“Do you need help back to the dormitory?” Schaffa asks him.
“I can make it back myself, sir,” Wudeh says. His eyes dart to Nassun, by which Nassun understands that Wudeh probably would like help back, but knows better than to get in between Schaffa and his favorite student.
Nassun looks at Schaffa. She’s excited, but she can wait. He lifts an eyebrow, then inclines his head and extends a hand to help Wudeh up.
Once Wudeh is safely abed, Schaffa comes back over to where Nassun now sits on the bench. She’s calmer for the delay, which is good, because she knows she’s going to need to seem calm and cool and professional in order to convince him to let some half-grown, half-trained girl experiment on him with magic.
Schaffa sits down beside her, looking amused. “All right, then.”
She takes a deep breath before beginning. “I know how to take the thing out of you.”
They both know exactly what she’s talking about. She has sat beside Schaffa, quietly offering herself, as he has huddled on this very bench clutching his head and whispering replies to a voice she cannot hear and shuddering as it punishes him with lashes of silver pain. Even now it is a low, angry throb inside him, pushing him to obey. To kill her. She makes herself available because her presence eases the pain for him, and because she does not believe he will actually kill her. This is folly, she knows. Love is no inoculation against murder. But she needs to believe it of him.
Schaffa frowns at her, and it is part of why she loves him that he shows no sign of disbelief. “Yes. I have sensed you growing… sharper lately, by increments. This happened to the orogenes at the Fulcrum, too, when they were allowed to progress to this point. They become their own teachers. The power guides them along particular paths, by lines of natural aptitude.” His brow furrows slightly. “Generally we steered them away from this path, though.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s dangerous. To everyone, not just the orogene in question.” He leans against her, shoulder warm and supportive. “You’ve survived the point that kills most: connecting with an obelisk. I… remember how others died, making the attempt.” For a moment he looks troubled, lost, confused, as he probes gingerly at the raw edges of his torn memories. “I remember something of it. I’m glad…” He winces again, looks troubled again. This time it isn’t the silver that’s hurting him. Nassun guesses he’s either remembered something he dislikes, or can’t remember something he thinks he should.
She won’t be able to take the pain of loss away from him, no matter how good she gets. It’s sobering. She can remove the rest of his pain, though, and that’s the part that matters. She touches his hand, her fingers covering the thin scars that she has seen him inflict with his own nails when the pain grows too great even for his smiles to ease. There are more of them today than there were a few days ago, some still raw. “I didn’t die,” she reminds him.
He blinks, and this alone is enough to snap him back into the here and now of himself. “No. You didn’t. But Nassun.” He adjusts their hands; now he is holding hers. His hand is huge and she can’t even see a glimpse of her own within it. She has always liked this, being enveloped so completely by him. “My compassionate one. I do not want my corestone removed.”
Corestone. Now she knows the name of her nemesis. The word makes no sense because it is metal, not stone, and it is not at the core of him, just in his head, but that doesn’t matter. She clenches her jaw against hate. “It hurts you.”
“As it should. I have betrayed it.” His jaw tightens briefly. “But I accepted the consequences of doing so, Nassun. I can bear them.”
This makes no sense. “It hurts you. I could stop the hurt. I can even make it stop hurting without taking it out, but only for a little while. I’d have to stay with you.” She learned this from that conversation with Steel, and watching what the stone eater did. Stone eaters are full of magic, so much more than people, but Nassun can approximate. “But if I take it out—”
“If you take it out,” Schaffa says, “I will no longer be a Guardian. Do you know what that means, Nassun?”
It means that then Schaffa can be her father. He is in every way that matters already. Nassun does not think this in so many words because there are things she is not yet prepared to confront about herself or her life. (This will change very soon.) But it is in her mind.
“It means that I will lose much of my strength and health,” he says in reply to her silent wishing. “I will no longer be able to protect you, my little one.” His eyes flick toward the Guardians’ cabin, and she understands then. Umber and Nida will kill her.
They will try, she thinks.
His head tilts; of course he is instantly aware of her defiant intent. “You couldn’t defeat them both, Nassun. Even you aren’t that powerful. They have tricks you haven’t yet seen. Skills that…” He looks troubled again. “I don’t want to remember what they’re capable of doing to you.”
Nassun tries not to let her bottom lip poke out. Her mother always said that was pouting, and that pouting and whining were things only babies did. “You shouldn’t say no because of me.” She could take care of herself.
“I’m not. I mention that only in hopes that the urge for self-preservation will help convince you. But for my own part, I do not want to grow weak and ill and die, Nassun, which is what would happen if you took the stone. I am older than you realize—” The blurry look returns for a moment. By this she knows he does not remember how old. “Older than I realize. Without the corestone to stop it, that time will catch up with me. A handful of months and I’ll be an old man, trading the pain of the stone for the pains of old age. And then I’ll die.”
“You don’t know that.” She is shaking a little. Her throat hurts.
“I do. I’ve seen it happen, little one. And it is a cruelty, not a kindness, when it does.” Schaffa’s eyes have narrowed, as if he must strain to see the memory. Then he focuses on her. “My Nassun. Have I hurt you so?”
Nassun bursts into tears. She’s not really sure why, except… except maybe because she’s been wanting this, working toward it, so much. She’s wanted to do something good with orogeny, when she has used it to do so many terrible things already—and she wanted to do it for him. He is the only person in the world who understands her, loves her for what she is, protects her despite what she is.
Schaffa sighs and pulls Nassun into his lap, where she wraps herself around him and blubbers into his shoulder for a long while, heedless of the fact that they are out in the open.
When the weeping has spent itself, though, she realizes that he is holding her just as tightly. The silver is alive and searing within him because she’s so close. His fingertips are on the back of her neck, and it would be so easy for him to push in, destroy her sessapinae, kill her with a single thrust. He hasn’t. He’s been fighting the urge, all this while. He would rather suffer this, risk this, than let her help him, and that is the worst thing in all the world.
She sets her jaw, and clenches her hands on the back of his shirt. Dance along the silver, flow with it. The sapphire is nearby. If she can make both flow together, it will be quick. A precise, surgical yank.