Still, it is nice having a home again. Life begins to feel normal, for the first time in a very long while. One evening during dinner, Nassun tells her father what Eitz has said about the sea. He looks skeptical, then asks where she heard these things. She tells him about Eitz, and he grows very quiet.
“This is a rogga boy?” he says, after a moment.
Nassun, whose instincts have finally pinged a warning—she’s gotten out of the habit of keeping vigilant for Jija’s mood shifts—falls silent. But because he will get angrier if she doesn’t speak, she finally nods.
“Which one?”
Nassun bites her lip. Eitz is Schaffa’s, though, and she knows that Schaffa will allow none of his orogenes to come to harm. So she says, “The oldest. He’s tall and very black and has a long face.”
Jija keeps eating, but Nassun watches the flex of muscles in his jaw that have nothing to do with chewing. “That Coaster boy. I’ve seen him. I don’t want you talking to him anymore.”
Nassun swallows, and risks. “I have to talk with all of the others, Daddy. It’s how we learn.”
“Learn?” Jija looks up. It’s banked, contained, but he’s furious. “That boy is what, twenty? Twenty-five? And he’s still a rogga. Still. He should have been able to cure himself by now.”
For a moment Nassun is confused, because curing herself of orogeny is the last thing she thinks of at the end of her lessons. Well, Schaffa did say that it was possible. Ah—and Eitz, who is only eighteen but obviously aged up in Jija’s head, is too old to have not utilized this cure, if he’s going to. With a chill, Nassun realizes: Jija has begun to doubt Schaffa’s claims that the erasure of orogeny is possible. What will he do if he realizes Nassun no longer wants to be cured?
Nothing good. “Yes, Daddy,” she says.
This mollifies him, as it usually does. “If you have to talk to him during your lessons, fine. I don’t want you making the Guardians angry. But don’t talk to him outside of that.” He sighs. “I don’t like that you spend so much time up there.”
He grumbles on about it for the rest of the meal, but says nothing worse, so eventually Nassun relaxes.
The next morning, at Found Moon, she says to Schaffa, “I need to learn how to hide what I am better.”
Schaffa is carrying two satchels uphill to the Found Moon compound as she says this. They’re heavy, and he’s freakishly strong, but even he has to breathe hard to do this, so she does not pester him for a response while he walks. When he has reached one of the compound’s tiny storeshacks, he sets the satchels down and catches his breath. It’s easier to keep goods up here for things like the children’s meals than to go back and forth to the Jekity storecaches or communal mealhouse.
“Are you safe?” he asks then, quietly. This is why she loves him.
She nods, biting her bottom lip, because it is wrong that she must wonder this about her own father. He looks at her for a long, hard moment, and there is a cold consideration to this look that warns her he’s begun to think of a simple solution to her problem. “Don’t,” she blurts.
He lifts an eyebrow. “Don’t…?” he challenges.
Nassun has lived a year of ugliness. Schaffa is at least clean and uncomplicated in his brutality. This makes it easy for her to set her jaw and lift her chin. “Don’t kill my father.”
He smiles, but his eyes are still cold. “Something causes a fear like that, Nassun. Something that has nothing to do with you, or your brother, or your mother’s lies. Whatever it is has left its wound in your father—a wound that obviously has festered. He will lash out at anything that touches upon or even near that reeking old sore… as you have seen.” She thinks of Uche, and nods. “That cannot be reasoned with.”
“I can,” she blurts. “I’ve done it before. I know how to…” manipulate him, those are the words for it, but she’s barely ten years old so she actually says, “I can stop him from doing anything bad. I always have before.” Mostly.
“Until you fail to stop him, once. That would be enough.” He eyes her. “I will kill him if he ever hurts you, Nassun. Keep that in mind, if you value your father’s life more than your own. I do not.” Then he turns back to the shed to arrange the satchels, and that’s the end of the conversation.
Some while later, Nassun tells the others of this exchange. Little Paido suggests: “Maybe you should move into Found Moon with the rest of us.”
Ynegen, Shirk, and Lashar are sitting nearby, relaxing and recovering after an afternoon spent finding and pushing around the marked rocks buried beneath the crucible floor. They nod and murmur agreement with this. “It’s only right,” says Lashar, in her haughty way. “You’ll never be truly one of us if you continue living down there among them.”
Nassun has thought this herself, often. But… “He’s my father,” she says, spreading her hands.
This elicits no understanding from the others, and a few looks of pity. Many of them still bear the marks of violence inflicted by the trusted adults in their lives. “He’s a still,” Shirk snaps back, and that is the end of the matter as far as most of them are concerned. Eventually Nassun gives up on trying to convince them otherwise.
These thoughts invariably begin to affect her orogeny. How can they not, when an unspoken part of her wants to please her father? It takes all of herself, and the confidence that comes of delight, to engage with the earth to her fullest. And that afternoon, when she tries to touch the spinning silver threads of the hot spot and it goes so horribly wrong that she gasps and claws her way back to awareness only to find that she has iced all ten rings of the crucible, Schaffa puts his foot down.
“You will sleep here tonight,” he says, after walking across the crusted earth to carry her back to a bench. She’s too exhausted to walk. It took everything she had not to die. “Tomorrow when you wake, I’m going with you to your house, and we’ll bring back your belongings.”
“D-don’t want to,” she pants, even though she knows Schaffa doesn’t like it when the children say no to him.
“I don’t care what you want, little one. This is interfering with your training. It is why the Fulcrum took children from their families. What you do is too dangerous to allow any distractions, however beloved.”
“But.” She does not have the strength to object more strongly. He holds her in his lap, trying to warm her up because the edge of her own torus was barely an inch from her skin.
Schaffa sighs. For a while he says nothing, except to shout for someone to bring a blanket; Eitz is the one who delivers it, having already gone to fetch it once he saw what happened. (Everyone saw what happened. It is embarrassing. As you realized back during Nassun’s dangerous early childhood, she is a very, very proud girl.) As Nassun finally stops shivering and feeling as though her sessapinae have been methodically beaten, Schaffa finally says, “You serve a higher purpose, little one. Not any single man’s desire—not even mine. You were not made for such petty things.”
She frowns. “What… what was I made for, then?”