Frog shook her head and refused to answer.
The second time they met in the fishing room, Frog had made the drifting spores of the luminescent fungi burst into life while still floating and unattached. The room had blazed with bright beauty. Unar, with her mouth wide to sing the godsong, had fleetingly, with her mind’s eye, placed Aoun in that room, so that his face could light with pleasure as she knew hers was lit—until Frog punched her in the stomach to make her stop singing, anyway.
Now, with her back resting against the ropes, Unar probed inside her own body with such a minuscule amount of power she hoped neither Oos nor Frog would sense it.
They couldn’t have sensed it, or Frog would have been there already, berating her. The child nagged like an old woman. Like a Servant of the Garden. Unar’s body was only a few days away from bleeding again, and she could feel, with her thin thread of magic, the thickening that preceded it. She shouldn’t have to accept the mess and aching of the whole ordeal. There had to be a better way.
Yes. The extra thickness could be reabsorbed. The body would resist, she sensed, but it could be forced. Tiny layer by tiny layer, each one of them invisible to the naked eye, could be returned to the body, to the constituent nutrients that ran in the blood, like thatch being torn apart and its constituent reeds returned to the river.
Unar thought irritably, I shouldn’t have to suffer what ordinary women suffer!
And she drew, hard, on the thread of magic. Much more than a thread. She forced her body to obey her, and it obeyed. The extra thickness was gone. Even the egg was returned to the nest of eggs that lived inside her.
Then she realised that Oos’s part in her duet with Marram had been completely muted by the surge. Now that the magic was over with, it seemed the musicians had stopped playing altogether, no doubt confused by the sudden silence of Oos’s instrument.
Frog rushed into the room, snatching up a length of rope and whipping Unar’s arms with it.
“You slow grey mould!” she cried. “You one-fingered worm!”
Unar tried to grab the rope. She opened her mouth to say that she was finished, that her experiment had worked, that she wouldn’t do it again for another month, when she realised Oos stood in the doorway, wide eyes pinned to Unar’s face.
“You did magic,” she said in astonishment, just as Frog hit her in the side of the head with the metal weight from the rope jig. Oos crumpled to the ground. Unar leaped to her side.
“You’ve hurt her!”
“We must go right now,” Frog snarled.
“Go where?”
“Out, out! Before the brothers stop us, you fly-catching stink-hole!”
“It’s still raining out there, and Marram’s the only one, he says, who can fly in the wet.”
Frog pushed her, hard enough that Unar almost joined Oos on the floor. Crying out, using the sound of it to reach out to Oos, Unar found a healthy body temporarily unconscious. Frog had bruised but not broken Oos’s skull. Unar sighed with relief.
Then she allowed Frog to drag her by the wrist into the hearth room. Bernreb lounged by the fire, eyes closed, with the baby asleep on his chest, Issi’s fingers gripping his beard. Esse wrapped portions of smoked fish and meat in layers of dried leaves to stow in storage crates.
Marram filled the doorway to the fishing room.
“Where is Oos?” he asked.
“Fixin’ ’er flute,” Frog said. “Can you move? My bladder is full.”
Marram slid into the hearth room with a smile on his lips. Unar didn’t look up or speak to him; there would be plenty of time for that later, after he found Oos’s body crumpled in the storeroom and went outside to find Unar still standing stupidly with Frog on Esse’s platform, wet and helpless.
Frog placed Unar’s hand on the rope that ran out through the vertical river.
“Hold it tight,” she said. “Sing the godsong.”
Unar obeyed, resigned, but no sound came out of her mouth. Magic flared around them, and the rope came to life, jerking her through the river as though a falling millstone had been tied to the other end.
By the time she’d sluiced the water from her face and blinked at the thin, grey, natural light, which was dreamlike after the golden, glowing confines of the hunters’ home, Frog stood beside her, small hands at the railing, showing her teeth to the relentless rain. Heavy droplets of spray from the still-growing river struck Unar’s back and black breeches. She hadn’t finished the black jacket that would have replaced her Gardener’s garb.
“I cannot do this part,” Frog shouted. “You must. Feel the sap in the tallowwood. Feel the life in it and make it stretch out. Grow us a branch to the next tree.”
Unar gaped at her.
“Grow a branch to the next tree? That’s two hundred paces away. I can’t even see the next tree!”
“Do it!” Frog shrieked, sawing through the rope with a small, serrated knife Unar hadn’t known that she carried. “Marram will be here in seconds. Sing as loud as you can.”
Unar sighed again. She began to sing. The first hoarse, untuneful notes jarred her ears before she could catch the source of Understorian magic and sink it into the side of the great tree. With the sensation of splitting into weightless, floating pieces came the feel of sap flowing, and water, too. She could make it obey her.
A shock went through her as she drew on the life of the tree and a full awareness of it blossomed in her mind from the crown, throbbing with pain where it had been cut to form the bed of Audblayin’s holy Garden, to the roots, where power swirled in murky, unpredictable patterns.
She touched her face; it was wet, but not only from the rain. The song faltered.
“I’m sorry,” Unar said to the great tree, “for causing you pain. I’m sorry!”
“Keep singing, imbecile!” Frog climbed down from the platform onto a branch, and Unar saw with another shock that it was the branch she had started to grow, right below them, stretching into the grey screen of rain.
Unar climbed down behind her, uncertainly, singing and urging the branch on as she went, so that Frog, clinging like a sloth to the leafy end of the shoot, was propelled ahead of her, laughing, encouraging Unar to send it further and further. Soon, they couldn’t see the main trunk behind them. Unar sensed a slowing. She was straining the resources of the tree.
Tiny specks of life within the new branch began to die, too far from the tree for the flowing sap to reach them. Even as fresh green wood beneath Unar’s feet turned brown and hard, she felt the junction where the branch joined the tree decay and turn brittle.