna call it, is only for them, not for filthy Understorian maggots to have or to use! Their precious barrier blocks the movements of large livin’ things, but it does not block music, does it?”
“You make no sense. Calm yourself. There’s no magic in music. Green things grow in silence.”
Frog thrust the instrument into Unar’s hands.
“Play something. I will show you. Play it loudly. Play it badly. I do not care. I know you are not the one who has been takin’ lessons, but as dank as you are, I am sure you can put your lips to it and make sounds come out.”
“You hushed me only moments ago.”
“Now I am tellin’ you to play.”
Unar narrowed her eyes at the girl, but she put the flute to her pursed lips and sent her breath over the row of pipes.
Nothing. No sounds came out. Unar could hear the soft crackle of the fire, Hasbabsah’s faint and irregular wheeze, and water falling in the fishing room, but no matter how hard she blew, the pipes stayed silent.
Frog’s eyes had lost their light. No, it was that her skull had started glowing. The same ghostly luminescence that lit the room under the river outlined the girl’s skeleton, shining through her clothes. Unar could see her teeth through her closed mouth.
Then came that same strange, weightless feeling from before, on the brink of sleep. Like her body was dissolving and she was becoming part of the very air.
Startled, she let the flute drop into her lap.
“Do not stop,” Frog insisted, the glow fading so that the whites of her eyes emerged from the place where two black holes had been. “The spell is not finished. Play on.”
At once frightened and exhilarated—she was right, the magic here was in a person’s very bones—Unar took Hasbabsah’s hand again, finding it warm and the pulse strong. Greedy to wield her own power, herself, she demanded, “How are you using it? How are you borrowing it from me?”
“Play on, I said. Your friend, the Servant, is stirrin’. This is not for ’er to see. Not ever.”
“Why not?”
“I will give no weapons to my enemy.” Frog’s grimace was back. “Your friend is more a slave than this old woman ever was. Listen, Unar, you wished to heal this one. To help ’er, to repay what your people did to ’er. At least, you said so. I do not think you lied. This is your last chance.”
Unar filled her lungs. She raised the flute. It made no sound, no matter what she did with it, no matter how she blew into the thinnest, shortest hollow, the thickest, longest one, or any of the whittled wooden chambers in between.
“Is it morning?” Hasbabsah cried, startling and stirring, unable to open her gummed lids. “Am I blind?”
Unar tried to set the flute aside, but Frog snatched it from her hands.
“It’s a few hours before dawn,” Unar told Hasbabsah, grasping the old woman by her flailing arms. “You haven’t opened your eyes for many nights. I’ll bring you water and a cloth.”
“Ylly?” Hasbabsah croaked.