He shakes his head. The silver flashes through him, the webwork of it alive and shifting as the thing lodged in his sessapinae weaves its will again, or tries to. “To remedy a great mistake. One to which I once contributed.”
This is too interesting to fall asleep to, though Nassun’s whole body craves it. “What was the mistake?”
“To enslave your kind.” When Nassun sits back to frown at him, he smiles again, but this time it is sad. “Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that we perpetuated their enslavement of themselves, under Old Sanze. The Fulcrum was nominally run by orogenes, you see—orogenes whom we had culled and cultivated, shaped and chosen carefully, so that they would obey. So that they knew their place. Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.”
For some reason he pauses here, sighs. Takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Smiles. This is how Nassun knows without sessing that the pain which lives always in Schaffa’s head has begun to flare hotter again. “And my kind—Guardians such as I once was—were complicit in this atrocity. You’ve seen how your father knaps a stone? Hammering at it, flaking away its weaker bits. Breaking it, if it cannot bear the pressure, and starting over with another. That is what I did, back then, but with children.”
Nassun finds this hard to believe. Of course Schaffa is ruthless and violent, but that is to his enemies. A year commless has taught Nassun the necessity of cruelty. But with the children of Found Moon, he is so very gentle and kind. “Even me?” she blurts. It is not the clearest of questions, but he understands what she means: If you had found me, back then?
He touches her head, smooths a hand over it, rests his fingertips against the nape of her neck. He takes nothing from her this time, but perhaps the gesture comforts him, for he looks so sad. “Even you, Nassun. I hurt many children, back then.”
So sad. Nassun decides he would not have meant it back then, even if he’d done something bad.
“It was wrong to treat your kind so. You’re people. What we did, making tools of you, was wrong. It is allies that we need—more than ever now, in these darkening days.”
Nassun will do anything that Schaffa asks. But allies are needed for specific tasks, and they are not the same thing as friends. The ability to distinguish this is also something the road has taught her. “What do you need us as allies for?”
His gaze grows distant and troubled. “To repair something long broken, little one, and settle a feud whose origins lie so far in our past that most of us have forgotten how it began. Or that the feud continues.” He lifts a hand and touches the back of his head. “When I gave up my old ways, I pledged myself to the cause of helping to end it.”
So that’s it. “I don’t like that it hurts you,” Nassun says, staring at that blot on the silver map of him. It’s so tiny. Smaller than one of the needles her father sometimes uses to stitch up holes in clothing. Yet it is a negative space against the glimmer, perceptible in silhouette only, or by its effects rather than in itself. Like the motionless spider at a quivering dew-laden web’s heart. Spiders hibernate, though, during a Season, and the thing within Schaffa never stops tormenting him. “Why does it hurt you if you’re doing what it wants?”
Schaffa blinks. Squeezes her gently, and smiles. “Because I will not force you to do what it wants. I present its wishes to you as a choice, and I will abide if you say no. It is… less trusting of your kind. Admittedly, for good reason.” He shakes his head. “We can speak of this later. Now let your sessapinae rest.” She subsides at once—though she had not really meant to sess him, and hadn’t been really aware of doing so. Constant sessing is becoming second nature to her. “A nap will help you, I think.”
So he carries her into one of the dormitory buildings and lays her down on an unclaimed cot. She curls up within the cocooning blanket and drifts off to the sound of his voice instructing the other children not to trouble her.
And she wakes, the next morning, to the echo of her own screams and strangled gasps as she fights her way out of the blanket. Someone grabs her arm and it is everything it should not be: not now, not on her, not who she wants, not tolerable. She flails toward the earth and it is not heat or pressure that answer her call but silver lacing light that screams in echo and reverberates with her unspoken need for force. That scream echoes across the land, not just in threads but in waves, not just through the land but through water and air, and
and then
and then
something answers her. Something in the sky.
She does not mean what she does. Eitz certainly does not intend what happens as a result of his attempt to wake her from the nightmare. He likes Nassun. She’s a sweet kid. And even though Eitz is no longer a trusting child and it has occurred to him in the years since they left his Coastal home that Schaffa smiled too much that day and smelled faintly of blood, he understands what it means that Schaffa is so taken with Nassun. The Guardian has been looking for something all this time, and in spite of everything, Eitz loves him enough to hope that he finds it.
Perhaps that will comfort you, as it will not Nassun, when in her frightened, disoriented flailing, she turns Eitz to stone.
This is not like the thing happening, far away and underground, to Alabaster. That is slower, crueler, yet much more refined. Artful. What hits Eitz is a catastrophe: a hammer blow of disordered atoms reordered at not quite random. The lattice that should naturally form dissolves into chaos. It starts on his chest when Nassun’s hand tries to slap him away, and spreads in less time than it takes for the other children present to draw breath in gasps. It spreads over his skin, the brown hardening and developing an undersheen like tigereye, then into his flesh, though no one will see the ruby inside unless they break him. Eitz dies almost instantly, his heart solidifying first into a striated jewel of yellow quartz and deep garnet and white agate, with faint lacing veins of sapphire. He is a beautiful failure. It happens so fast that he has no time for fear. That may comfort Nassun later, if nothing else.
But in the moment, in the pent seconds after this happens, as Nassun writhes and tries to drag her mind back from falling, falling upward through watery blue light, and as Deshati’s gasp turns into a scream (which sets off others) and Peek comes forward to stare openmouthed at the glossy, brightly colored facsimile of himself that Eitz has become, a number of things happen simultaneously elsewhere.
Some of these things you will have guessed. Perhaps a hundred miles away, a sapphire obelisk shimmers into solid reality for an instant, then flickers back to translucence—before ponderously beginning to drift toward Jekity. Many more miles in a different direction, somewhere deep within a magmatic vein of porphyry, a shape that is suggestive of the human form turns, alert with new interest.
Another thing happens that you may not have guessed—or perhaps you will have, because you know Jija as I do not. But in the precise moment that his daughter rips a boy’s protons loose, Jija finishes his laborious climb to the plateau that houses the Found Moon compound. Too angry for courtesy after a night of seething, he shouts for his daughter.
Nassun does not hear him. She is convulsing in the dormitory. Hearing the other children’s screams, Jija turns toward the building—but before he can start in that direction, two of the Guardians emerge from their building and move across the compound. Umber heads toward the dormitory at a brisk pace. Schaffa veers off to intercept Jija. Nassun will hear of all this later from the children who witness it. (So will I.)