Nassun stirs a little, and half wakes, blinking in the lantern light. “Schaffa?”
“It’s nothing, little one,” he says. “I’m sorry.” Many degrees of sorry. But the fear is in him, and the dream lingers. He cannot help trying to expunge it. He finally blurts, “Nassun. Are you afraid of me?”
She blinks, barely lucid—and then she smiles. It untwists something within him. “Never.”
Never. He swallows, his throat suddenly tight. “Good. Go back to sleep.”
She drifts off at once, and perhaps she was never really awake to begin with. But he lingers near her, keeping watch until her eyelids flicker into dreaming again.
Never.
“Never again,” he whispers, and twitches with the memory of that, too. Then the feeling changes and his resolve refocuses. What happened before does not matter. That was a different Schaffa. He has another chance now. And if being less than himself means being less than the monster that he was, he cannot regret it.
There is a quicksilver lightning strike of pain along his spine, too fast for him to smile it away. Something disagrees with his resolve. Automatically his hand twitches toward the back of Nassun’s neck… and then he stops himself. No. She is more to him than just relief from pain.
Use her, commands the voice. Break her. So willful, like her mother. Train this one to obey.
No, Schaffa thinks back, and braces himself to bear the lash of retaliation. It is only pain.
So Schaffa tucks Nassun in, and kisses her forehead, and puts out the light as he leaves. He heads for the ridge that overlooks the town, and stands there for the rest of the night grinding his teeth and trying to forget the last of who he was and promising himself a better future. Eventually the other two Guardians come out onto the steps of their cabin as well, but he ignores the alien pressure of their gazes against his back.
12
Nassun, falling up
AGAIN, MUCH OF THIS IS SPECULATION. You know of Nassun, and she is part of you, but you cannot be Nassun… and I think we have established by now that you do not know her as well as you think. (Ah, but no parent does, with any child.) Another has the task of encompassing Nassun’s existence. But you love her, and that means that some part of me cannot help but do the same.
In love, then, we shall seek understanding.
With her consciousness anchored deep within the earth, Nassun listens.
At first there is only the usual impingement upon the ambient sesuna: the minute flex-and-contract of strata, the relatively placid churn of the old volcano beneath Jekity, the slow unending grind of columnar basalt rising and cooling into patterns. She’s gotten used to this. She likes that she can listen to this freely now, whenever she wants, instead of having to wait until the dark of night, lying awake after her parents have gone to bed. Here in Found Moon, Schaffa has given Nassun permission to use the crucible whenever she wants, for as long as she wants. She tries not to monopolize it, because the others need to learn, too… but they do not enjoy orogeny as much as she does. Most of them seem indifferent to the power they wield, or the wonders they can explore by mastering it. A few of the others are even afraid of it, which makes no sense to Nassun—but then, it also makes no sense to her now that once she wanted to be a lorist. Now she has the freedom to be fully who and what she is, and she no longer fears that self. Now she has someone who believes in her, trusts her, fights for her, as she is. So she will be what she is.
So now Nassun rides an eddy within the Jekity hot spot, balancing perfectly amid the conflicting pressures, and it does not occur to her to be afraid. She does not realize this is something a Fulcrum four-ringer would struggle to do. But then, she doesn’t do it the way a four-ringer would, by taking hold of the motion and the heat and trying to channel both through herself. She reaches, yes, but just with her senses and not her absorption torus. But where a Fulcrum instructor would warn that she can’t affect anything like this, she follows the lesson of her own instincts, which say she can. By settling into the eddy, swirling with it, she can relax enough to winnow down through its friction and pressure to what lies beneath: the silver.
This is the word she has decided to give it, after questioning Schaffa and the others and realizing they don’t know what it is, either. The other orogene kids can’t even detect it; Eitz thought he sessed something once, when she shyly asked him to concentrate on Schaffa instead of the earth, because the silver is easier to see—more concentrated, more potent, more intent—within people than it is in the ground. But Schaffa stiffened and glared at him in the next instant, and Eitz flinched and looked guiltier and more haunted than ever, so Nassun felt bad that she hurt him. She never asked him to try it again.
The others, however, can’t do even that much. It is the other two Guardians, Nida and Umber, who help the most. “This is a thing that we culled for in the Fulcrum when we found it, when they heard the call, when they listened too closely,” Nida begins, and Nassun braces herself because once Nida gets started there’s no telling how long she’ll run on. She stops only for the other Guardians. “The use of sublimates in lieu of controlling structures is dangerous, determinate, a warning. Important to cultivate for research purposes, but most such children we steered into node service. Among the others we cut—cut—cut them, for it was forbidden to reach for the sky.” Amazingly, she shuts up after this. Nassun wonders what the sky has to do with anything, but she knows better than to ask, lest Nida get going again.
But Umber, who is as slow and quiet as Nida is fast, nods. “We allowed a few to progress,” he translates. “For breeding. For curiosity. For the Fulcrum’s pride. No more than that.”
Which tells Nassun several things, once she sifts sense from the babble. Nida and Umber and Schaffa are not proper Guardians anymore, though they used to be. They have given up the credo of their order, chosen to betray the old ways. So the use of the silver is clearly an issue of violent concern to ordinary Guardians—but why? If only a few of the Fulcrum’s orogenes were allowed to develop the skill, to “progress,” what was the danger if too many did it? And why do these ex-Guardians, who once “culled for” the skill, allow her to do it unfettered now?
Schaffa is there for this conversation, she notes, but he does not speak. He merely watches her, smiling and twitching now and again as the silver sparks and tugs within him. That’s been happening to him a lot, lately. Nassun isn’t sure why.
Nassun goes home in the evenings after her days at Found Moon. Jija has settled into his Jekity house, and every time she comes back, there are new touches of hominess that she likes: surprisingly rich blue paint on the old wooden door; cuttings planted in the small housegreen, though they grow scraggly as the ash thickens in the sky overhead; a rug he has bartered a glassknife for in the small room that he designates as her own. It’s not as big as the room she had back in Tirimo, but it has a window that overlooks the forest around Jekity’s plateau. Beyond the forest, if the air is clear enough, she can sometimes see the coast as a distant line of white just beyond the forest’s green. Beyond that is a spread of blue that fascinates her, though there’s nothing to see but that slice of color, from here. She has never seen the sea up close, and Eitz tells her wonderful stories of it: that it smells of salt and strange life; that it washes up onto thin stuff called sand in which little grows because of the salt; that sometimes its creatures wiggle or bubble forth, like crabs or squid or sandteethers, though the lattermost are said to appear only during a Season. There is the constant danger of tsunami, which is why no one lives near the sea if they can avoid it—and indeed, a few days after Nassun and Jija reach Jekity, she sessed rather than saw the remnant of a big shake far to the east, well out to sea. She sessed, too, the reverberations this caused when something vast shifted and then pounded at the land along the coast. For once she was glad to be so far away.