“Who is the Master?” Unar demanded, but Frog didn’t reply, only pointed in the direction they had to go. Quandong crossed branches with metal-stone tree, metal-stone tree with bloodwood, bloodwood with floodgum, and floodgum with ironbark.
“I’m tired,” Unar panted, hours later. Using the song-magic of Understorey didn’t seem to deplete her the same way as using magic in Canopy had; there, she could never have raised so many mighty branches before exhausting herself. Here, the power came from the sounds. A person singing didn’t tire as quickly as a person digging ditches.
Still. A person singing grew hoarse eventually, and concentration faltered.
Frog looked unimpressed.
“So make a bracket fungus and sleep.”
“Now? It’s barely midday.”
“We can travel in the dark if we must. If you are tired, rest. I have no more stolen bones to help you.”
“Stolen?”
Frog’s little mouth tightened again. When Unar lay down on the shelf between orange fungi, feeling her body heat sink into the velvet surface of it and hearing the rain strike the upper bracket softly, Frog stayed crouched on the edge, staring into space between the great trees.
“What’s your earliest memory?” Unar asked. My earliest memory is of you. Do you remember it? Do you remember me? We looked into each other’s eyes.
“My first foster parents fightin’,” Frog said. “My foster father asked for fermented greenmango juice to drink. We call it bia. ‘Gimme some bia, wife,’ ’e said. She said, ‘I given it for taxes.’ You see, the villagers usually pay tax to a Headman. My foster father knocked ’er down and cut ’er in the face with ’is spines. There was blood everywhere.”
It wasn’t funny, but Unar wanted to laugh.
“If you’d stayed in our house,” she said, “it would have been the other way around. Mother hitting Father with a stick, so that his legs looked like striped snakes. I’d run to him and hug his legs, kiss his bruises, and he’d pretend that I hadn’t hurt him.”
“You should have pushed ’er out a window,” Frog said.
“Not me. I don’t serve the god of death.” Unar thought of Marram, and the urge to laugh died.
“I tried to kill my foster father,” Frog said, unmoving where she squatted at the edge. “’E was a big man, though. Bigger than Bernreb and with a stomach like a barrowful of melons. ’Is job was to set the bridges. In daylight, ’e set them, when most demons are sleepin’ and it is safe to cross and to trade. But most of the time, ’e just stayed home and drank bia. ’E drank some of the poison I put in ’is bia, but not all of it, and I had been wrong about how much I would need. Then ’e knew I had done it, and I had to run away.”
Unar tried to glance at Frog’s face, but could see only the back of the girl’s head from where she lay. Frog had apparently not been bluffing about using Unar’s power to kill. There was no squeamishness in the child. Nor any sense of loyalty towards the man who presumably had made the choice to take her in of his own free will. Frog, like her big sister, was desperate, ambitious, and single-minded as a seed. Unar could hardly judge her for it.
“If you ever decide to kill me,” she said, “you’ll tell me what I’ve done wrong first, won’t you?”
She was joking, trying to lighten the mood, but Frog’s slight shoulders shrugged.
“If it is my decision, I will. If it is an order from the Master, probably not. The first thing you will learn, if you wanna perfect your magic use, is never to disobey an order.”
Unar didn’t ask again where they were going. She didn’t ask who the Master was, or what sort of orders she might be expected to carry out. To perfect her magic use, she knew she would do almost anything that Frog’s superiors asked of her. Anything but damage the Garden or hurt her friends. There was no sense in freeing Ylly and Hasbabsah only to have them come to harm, and certainly no reason to involve Oos in anything. Oos had Ylly to take care of her now. She didn’t need Unar.
“You’re my sister. I trust you. You came to fetch me for a reason.”
Whatever the reason was, Frog was not forthcoming.
You want my advice, do not love anyone. Or anythin’.
Unar sighed, closed her eyes, and wished she were dry. Her stomach grumbled, but a benefit of having nothing to eat, she supposed, would be not having to dangle her bare arse over the edge of a mushroom and defecate into the dark. Whatever Frog said, Unar shouldn’t have had to put up with the added indignity of blood everywhere, not if she could do something about it. Frog wasn’t old enough yet, but when she found out for herself what a mess menstruation made, she would apologise and beg for Unar’s help.
Just like Aoun would, when he realised she had returned with Audblayin.
Behind her eyelids, Unar imagined the look on his face when she led Audblayin to the Garden Gates. Frog at her side. Aoun four or five years older, like Unar. He would gasp, But nobody has ever found Audblayin so young, before.
Unar would say, There’s never been a Gardener like me, before. Open the Gates.
Aoun would open the Gates. A Servant—not Servant Eilif, most likely she’d be dead of old age—would fall to her knees and wail for Unar to become the god’s Bodyguard at once. They’d take her to the night-yew. They’d perform the ceremony. Aoun would find her, later, alone in the Garden, and beg her to forgive him for pulling away from her kiss. The neutering magic of the Servants had severed him from his true heart, but now he knew that he and Unar were a single spirit with separate flesh. She would do with him what she had done with Edax.
And at last, laughing with the joy of it, Unar would fly.
PART III
Drowning Season
FORTY-TWO
IT WAS near dusk on the fourth day since Marram had fallen.
“Will I make a shelter for us for the night?” Unar asked, hiding a yawn with the back of her hand.
The skin she pressed to her lips was wet and wrinkled. She could barely remember what being dry felt like. Frog had made a tiny fire, two days ago, to cook a roosting fish-owl. Owls were poisonous in large quantities, but birds in Understorey were rare enough that the travellers couldn’t be choosy. Unar had trapped the owl’s feet with a sudden growth spurt in the branch it rested on, trying not to think of Edax, and Frog had wrung its neck, suffering a bite right through the palm of her hand for her troubles.
Unar healed the bite almost at once, but Frog still plucked the feathers with a vengeful sort of violence. The fatty flesh had been rank, and the warmth from the smoky flame negligible.
“No,” Frog said, staring in the direction they had been travelling. “We are close. We should keep goin’. We are almost at the dovecote.”
“The dovecote?”
“It is what we call it. The place where we meet. Where the Master rules.”
“You’re sure you can find it in the dark?”