He murmurs to her, “Get your things. As if you were going to spend a few nights with Grandma.” Jija’s mother married again a few years back and now she lives in Sume, the town in the next valley over, which will soon be destroyed utterly.
“Are we going there?” Nassun asks against his belly.
He touches the back of her head. He’s always done this, because she’s always liked the gesture. When she was a baby, she cooed louder when he cupped her there. This is because the sessapinae are located in that region of the brain and when he touches her there, she can perceive him more completely, as orogenes do. Neither of them has ever known why she likes it so much.
“We’re going somewhere you can be better,” he says gently. “Somewhere I heard of, where they can help you.” Make her a little girl again, and not… He turns away from this thought, too.
She swallows, then nods and steps back, looking up at him. “Is Mama coming, too?”
Something moves across Jija’s face, subtle as an earthquake. “No.”
And Nassun, who was fully prepared to go off into the sunset with some lorist, effectively running away from home to escape her mother, relaxes at last. “Okay, Daddy,” she says, and heads to her room to pack.
Jija gazes after her for a long, breath-held moment. He turns away from Uche again, gets his own things, and heads outside to hitch up the horse to the wagon. Within an hour they are away, headed south with the end of the world on their heels.
In the days of Jyamaria, which died in the Season of Drowned Desert, it was thought that giving the lastborn to the sea would keep it from coming ashore and taking the rest.
2
you, continued
A WHAT?” YOU SAY.
“A moon.” Alabaster, beloved monster, sane madman, the most powerful orogene in all the Stillness, and in-progress stone eater snack, stares at you. This has all of its old intensity, and you feel the will of him, the stuff that makes him the force of nature that he is, as an almost physical rider on that stare. The Guardians were fools to ever consider him tame. “A satellite.”
“A what?”
He makes a little sound of frustration. He’s completely the same, aside from being partially turned to stone, as the days when you and he were less than lovers and more than friends. Ten years and another self ago. “Astronomestry isn’t foolishness,” he says. “I know you were taught that, everyone in the Stillness thinks it’s a waste of energy to study the sky when it’s the ground that’s trying to kill us, but Earthfires, Syen. I thought you would’ve learned to question the status quo a little better by now.”
“I had other things to do,” you snap, just like you always used to snap at him. But thinking of the old days makes you think of what you’ve been up to in the meantime. And that makes you think of your living daughter, and your dead son, and your soon-to-be-very-ex-husband, and you flinch physically. “And my name is Essun now, I told you.”
“Whatever.” With a groaning sigh, Alabaster carefully sits back against the wall. “They say you came here with a geomest. Have her explain it to you. I don’t have a lot of energy these days.” Because being eaten probably takes a toll. “You didn’t answer my first question. Can you do it yet?”
Can you call the obelisks to you? It is a question that made no sense when he first asked it, possibly because you were distracted by realizing he was a) alive, b) turning to stone, and c) the orogene responsible for ripping the continent in half and touching off a Season that may never end.
“The obelisks?” You shake your head, more confused than refusing. Your gaze drifts to the strange object near his bed, which looks like an excessively long pink glassknife and feels like an obelisk, even though it cannot possibly be. “What do—no. I don’t know. I haven’t tried since Meov.”
He groans softly, shutting his eyes. “You’re so rusting useless, Syen. Essun. Never had any respect for the craft.”
“I respect it fine, I just don’t—”
“Just enough to get by, enough to excel but only for gain. They told you how high and you jumped no further, all to get a nicer apartment and another ring—”
“For privacy, you ass, and some control over my life, and some rusting respect—”
“And you actually listened to that Guardian of yours, when you don’t listen to anybody else—”
“Hey.” Ten years as a schoolteacher have given your voice an obsidian edge. Alabaster actually stops ranting and blinks at you. Very quietly, you say, “You know full well why I listened to him.”
There is a moment of silence. Both of you take this time to regroup.
“You’re right,” he says, at length. “I’m sorry.” Because every Imperial Orogene listens—listened—to their assigned Guardian. Those who didn’t died or ended up in a node. Except, again, for Alabaster; you never did find out what he did to his Guardian.
You offer a stiff nod of truce. “Apology accepted.”
He takes a careful breath, looking weary. “Try, Essun. Try to reach an obelisk. Today. I need to know.”
“Why? What’s this about a still-light? What does—”
“Satellite. And all of it’s irrelevant if you can’t control the obelisks.” His eyes are actually drifting shut. This is probably a good thing. He’ll need his strength if he’s to survive whatever is happening to him. If it’s survivable. “Worse than irrelevant. You remember why I wouldn’t tell you about the obelisks in the first place, don’t you?”
Yes. Once, before you ever paid attention to those great floating half-real crystals in the sky, you asked Alabaster to explain how he accomplished some of his amazing feats of orogeny. He wouldn’t tell you, and you hated him for that, but now you know just how dangerous the knowledge was. If you hadn’t understood that the obelisks were amplifiers, orogeny amplifiers, you would never have reached for the garnet to save yourself from a Guardian’s attack. But if the garnet obelisk hadn’t been half-dead itself, cracked and stuffed with a frozen stone eater, it would have killed you. You didn’t have the strength, the self-control, to prevent the power from frying you from the brain on down.
And now Alabaster wants you to reach for one deliberately, to see what happens.
Alabaster knows your face. “Go and see,” he says. His eyes shut completely then. You hear a faint rattle in his breath, like gravel in his lungs. “The topaz is floating somewhere nearby. Call it tonight, then in the morning see…” Abruptly he seems to weaken, running out of strength. “See if it’s come. If it hasn’t, tell me, and I’ll find someone else. Or do what I can myself.”
Find who, to do what, you can’t even begin to guess. “Will you still tell me what all this is about?”
“No. Because in spite of everything, Essun, I don’t want you to die.” He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. The next words are softer than usual. “It’s good to see you.”
You have to tighten your jaw to reply. “Yeah.”
He says nothing more, and that’s enough of a goodbye for both of you.
You get up, glancing at the stone eater who stands nearby. Alabaster calls her Antimony. She stands statue-still in the way they do, her too-black eyes watching you too steadily, and though her pose is something classical, you think there’s a hint of irony in it. She stands with head elegantly tilted, one hand on her hip and the other upraised and poised with the fingers relaxed, waving in no particular direction. Maybe it’s a come-hither, maybe it’s a backhanded farewell, maybe it’s that thing people do when they’re keeping a secret and want you to know it, but they don’t want to tell you what it is.