Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(64)

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.

“Unless he is busy with something else.”

“I am not busy,” Marram said. “We need more moonflowers for the women. Ylly needs soapleaf for the sheets. Hasbabsah has asked for green leaves from this tallowwood to rub on the baby’s chest. Issi is sick, she says.”

“That explains all the crying last night,” Unar said, rubbing her face, but her tiredness wasn’t really because of the baby. She longed to return to bed right there and then.

“Honey might soothe her throat,” Oos said, and Unar couldn’t help but sense the potential for seeds to sprout in nothing more musical than Oos’s ordinary speaking voice. If Oos’s bones were awake, too, why couldn’t she hear it when Unar spoke? Unar’s speaking voice was simply not musical, she supposed.

“Honey is for Canopians,” Hasbabsah said. “The tallowwood leaves will do to clear her blessed little head.”

“Esse can climb for those,” Unar said, looking Esse in the eye. Maybe he would get angry enough to take her with him, out of the warmth and into the rain, and if he climbed close enough to the barrier, maybe she could examine it for weakness, now that she had her magic back.