“Gods,” he whispered brokenly in a tone harshened by smoke. “Gods, gods, gods.”
“We don’t know,” I told him quietly. “They may have gotten out.”
“Raiders,” Del said. “They wanted the horses.”
Neesha’s voice was thinned by grief. “I can’t wait until morning. Not to know? I can’t spend a night like that, waiting for dawn.” He lowered his arms, rubbed the back of a forearm across his brow, rearranging soot. “I must go in.”
Both Del and I shook our heads. “In the morning,” she said gently. “If they’re dead, they can wait.”
He could not accept it, looking from one to the other of us. His expression was wracked by sorrow, by a painful disbelief. “How can you tell me to wait, when someone may be alive in there?”
I could not imagine what he felt, or how he could believe there was a chance anyone had survived. “Neesha, what we can do is walk the area around the house. All sides, at increasing distance. If anyone did manage to escape, he or she may have made it away from the house.”
His tone was bitter. “Or died at the hands of raiders!”
I hadn’t said it, because it was so likely. The house, I could keep him from but not from anything else. Even if anyone had escaped the flames, I expected the raiders had probably caught and killed them.
“We’ll all go, the three of us,” I said quietly.
He wrapped both arms around his ribcage and hugged himself, staring at the ruins. He paced back and forth, struggling with the knowledge of what had come to him. He could not believe it. Could not. I could; I’d survived raiders even as my parents had not, born of my mother’s womb into Southron sand. Del survived raiders when she was fifteen, when all had been lost save for her and her brother; and she lost him later.
But my son had known only the kindness of life, brought up with no hardships of the body, no hardships of the soul. Del stepped closer to him, taking an arm into her own as she stood by his side. “I do know, Neesha. I know. But let this not change you as something very like this changed me.”
“My sister,” he said hollowly. “Would they have taken her?”
Oh, hoolies. I hadn’t thought about that. I’d been concentrating on the burned house and how to keep him out of it. But I understood the question and the two-edged answer: Had she not burned to death it was because she’d been taken for sport.
“We’ll look,” Del said. “There will be no answers until we have exhausted a search, in the house and out of it.” She paused. “Do you wish company while you search?”
After a moment, Neesha shook his head. “No. Let me be. Let me do this alone.”
She released his arm, and came back to me. There was loss in her eyes, a darkness of spirit. She remembered, I knew, what had been done to her. And worried, I knew also, that it might have been done as well to Neesha’s sister.
We searched in circles, each growing larger with every completion. Hoofprints aplenty, but human feet had left no impression upon the grass, only in the bare, beaten dirt immediately surrounding the house and corrals. Hoofprints and footsteps had carved narrow trails into the grass. But those small trails were made of frequent passage; someone running from the house, or riding from the house, making their own solitary way would not leave much to mark their going.
A man, a woman, a girl. But none of them was found. It gave us no joy, no relief, because until we could search the house we couldn’t know if the lack was good or bad. Hoofprints surrounded the house, led outward in rays from the house, from the corrals. Neesha mentioned pasturage apart from the corrals. But we could not imagine that any of his family had gone so far; had been allowed to go so far if seen by the raiders. And there were no tracks. Grass grew freely, tightly, and robustly. In it, no tracks had been laid by galloping horses, or by fleeing humans. Nonetheless, it offered the possibility that some of the horses had not been discovered by the raiders. A far pasture provided safety to frightened horses, and with so many mounts close to in corrals, I doubted the raiders would have bothered.
Eventually it was Neesha, as the sun went down, who said we should halt our search. It made no sense to continue looking; we had walked far, farther than anyone trying to escape the depredation of raiders could have managed; and in the dark we would see nothing. What we knew was that the corralled horses had been stolen and that we had no inkling of whether Neesha’s mother, stepfather, and sister had escaped or burned to death in the house.
Neesha would not sleep. Throughout the night he held vigil, praying for good fortune. And seeing, I knew, the faces of his kinfolk, the memories of life among them. None of us was hungry. We drank water, chewed journey bread so our bellies wouldn’t growl, and thought our own thoughts.
Del set her bedding very close to mine. We lay down together, full of silence. Del turned to me on hip and shoulder, scooting close; I wrapped an arm around her and held her tightly. We knew we could not offer peace to Neesha with simple words. Nor could Del and I banish our memories of hardship. But we lay there entwined, wordlessly sealing ourselves to one another, sharing strength to escape from how we had begun; to remember, now, we had a home between canyon walls, with sweet water and green grass and a life no longer fraught with daily danger.
Neesha, in his way, was being annealed as I had been atop the spires of Meteiera on ioSkandi; as a young Del was annealed on Staal-Ysta. I wanted to take it from him, but I couldn’t. It was for him to be annealed or to break of brittleness.
Chapter 23
I AWOKE IN THE MORNING when part of the house collapsed upon itself. Ash drifted on the air. Heat remained but was pallid. Del roused even as I did, pushing hair out of her eyes as she sat up. And Neesha…Neesha’s bedding was empty.
I swore, rose rapidly, awkwardly, stiff as always first thing. I grabbed up my sword and hastened to what once had been the plank front door and now lay charred upon the wooden floorboards. “Neesha? Neesha!” Hoolies, had he gone in on his own? “Where are you?”
Del joined me, sword in hand even as I held mine. “Did he go in?” she asked
“I don’t know,” I said grimly. “But we’ll have to.”
“No. No, you need not.”
I spun around and saw Neesha approaching from the corral containing our horses. Tears had left white runnels in soot and grime. He was clearly exhausted.
Del murmured something in Northern.
I asked because I had to, even though I believed it was self-evident. “Did you go in?”
“I did.”
I waited for the words. Waited for the grief. I knew what the answer was. My son had cried.
Neesha said, “There are no bodies.”
At first I wasn’t certain what he’d said. And then I understood. He cried for relief, not in grief. “They got out,” I said in surprise.
He nodded. But his expression remained tense. “What if the raiders took them and then set the house afire? That’s no better, is it?”
“Of course it’s better,” Del told him flatly. “I escaped from raiders. I am proof it can be done.”
“Wait,” I said, putting a flattened hand into the air. “Wait. Neesha, if they escaped both fire and raiders, is there a place they might go?”
He stared at me blankly a moment. Then, exploding from him, “Yes! They’d go to Sabir and Yahmina! Our closest neighbors—eight or so miles away.” He gestured. “That way. Gods, I should have realized…I saw that produce. Sabir must have found them.”