The Fifth Season (12 page)

Schaffa keeps stroking her broken hand. “I love you,” he says.

She flinches, and he soothes her with a soft shush in her ear, while his thumb keeps stroking the hand he’s broken. “Never doubt that I do, little one. Poor creature locked in a barn, so afraid of herself that she hardly dares speak. And yet there is the fire of wit in you along with the fire of the earth, and I cannot help but admire both, however evil the latter might be.” He shakes his head and sighs. “I hate doing this to you. I hate that
it’s necessary. But please understand: I have hurt you so that you will hurt no one else.”

Her hand
hurts
. Her heart pounds and the pain throbs with it, BURN burn, BURN burn, BURN burn. It would feel so good to cool that pain, whispers the stone beneath her. That would mean killing Schaffa, however—the last person in the world who loves her.

Schaffa nods, as if to himself. “You need to know that I will never lie to you, Damaya. Look under your arm.”

It takes an effort of ages for Damaya to open her eyes, and to then move her other arm aside. As she does, however, she sees that his free hand holds a long, beveled, black glass poniard. The sharp tip rests on the fabric of her shirt, just beneath her ribs. Aimed at her heart.

“It’s one thing to resist a reflex. Another altogether to resist the conscious, deliberate desire to kill another person, for self-defense or any other reason.” As if to suggest this desire, Schaffa taps the glassknife against her side. The tip is sharp enough to sting even through her clothing. “But it seems you can, as you said, control yourself.”

And with that Schaffa pulls the knife from her side, twirls it expertly along his fingers, and slides it into his belt sheath without looking. Then he takes her broken hand in both of his. “Brace yourself.”

She can’t, because she doesn’t understand what he means to do. The dichotomy between his gentle words and cruel actions has confused her too much. Then she screams again as Schaffa begins to methodically set each of her hand bones. This takes only seconds. It feels like much more.

When she flops against him, dazed and shaking and weak, Schaffa urges the horse forward again, this time at a brisk trot. Damaya is past pain now, barely noticing as Schaffa keeps her injured hand in his own, this time tucking it against her body to minimize accidental jostling. She does not wonder at this. She thinks of nothing, does nothing, says nothing. There is nothing left in her to say.

The green hills fall behind them, and the land grows flat again. She pays no attention, watching the sky and that distant smoky gray obelisk, which never seems to shift position even as the miles pass. Around it, the sky grows bluer and begins to darken into black, until even the obelisk becomes nothing more than a darker smudge against the emerging stars. At last, as the sun’s light fades from the evening, Schaffa reins the horse just off the road and dismounts to make camp. He lifts Damaya off the horse and down, and she stands where he put her while he clears the ground and kicks small rocks into a circle to make a fire. There’s no wood out here, but he pulls from his bags several chunks of something and uses them to start a fire. Coal, to judge by the stink, or dried peat. She doesn’t really pay attention. She just stands there while he removes the saddle from the horse and tends the animal, and while he lays out the bedroll and puts a little pot into the flames. The aroma of cooking food soon rises over the fire’s oily stink.

“I want to go home,” Damaya blurts. She’s still holding her hand against her chest.

Schaffa pauses in his dinner-making, then looks up at her. In the flickering light of the fire his icewhite eyes seem to dance. “You no longer have a home, Damaya. But you will, soon, in
Yumenes. You’ll have teachers there, and friends. A whole new life.” He smiles.

Her hand has mostly gone numb since he set the bones, but there is a lingering dull throb. She closes her eyes, wishing it would go away. All of it. The pain. Her hand. The world. The smell of something savory wafts past, but she has no appetite for it. “I don’t want a new life.”

Silence greets her for a moment, then Schaffa sighs and rises, coming over. She twitches back from him, but he kneels before her and puts his hands on her shoulders.

“Do you fear me?” he asks.

For a moment the desire to lie rises within her. It will not please him, she thinks, for her to speak the truth. But she hurts too much, and she is too numb right now, for fear or duplicity or the desire to please. So she speaks the truth: “Yes.”

“Good. You should. I’m not sorry for the pain I’ve caused you, little one, because you needed to learn the lesson of that pain. What do you understand about me now?”

She shakes her head. Then she makes herself answer, because of course that is the point. “I have to do what you say or you’ll hurt me.”

“And?”

She closes her eyes tighter. In dreams, that makes the bad creatures go away.

“And,” she adds, “you’ll hurt me even when I do obey. If you think you should.”

“Yes.” She can actually hear his smile. He nudges a stray braid away from her cheek, letting the backs of his fingers brush her skin. “What I do is not random, Damaya. It’s about control.
Give me no reason to doubt yours, and I will never hurt you again. Do you understand?”

She does not
want
to hear the words, but she does hear them, in spite of herself. And in spite of herself, some part of her relaxes just a little. She doesn’t respond, though, so he says, “Look at me.”

Damaya opens her eyes. Against the firelight, his head is a dark silhouette framed by darker hair. She turns away.

He takes hold of her face and pulls it back, firmly. “Do you understand?”

Of course it is a warning.

“I understand,” she says.

Satisfied, he lets go of her. Then he pulls her over to the fire and gestures for her to sit on a rock he has rolled over, which she does. When he gives her a small metal dish full of lentil soup, she eats—awkwardly, since she isn’t left-handed. She drinks from the canteen he hands her. It’s difficult when she needs to pee; she stumbles over the uneven ground in the dark away from the fire, which makes her hand throb, but she manages. Since there’s only one bedroll, she lies down beside him when he pats that spot. When he tells her to sleep, she closes her eyes again—but she does not fall asleep for a long while.

When she does, however, her dreams are full of jolting pain and heaving earth and a great hole of white light that tries to swallow her, and it seems only a moment later that Schaffa shakes her awake. It’s still the middle of the night, though the stars have shifted. She does not remember, at first, that he has broken her hand; in that moment, she smiles at him without thinking. He blinks, then smiles back in genuine pleasure.

“You were making a noise,” he says.

She licks her lips, not smiling anymore, because she has remembered, and because she doesn’t want to tell him how much the nightmare frightened her. Or the waking.

“Was I snoring?” she asks. “My brother says I do that a lot.”

He regards her for a moment in silence, his smile fading. She is beginning to dislike his little silences. That they are not simply pauses in the conversation or moments in which he gathers his thoughts; they are tests, though she isn’t sure of what. He is always testing her.

“Snoring,” he says at last. “Yes. Don’t worry, though. I won’t tease you about it like your brother did.” And Schaffa smiles, as if this is supposed to be funny. The brother she no longer has. The nightmares that have consumed her life.

But he is the only person left whom she can love, so she nods and closes her eyes again, and relaxes beside him. “Good night, Schaffa.”

“Good night, little one. May your dreams be ever still.”

* * *

BOILING SEASON: 1842–1845 Imperial. A hot spot beneath Lake Tekkaris erupted, aerosolizing sufficient steam and particulate matter to trigger acidic rain and sky occlusion over the Somidlats, the Antarctics, and the eastern Coastal comms. The Equatorials and northern latitudes suffered no harm, however, thanks to prevailing winds and ocean currents, so historians dispute whether this qualifies as a “true” Season.

—The Seasons of Sanze, textbook for year 12 creche

7

you plus one is two

I
N THE MORNING YOU RISE
and move on, and the boy comes with you. The two of you trudge south through hill country and falling ash.

The child is an immediate problem. He’s filthy, for one. You couldn’t see this the night before in the dark, but he’s absolutely covered in dried and drying mud, stuck-on twigs, and Earth knows what else. Caught in a mudslide, probably; those happen a lot during shakes. If so, he’s lucky to be alive—but still when he wakes up and stretches, you grimace at the smears and flakes of dirt he’s left on your bedroll. It takes you twenty minutes to realize he’s naked under all the mess.

When you question him about this—and everything else—he’s cagey. He shouldn’t be old enough to be effectively cagey, but he is. He doesn’t know the name of the comm he’s from or the people who birthed him, who apparently are “not very many” in number. He says he doesn’t have any parents. He doesn’t know his use name—which, you are certain, is a blatant lie. Even if his mother didn’t know his father, he would’ve
inherited her use-caste. He’s young, and maybe orphaned, but not too young to know his place in the world. Children far younger than this boy understand things like that. Uche was only three and he knew that he was an Innovator like his father, and that this was why all his toys were tools and books and items that could be used for building things. And he knew, too, that there were things he could not discuss with anyone except his mother, and even then only when they were alone. Things about Father Earth and his whispers,
way-down-below things
as Uche had called them—

But you’re not ready to think about that.

Instead you ponder the mystery of Hoa, because there’s so very much to ponder. He’s a squat little thing, you notice when he stands up; barely four feet tall. He acts maybe ten years old, so he’s either small for his age or has a manner too old for his body. You think it’s the latter, though you’re not sure why you think this. You can’t tell much else about him, except that he’s probably lighter-skinned; the patches where he’s shed mud are gray-dirty, not brown-dirty. So maybe he’s from somewhere near the Antarctics, or the western continental coast, where people are pale.

And now he’s here, thousands of miles away in the northeastern Somidlats, alone and naked. Okay.

Well, maybe something happened to his family. Maybe they were comm-changers. Lots of people do that, pick up roots and spend months or years traveling cross-continent to beg their way into a comm where they’ll stick out like pale flowers in a dun meadow…

Maybe.

Right.

Anyway.

Hoa also has icewhite eyes. Real, actual icewhite. Scared you a bit when you woke up in the morning and he looked at you: all that dark mud surrounding two points of glaring silvery-blue. He doesn’t look quite human, but then people with icewhite eyes rarely do. You’ve heard that in Yumenes, among the Breeder use-caste, icewhite eyes are—were—especially desirable. Sanzeds liked that icewhite eyes were intimidating, and a little creepy. They are. But the eyes aren’t what makes Hoa creepy.

He’s inordinately cheerful, for one. When you rose the morning after he joined you, he was already awake, and playing with your tinderbox. There was nothing in the meadow with which to make a fire—only the meadowgrass, which would’ve burned up in seconds even if you could have found enough dry, and probably touched off a grassfire in the process—so you hadn’t taken the box out of your pack the night before. But he had it, humming idly to himself as he twirled the flint in his fingers, and that meant he’d been digging in your pack. It didn’t put you in the best of moods for the day. The image stuck in your mind, though, as you packed up: a child who’d obviously been through some disaster, sitting naked in the middle of a meadow, surrounded by falling ash—and yet, playing. Humming, even. And when he saw you awake and looking, he smiled.

This is why you’ve decided to keep him with you, even though you think he’s lying about not knowing where he comes from. Because. Well. He
is
a child.

So when you’ve got your pack on, you look at him, and he
looks back at you. He’s clutching to his chest that bundle you glimpsed the night before—a wad of rags tied around something, is all you can tell. It rattles a little when he squeezes it. You can tell that he’s anxious; those eyes of his can’t hide anything. His pupils are huge. He fidgets a little, shifting onto one foot and using the other to scratch the back of his calf.

“Come on,” you say, and turn away to head back to the Imperial Road. You try not to notice his soft exhalation, and the way he trots to catch up to you after a moment.

When you step onto the road again, there are a few people moving along it in knots and trickles, nearly all of them going south. Their feet stir up the ash, which is light and powdery for now. Big flakes: no need for masks yet, for those who remembered to pack one. A man walks beside a rickety cart and half-spavined horse; the cart is full of belongings and old people, though the walking man is hardly younger. All of them stare at you as you step from behind the hill. A group of six women who have clearly banded together for safety whisper among themselves at the sight of you—and then one of them says loudly to another, “Rusting Earth,
look
at her, no!” Apparently you look dangerous. Or undesirable. Or both.

Or maybe it’s Hoa’s appearance that puts them off, so you turn to the boy. He stops when you do, looking worried again, and you feel abruptly ashamed for letting him walk around like this, even if you didn’t ask to have some strange child tagging along.

You look around. There’s a creek on the other side of the road. No telling how long before you reach another roadhouse; they’re supposed to be stationed every twenty-five miles on an
Imperial Road, but the shake from the north might have damaged the next one. There are more trees around now—you’re leaving the plains—but not enough to provide any real cover, and many of the trees are broken, anyway, after the shake from the north. The ashfall helps, a little; you can’t see more than a mile off. What you can see, though, is that the plainsland around the road is beginning to give way to rougher territory. You know from maps and talk that below the Tirimas mountains there’s an ancient, probably-sealed minor fault, a strip of young forest that’s grown up since the last Season, and then in perhaps a hundred miles the plains become salt flats. Beyond that is desert, where comms become few and far between, and where they tend to be even more heavily defended than comms in more hospitable parts.