Crossroads of Canopy (Titan's Forest #1)(67)

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.

“It’s going to crack and fall,” she shouted at Frog as the other tree trunk abruptly loomed ahead. Unar plunged her magic into that tree instead. It was a greenmango, the sour fruit fit only for birds and slaves. Unar thought she’d seen its crown in daylight, made rainbow-coloured by parrots and toucans. A new branch erupted out of the side of it, arching to meet the one they held on to. Frog leaped across the gap between branches before they could cross. Unar followed close behind her.

When she turned to look back the way they had come, she saw Marram, running barefooted along the tallowwood branch, without ropes or chimera-skin wings. Without the bow and arrows he usually carried.

“Go back, Marram!” Unar shouted. “The branch is breaking.”

His face looked grim. He could feel it, magic or not, but he kept coming.

“I will kill ’im if ’e does not go back,” Frog said, crouched at Unar’s heels, holding her little knife in a white-knuckled hand.

“Oos will wake soon.” Unar’s voice was haggard. The futility of Marram’s determination broke her heart as surely as the tallowwood branch was breaking. “Go back. You love her. You should be there when she wakes.” A twinge pulled at her even as she said this. She loved Oos too, but for now she had to follow Frog and find out more about her powers.

“You took me in.” Unar tried to convince him a third time. “You fed me. Protected me from demons. Go back, Marram. Please.”

The tip of the tallowwood branch, which had been perfectly horizontal, silently slanted towards the forest floor. Marram sprang at the greenmango branch, hands and spines outstretched, but it was four or five body lengths away from him.

He fell into darkness. Unar watched his flailing arms and legs with horror until she couldn’t see him anymore.





FORTY

DIZZINESS THREATENED to send Unar over the edge.

She sat down abruptly on the greenmango branch, her gorge rising, still staring into the space where Marram had vanished. The wet bark felt unreal beneath her palms. Rainwater ran down the back of her collar and along the curve of her spine.

“It’s your fault,” she said, and there was no magic in her broken voice at all. She felt as empty as the day Oos and Aoun had drained her. “You killed him.”

“If you wanna blame me for it,” Frog said, “I do not care. Just grow us a big bracket fungus to lie down on and rest, and another one to keep the rain off. In the mornin’ we can go on to the next tree, and the next.”

Unar hardly registered the words. Marram had been kind. He’d been banished from his society for refusing to help strike at gods he didn’t even serve. Now he’d fallen just as surely as if he’d made that attempt and failed.

The only one who can fly.

Minutes later, Unar heard them calling across the void. Bernreb’s voice, and Ylly’s. Even Hasbabsah’s. They called for Marram and Unar and Frog. Unar bit her lip to keep from calling back to them. Oos wasn’t calling. Maybe she was dead. Maybe Frog had killed her after all. As for Esse, he would be too angry to call, but busy putting together some contraption capable of coming after them, even in the monsoon.

Frog’s small hand landed on Unar’s shoulder and shook her impatiently.

“I can’t grow anything,” Unar said.

“Yes you can. Of course you can. If your voice is tired, use this.” The hand tapped her back with something round and hard. Unar twisted to take it from her, a white rock the size of her two hands, shaped like a wishbone stuck into a flatcake.

“What is it?”

“The ear bone of an Old God.”

Only when Unar turned it did she see the hole bored into the long end of it.

“There’s only one hole. Where does the sound come out?”