“He thinks I’m evil,” she finds herself saying.
Schaffa looks at her for a long moment. There is something confused in his gaze for a moment, a wondering sort of frown that he gets from time to time. Not quite intentionally, Nassun sesses him in a fleeting pass, and yes—those strange silvery threads are flaring within him again, lacing through his flesh and tugging on his mind from somewhere near the back of his head. She stops as soon as his expression clears, because he is fiendishly sensitive to her uses of orogeny, and he does not like her doing anything without his permission. But when he is being tugged by the bright threads, he notices less.
“You aren’t evil,” he says firmly. “You are exactly as nature made you. And that is special, Nassun—special and powerful in ways that are atypical even for one of your kind. In the Fulcrum, you would have rings by now. Perhaps four, or even five. For one your age, that’s amazing.”
This makes Nassun happy, even though she doesn’t fully understand. “Wudeh says the Fulcrum rings go up to ten?” Wudeh has the most talkative of the three Guardians, agate-eyed Nida. Nida sometimes says things that don’t make sense, but the rest of the time she shares useful wisdom, so all the kids have learned to simply tune out the gibbering.
“Yes, ten.” For some reason, Schaffa seems displeased by this. “But this is not the Fulcrum, Nassun. Here, you must train yourself, since we have no senior orogenes to train you. And that’s good, because there are… things you can do.” His face twitches. Flicker of silver through him again, then quiescence. “Things you are needed to do, which… things that Fulcrum training cannot do.”
Nassun considers this, for the moment ignoring the silver. “Things like making my orogeny go away?” She knows her father has asked this of Schaffa.
“That would be possible, when you reach a certain point of development. But to reach that point, it is best that you learn to use your powers with no preconceptions.” He glances at her. His expression is noncommittal, but somehow she knows: He does not want her changing into a still, even if it does become possible. “You’re lucky to have been born to an orogene who was skilled enough to manage you as a child. You must have been very dangerous in your infancy and early years.”
It’s Nassun’s turn to shrug at this. She lowers her gaze and scuffs at a weed that has worked its way up between two basalt columns. “I guess.”
He glances at her, his gaze sharpening. Whatever is wrong with him—and there is something wrong with all of Found Moon’s Guardians—it vanishes whenever she tries to hide something from him. It is as if he can sess obfuscations. “Tell me more of your mother.”
Nassun does not want to talk about her mother. “She’s probably dead.” It seems likely, though she remembers feeling her mother’s effort to shunt the Rifting away from Tirimo. People would’ve noticed that, though, wouldn’t they? Mama always warned Nassun against doing orogeny during a shake, because that is how most orogenes get discovered. And Uche is what happens when orogenes get discovered.
“Perhaps.” His head cocks, like that of a bird. “I’ve seen the marks of Fulcrum training in your technique. You are… precise. It’s unusual to see in a grit—” He pauses. Looks confused again for a moment. Smiles. “A child of your age. How did she train you?”
Nassun shrugs again, thrusting her hands into her pockets. He will hate her, if she tells him. If not that, he will surely at least think less of her. Maybe he will give up.
Schaffa moves to sit on a nearby terrace wall. He also keeps watching her, smiling politely. Waiting. Which makes Nassun think of a third, worse possibility: What if she refuses to tell him, and he gets angry and kicks her and her father out of Found Moon? Then she will have nothing left but Jija.
And—she sneaks another look at Schaffa. His brow has furrowed slightly, not in displeasure but concern. The concern does not seem false. He is concerned about her. No one has shown concern for her in a year.
Thus, finally, Nassun says, “We would go out to a place near the end of the valley, away from Tirimo. She would tell Daddy she was taking me out hunting for herbs.” Schaffa nods. That is something that children are normally taught in comms outside the Equatorial node network. A useful skill, should a Season come. “She would call it ‘girl time.’ Daddy used to laugh.”
“And you practiced orogeny there?”
Nassun nodded, looking at her hands. “She would talk to me about it, when Daddy wasn’t home. ‘Girl talk.’” Discussions of wave mechanics and math. Endless quizzes. Anger when Nassun did not answer quickly, or correctly. “But at the Tip—the place she took me to—it was just practice. She had drawn circles on the ground. I had to push around a boulder, and my torus couldn’t get any wider than the fifth ring, and then the fourth, and then the third. Sometimes she would throw the boulder at me.” Terrifying to have three tons of stone rumbling along the ground toward her, and to wonder, If I can’t do it, will Mama stop?
She had done it, so that question remains unanswered.
Schaffa chuckles. “Amazing.” At Nassun’s look of confusion, he adds, “That is precisely how orogene children are—were—trained at the Fulcrum. But it seems your training was substantially accelerated.” He tilts his head again, considering. “If you had only occasional practice sessions, to conceal them from your father…”
Nassun nods. Her left hand flexes closed and then open again, as if on its own. “She said there wasn’t time to teach me the gentle way, and anyway I was too strong. She had to do what would work.”
“I see.” Yet she can feel him watching her, waiting. He knows there’s more. He prompts, “It must have been challenging, though.”
Nassun nods. Shrugs. “I hated it. I yelled at her once. Told her she was mean. I told her I hated her and she couldn’t make me do it.”
Schaffa’s breathing is, when the silver light is not stuttering or flickering within him, remarkably even. She has thought before that he sounds like a sleeping person, so steady is it. She listens to him breathe, not asleep, but calming nevertheless.
“She got really quiet. Then she said, ‘Are you sure you can control yourself?’ And she took my hand.” She bites her lip then. “She broke it.”
Schaffa’s breath pauses, just for an instant. “Your hand?”
Nassun nods. She draws a finger across her palm, where each of the long bones connecting wrist to knuckle still ache sometimes, when it is cold. After he says nothing more, she can continue. “She said it didn’t m-matter if I hated her. It didn’t matter if I didn’t want to be good at orogeny. Then she took my hand and said don’t ice anything. She had a round rock, and she hit my, my… my hand with it.” The sound of stone striking flesh. Wet popping sounds as her mother set the bones. Her own voice screaming. Her mother’s voice cutting through the pounding of blood in her ears: You’re fire, Nassun. You’re lightning, dangerous unless captured in wires. But if you can control yourself through pain, I’ll know you’re safe. “I didn’t ice anything.”
After that, her mother had taken her home and told Jija that Nassun had fallen and caught herself badly. True to her word, she’d never made Nassun go to the Tip with her again. Jija had remarked, later, on how quiet Nassun had become that year. Just something that happens when girls start to grow up, Mama had said.
No. If Daddy was Jija, then Mama had to be Essun.
Schaffa is very quiet. He knows what she is now, though: a child so willful that her own mother broke her hand to make her mind. A girl whose mother never loved her, only refined her, and whose father will only love her again if she can do the impossible and become something she is not.