The Fifth Season (13 page)

(Jija can’t be going as far as the desert. That would be foolish; who would take him in there?)

There will be comms along the road between here and the salt plains, you’re certain. If you can get the boy decent-looking, one of them will probably take him in.

“Come with me,” you say to the boy, and veer off the road. He follows you down the gravel bed; you notice how sharp some of the rocks are and add good boots to the list of things you need to get for him. He doesn’t cut his feet, thankfully—though he does slip on the gravel at one point, badly enough that he falls and rolls down the slope. You hurry over when he stops rolling, but he’s already sitting up and looking disgruntled, because he’s landed square in the mud at the edge of the creek. “Here,” you say, offering him a hand up.

He looks at the hand, and for a moment you’re surprised to
see something like unease on his face. “I’m okay,” he says then, ignoring your hand and pushing himself to his feet. The mud squelches as he does it. Then he brushes past you to collect the rag bundle, which he lost hold of during the fall.

Fine, then. Ungrateful little brat.

“You want me to wash,” he says, a question.

“How’d you guess?”

He doesn’t seem to notice the sarcasm. Setting his bundle down on the gravel bank, he walks forward into the water until it rises to about his waist, then he squats to try to scrub himself. You remember and rummage in your pack until you find the slab of soap. He turns at your whistle and you toss it to him. You flinch when he misses the catch entirely, but he immediately dives under and resurfaces with it in his hands. Then you laugh, because he’s staring at the soap like he’s never seen such a thing.

“Rub it on your skin?” You pantomime doing it: sarcasm again. But he straightens and smiles a little as if that actually clarified something for him, and then he obeys.

“Do your hair, too,” you say, rummaging in the pack again and shifting so you can keep an eye on the road. Some of the people passing by up there glance down at you, curiosity or disapproval in their gaze, but most don’t bother looking. You like it that way.

Your other shirt is what you were looking for. It’ll be like a dress on the boy, so you cut a short length off the spool of twine in your pack, which he can use to belt the shirt below his hips for modesty and to retain a little warmth around his torso. It won’t do in the long term, of course. Lorists say that it
doesn’t take long for things to turn cold when a Season begins. You’ll have to see if the next town you pass is willing to sell you clothes and additional supplies, if they haven’t already implemented Seasonal Law.

Then the boy comes out of the water, and you stare.

Well. That’s different.

Free of mud, his hair is ashblow-coarse, that perfect weatherproof texture the Sanzed value so much, already beginning to stiffen and pouf up as it dries. It will be long enough to keep his back warm, at least. But it is
white,
not the normal gray. And his skin is white, not just pale; not even Antarctic people are ever quite that colorless, not that you’ve seen. His eyebrows are white, above his icewhite eyes. White white white. He almost disappears amid the falling ash as he walks.

Albino? Maybe. There’s also something off about his face. You wonder what you’re seeing, and then you realize: There’s nothing
Sanzed
about him, except the texture of his hair. There’s a broadness to his cheekbones, an angularity to his jaw and eyes, that seems wholly alien to your eyes. His mouth is full-lipped but narrow, so much so that you think he might have trouble eating, though obviously that’s not true or he wouldn’t have survived to this age. His short stature is part of it, too. He’s not just small but stocky, as if his people are built for a different kind of sturdiness than the ideal that Old Sanze has spent millennia cultivating. Maybe his race are all this white, then, whoever they are.

But none of this makes sense. Every race in the world these days is part Sanzed. They did rule the Stillness for centuries, after all, and they continue to do so in many ways. And they
weren’t always peaceful about it, so even the most insular races bear the Sanzed stamp whether their ancestors wanted the admixture or not. Everyone is measured by their standard deviations from the Sanzed mean. This boy’s people, whoever they are, have clearly managed to remain outliers.

“What in fire-under-Earth are you?” you say, before it occurs to you that this might hurt his feelings. A few days of horror and you forget everything about taking care of children.

But the boy only looks surprised—and then he grins. “Fire-under-Earth? You’re weird. Am I clean enough?”

You’re so thrown by him calling
you
weird that only much later do you realize he avoided the question.

You shake your head to yourself, then hold out a hand for the soap, which he gives to you. “Yes. Here.” And you hold up the shirt for him to slip his arms and head into. He does this a bit clumsily, as if he’s not used to being dressed by someone else. Still, it’s easier than getting Uche dressed; at least this boy doesn’t wiggle—

You stop.

You go away for a bit.

When you return to yourself, the sky is brighter and Hoa has stretched out on the nearby low grass. At least an hour has passed. Maybe more.

You lick your lips and focus on him uncomfortably, waiting for him to say something about your… absence. He just perks up once he sees you’re back, gets to his feet, and waits.

Okay, then. You and he might get along, after all.

After that you get back on the road. The boy walks well despite having no shoes; you watch him closely for signs of
limping or weariness, and you stop more frequently than you would have on your own. He seems grateful for the chance to rest, but aside from that, he does all right. A real little trouper.

“You can’t stay with me,” you say, though, during one of your rest breaks. Might as well not let him get his hopes up. “I’ll try to find you a comm; we’ll be stopping at several along the way, if they’ll open the gates to trade. But I have to move on, even if I find you a place. I’m looking for someone.”

“Your daughter,” the boy says, and you stiffen. A moment passes. The boy ignores your shock, humming and petting his little bundle of rags like it’s a pet.

“How did you know that?” you whisper.

“She’s very strong. I’m not sure it’s her, of course.” The boy looks back at you and smiles, oblivious to your stare. “There’s a bunch of you in that direction. That always makes it hard.”

There are a lot of things that probably should be in your mind right now. You only muster the wherewithal to speak one of them aloud. “
You know where my daughter is
.”

He hums again, noncommitally. You’re sure he knows just how insane this all sounds. You’re sure he’s laughing, somewhere behind that innocent mask of a face.

“How?”

He shrugs. “I just know.”

“
How?
” He’s not an orogene. You’d know your own. Even if he was, orogenes can’t
track each other like dogs,
homing in from a distance as if orogeny has a smell. Only Guardians can do anything like that, and then only if the rogga is ignorant or stupid enough to let them.

He looks up, and you try not to flinch. “I just
know,
all right?
It’s something I can do.” He looks away. “It’s something I’ve always been ur