“Airak,” Unar squeaked.
“To Floor with Airak,” Frog said, baring her teeth. “It is not workin’. Wait. Maybe you need to go one lower than where you started. Find it yourself. I cannot sing that low.”
Unar tried, but her voice croaked, dry and useless, and she couldn’t make it sound like song.
“Neither can I.”
“You must try again!” Frog’s fists firmed. “Or stay here, powerless, forever.”
Unar stood up. She went to the bucket for drinking water, dipped it into the river, wet her throat, and washed her face and hands. She stood with her shoulders back and her chin lifted, eyes closed. She could do it. She would do it! She had never failed at any magical task ever set for her.
Airak the white with his forked swords of light
dances with those who will dare
while Oxor is love, and her sunshine above
pierces mortals and mists with her care.
“Do not stop!” Frog leaped up from her crate. Unar heard the sound of it tipping carelessly onto the floor. Her body felt like it was dissolving in the now-familiar indication of Understorian magic—all weightlessness and no smells. Her eyes flew open. Frog was crossing the floor between them, hands extended, the tiny bones inside them glowing like the bones of a transparent fish. “Sing the whole song!” She laid her hands on Unar’s.
Atwith the king of the unliving thing
rules a restful, lightless land
while the winged and the furred, the beast and the bird
come to Orin if she lifts a hand.
Ukak, he calls the small creatures that crawl
to the lamps that are Airak’s bliss
while Odel sets their adored children in air
as soft as a mother’s kiss.
Esh grows the paths between family hearths
and knits up the limbs of the sleepers.
Irof brings blooms to the humblest of tombs
and wakes up the hearts of the weepers.
Ehkis brings rain to the forest again
and rests in the heart of the waters.
Audblayin guards birth and the things of the earth
and opens the eyes of their daughters.
Ulellin whose leaves and the stir of the breeze
bring delight to the high and the bidden
is no less than Akkad, whose greatfruit can be had
for sweetness or seed-metals hidden.
Unar looked down and saw the bones in her own hands beginning to glow. There was uneasiness in her midriff, too, a feeling like the cramps in a stomach empty for weeks suddenly finding itself full of food. At the same time, her stomach was breaking into floating fragments with the rest of her. She had no body. She needed no body. Only the pure vibration of sound. The glow of her bones strengthened as she sang the final verse.
Ilan guards rights of the royals, whose heights
are not for the stricken unclad.
Together, they raise all the meek who give praise
to the skies with a green, glowing hand.
Disembodied, hot and cold at the same time, a collection of motes floating on currents of music, her mote-fingers tangled with Frog’s mote-fingers, Unar sensed it for sure.
Frog was her sister.
They had come from the same mother. They had come from the same father.
The song ended. Unar’s body solidified as if her soul had been suddenly coated in clay. Frog let her hands drop. She looked at Unar with satisfaction.
“You will hafta practice singin’ in that octave,” she said. “Your voice is terrible. Not that anyone will know, if you use it for magic. The use of it will render it silent. But remember that your friend Oos has always been sensitive to music. She will feel it. Not the makin’, but the usin’. ’Er bones are already awake.”
Unar wasn’t best pleased to hear that just as she herself had not needed the Garden to wake her Canopian magic, Oos was a natural at musical Understorian magic. But she tried to stick up for her friend.
“Then why keep it secret from her? You said she … we … couldn’t get back up through the barrier. What harm, if she has her magic to help her heal, down here, the same as she did before? She could show me—”
“She will never show you! I am the only one who will show you. I am the only one you ’ave, Unar.” Frog’s teeth showed again in that characteristic grimace that Unar thought she could grow to love. “The only one who loves you.”
Unar closed the distance between them, trying to fold Frog in her arms, but the girl flinched back.
“What’s wrong?”
“Hold me when you mean it. Only when you mean it.”
“I mean it. I tried to find you, Isin, but I was too small. I tried to find other babies that fell because of you. I went to the Garden because becoming Bodyguard to Audblayin was my chance to find you when you were reborn. Yet here you are, in the same body. You are my sister.” Frog allowed the embrace, this time. Her thin body quivered, and she didn’t relax into it. Unar sighed. “Oos was my sister too. I wish you could—”
Frog pulled away.
“No. Only me. I am your only real sister.”
Unar bowed her head in acknowledgement.
“You are my only real sister.”
When she lifted her head, Frog had gone back to her blankets. Unar stood there alone, listening to the sound of her own breathing, feeling the tiny increments of Audblayin’s birth magic expelled with every vibration, as though the Garden lived inside her.
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE TEMPTATION to test her new power was almost overwhelming.
Unar listened to Marram and Oos play the pipes in the morning. They each had an instrument now, and harmonised with one another in complex ways. To Unar, it was like watching two painted bronzebacks entwined, one living and one dead, and the living snake looked at her with crystalline eyes and promised to obey her, if she would only give it a command.
Frog ate her breakfast fish fastidiously, lining up the bones, and gave Unar a single, severe, meaningful glance. Ylly and Issi slept late, as did Esse, recovering from the sleep debt accumulated from building the new platform and the demon trap.
Unar and Frog finished making the rope together by midday. Esse woke in time for that meal and made a spicy, oily mush of legumes and orchid bulbs that tasted better than anything Unar had eaten in Understorey so far.
“Is this our reward for finishing the rope?” Unar asked.
“What rope?” Esse replied. “I need a new net. I think I see a way to use glue solvent to make the fibres all but invisible.”
“What fibres?” Bernreb grunted. “I’m not killing any more bears for their whiskers. It’s wasteful.”
“Hookvine spines for strength,” Esse said, hardly listening to Bernreb. “Caterpillar hairs for length, I think. You know the ones. As long as my hand. They are so hairy the wasps cannot lay eggs in them. The hairs are orange, but I think I can soak them till they turn transparent.”
“I know the ones. You want Marram to go out in the monsoon, risking his life, to collect caterpillars?”
Esse’s distracted grey eyes flickered to Marram’s amused face.