The Pseran halted at last. "Wait," she said, staring only at Rufus.
"Tell Nadielle-"
"I'll return to inform you whether she will welcome you in," the Pseran said.
"You'll…" Gorham shook his head, sighed, and nodded. "Tell her it's important."
"Isn't it always?" the Pseran said with a wry smile, and Gorham glanced back at Peer as the chopped woman drifted quickly into the darkness.
"So now we just wait?" Malia said.
"Yes." Gorham sat on a raised bank of dried soil, taking a drink from his water skin and splashing his face. He rubbed with his hand and wiped it dry with his sleeves, leaving a smear of dirt across one cheek.
"I'm tired," Rufus said. He sat in the center of the rutted road. "Why won't the Baker see us?"
"She will!" Gorham snapped.
"Are you sure she's really on our side?" Peer asked.
Malia laughed, without humor. "She's on her side."
"She has her own rules," Gorham said. "She works on her own time frame, and living down here… she's strange."
"Strange," Rufus said. Peer moved closer and sat beside him, noticing that he'd already closed his eyes and regulated his breathing. That Pseran called you chopped, she wanted to say. What does that mean? Where are you really from? But she said nothing, because now did not feel like the time.
Instead, she got up and went to sit next to Gorham. Malia had wandered off, still keeping within the circle of torchlight and kicking at the dusty ground. Peer thought she was a woman who would never look right sitting still.
"Still talking to me?" he asked.
"No." They sat in silence for a while, and when Peer breathed in she caught a whiff of Gorham's familiar smell. She had inhaled that scent so many times-lain with it, loved it-that she would know it anywhere. It gave her a deep pang of regret for what had passed, but the anger was still stronger. She tensed to stand, and the air shards scraped against her elbow.
"Peer," he began, but she could not let him continue. However much he had changed-become the leader of whatever was left of the Watchers, a true rebel as opposed to the safe protester he had been before-the parts of him she had loved would always stay the same. Their past was a wide foundation, and betrayal and separation had been built upon that. Right now she did not feel capable of finding her way back to the solid base of their relationship. And letting him talk about it would only confuse her more.
"I can't," she said. "There's too much happening here." She looked at Rufus where he seemed to sleep, thought of his piercing green eyes and that Pseran's single word: chopped.
"I need to tell you-" Gorham began.
And then Rufus was gagging, coughing, choking, scratching at his throat with long nails, and even though his eyes were squeezed shut, Peer was certain that all he wanted was to open them.
It's dark, and very cold, and a wind whips in from the desert, bringing only a stale, slightly burned smell. There was a lightning storm out there the previous evening when he and his mother had arrived, and Rufus (that's not my name, but that is me)
– had watched from the flat roof of the empty dwelling they'd found close to a tumbled section of the south wall. She had called him down after a while, hugging him close when he came to her and bestowing affection that he was not used to. She'd been sad since that strange visitor, though there was still something about her that at times made her seem very far away. He'd walk into a room to see her staring at something he couldn't see, her fingers slowly stroking her chin, mouth working ever so slightly as if she was saying something much too quiet to hear. And after those times, she'd be quiet and distracted even when she did start talking to him again.
It was because of the thing that came to visit several days before. She'd been different ever since then. It was a man, though unlike any man he'd ever seen before-incredibly thin, long-limbed, with those indigo eyes that seemed to burn right through him. And when it reached for him, then lowered its head and started mumbling…
He shivers, and his mother hugs him tight.
"It's going to be fine," she says, kneeling and pulling him to her. He can feel her tears on his face, and he wonders why.
"I'm hungry," he says. "I'm thirsty."
"I know," she says, because she has not fed him or given him water for a whole day. "There'll be something soon, don't worry."
"When?"
"Soon."
"What are we doing here?" They were in Skulk Canton. He'd watched his mother speaking with people and breathing stuff in their faces, like she sometimes did. The people-he thought they were soldiers, but scruffy and dirty, not like most of the Scarlet Blades he saw around Course-slowed down, drooping to the ground while he and his mother passed. It was all part of the strangeness that began two days before, when she left for the day. Stay in, she said, making him promise. He did what he was told and spent the day wondering why the womb vats were all silent and empty.
Now here they are, and Rufus knows that something is about to change. There is an air of moving on about the way she speaks to him, touches him, looks at him. It is as if she's trying to remember every part of her boy.
"I'm sorry," his mother says, and when he asks what for, she only shakes her head and cries some more. He has never seen his mother crying before now. She is strong. It makes him cry too, and then he sees something out in the desert.
"There's…" he begins, because he has read all his mother's books about the Markoshi Desert, how everything is dead out there and nothing can live upon its sands.
"Yes," his mother says, and she has already seen it. Far out, a dark-gray smudge on the light gray of the starlit desert, a shape is moving toward them. "It left Course before we did, and now it's coming back to Skulk. As I instructed it." She sounds vaguely angry, as if she wishes her mysterious instructions had not been obeyed.
"What is it?"
"Something I had to make. Because I'm not sure what you are, but if you are what they say, then this needs to be done. And one day you'll return to me."
"What needs to be done?" he asks. "I'm scared."
"Don't be," she whispers. His mother looks around furtively, then pulls her hood up over her head. He doesn't like it when she does that; he can no longer see her beautiful green eyes. There were precious stones called emeralds, she once told him, buried deep in the ground that is now buried beneath the domes of Dragar's Canton. People used to go there many hundreds of years ago and dig them up.
Why? he asked.
Because they were beautiful.
So are your eyes, but people don't dig them up.
She nodded for a while, staring at him, until finally she said, It's all about having something for yourself.
"I have something for you," she says, producing a silvered metal flask from her pocket.
"One of your magic drinks?" he asks.
"It's not magic!" she says, almost spitting. Her sudden anger could have frightened him-but he knows she will never do anything to harm her son. She loves him. "It's only magic because people don't understand it, that's all, and people are scared of what they don't understand. They have to give it names to protect themselves from it." She holds him hard, staring into his eyes, and he thinks, She really wants me to listen. This is how she speaks when she has a lesson to teach. "People try, but they never get it right. I know how to do it, because of… knowledge passed down to me. If you'd known my mother, and hers, you'd understand. But this is not magic."
"Yes, Mother."
"If anything, it's a curse." She looks past him at the thing approaching across the desert. "A curse on me, and a curse on…"