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.
Schaffa tenses. “Nassun.” The blaze of silver within him suddenly goes still and dims slightly. It is as if the corestone is aware of the threat she poses.
It is for his own good.
But.
She swallows. If she hurts him because she loves him, is that still hurt? If she hurts him a lot now so that he will hurt less later, does that make her a terrible person?
“Nassun, please.”
Is that not how love should work?
But this thought makes her remember her mother, and a chilly afternoon with clouds obscuring the sun and a brisk wind making her shake as Mama’s fingers covered hers and held her hand down on a flat rock. If you can control yourself through pain, I’ll know you’re safe.
She lets go of Schaffa and sits back, chilled by who she has almost become.
He sits still for a moment longer, perhaps in relief or regret. Then he says quietly, “You’ve been gone all day. Have you eaten?”
Nassun is hungry, but she doesn’t want to admit it. All of a sudden, she feels the need of distance between them. Something that will help her love him less, so that the urge to help him against his will does not ache so within her.
She says, looking at her hands, “I… I want to go see Daddy.”
Schaffa is silent a moment longer. He disapproves. She doesn’t need to see or sess to know this. By now, Nassun has heard of what else transpired on the day that she killed Eitz. No one heard what Schaffa said to Jija, but many people saw him knock Jija down, crouch over him, and grin into his face while Jija stared back with wide, frightened eyes. She can guess why it happened. For the first time, however, Nassun tries not to care about Schaffa’s feelings.
“Shall I come with you?” he asks.
“No.” She knows how to handle her father, and she knows that Schaffa has no patience for him. “I’ll be back right after.”
“See that you are, Nassun.” It sounds kindly. It’s a warning.
But she knows how to handle Schaffa, too. “Yes, Schaffa.” She looks up at him. “Don’t be afraid. I’m strong. Like you made me.”
“As you made yourself.” His gaze is soft and terrible. Icewhite eyes can’t be anything but, though there’s love layered over the terrible. Nassun is used to the co
mbination by now.
So Nassun climbs out of his lap. She’s tired, even though she hasn’t done anything. Emotion always makes her tired. But she heads down the hill into Jekity, nodding to people she knows whether they nod back or not, noticing the new granary the village is building since they’ve had time to increase their stores while the ashfalls and sky occlusions are still intermittent. It’s an ordinary, quiet day in this ordinary, quiet comm, and in some ways it feels much like Tirimo. If not for Found Moon and Schaffa, Nassun would hate it here the same way. She may never understand why, if Mama had the whole of the world open to her after somehow escaping her Fulcrum, she chose to live in such a placid, backwater place.
Thus it is with her mother on her mind that Nassun knocks on the door of her father’s house. (She has a room here, but it isn’t her house. This is why she knocks.)
Jija opens the door almost immediately, as if he was about to leave and go somewhere, or as if he has been waiting for her. The scent of something redolent with garlic wafts out of the house, from the little hearth near the back. Nassun thinks maybe it is fish-in-a-pot, since the Jekity comm shares have a lot of fish and vegetables in them. It’s the first time Jija has seen her in a month, and his eyes widen for a moment.
“Hi, Daddy,” she says. It’s awkward.
Jija bends and before Nassun quite knows what’s happening, he’s picked her up and swept her into an embrace.
Jekity feels like Tirimo, but in a good way now. Like back when Mama was around but Daddy was the one who loved her most and the stuff on the stove would be duck-in-a-pot instead of fish. If this were then, Mama would be yelling at the neighbors’ kirkhusa pup for stealing cabbages from their housegreen; Old Lady Tukke never did tie the creature up the way she should. The air would smell like it does now, rich cooking food mingled with the more acrid scents of freshly chipped rock and the chemicals Daddy uses to soften and smooth his knappings. Uche would be running around in the background, making whoosh sounds and yelling that he was falling as he tried to jump up in the air—
Nassun stiffens in Jija’s embrace as she suddenly realizes: Uche. Jumping up. Falling up, or pretending to.
Uche, whom Daddy beat to death.
Jija feels her tense and tenses as well. Slowly he lets go of her, easing her to the ground as the joy in his expression fades to unease. “Nassun,” he says. His gaze searches her face. “Are you all right?”
“I’m okay, Daddy.” She misses his arms around her. She can’t help that. But the epiphany about Uche has reminded her to be careful. “I just wanted to see you.”
Some of the unease in Jija fades a little. He hesitates, seems to fumble for something to say, then finally stands aside. “Come in. Are you hungry? There’s enough for you, too.”
So she heads inside and they sit down to eat and he fusses over how long her hair has gotten and how nice the cornrows and puffs look. Did she do them herself? And is she a little taller? She might be, she acknowledges with a blush, even though she knows for certain that she is a whole inch taller than the last time Jija measured her; Schaffa checked one day because he thought he might need to requisition some new clothes with Found Moon’s next comm share. She’s such a big girl now, Jija says, and there is such real pride in his voice that it disarms her defenses. Almost eleven and so beautiful, so strong. So much like—he falters. Nassun looks down at her plate because he’s almost said, so much like your mother.
Is this not how love should work?
“It’s okay, Daddy,” Nassun makes herself say. It is a terrible thing that Nassun is beautiful and strong like her mother, but love always comes bound in terrible things. “I miss her, too.” Because she does, in spite of everything.
Jija stiffens slightly, and a muscle along the curve of his jaw flexes a little. “I don’t miss her, sweetening.”
This is so obviously a lie that Nassun stares and forgets to pretend to agree with him. Forgets lots of things, apparently, including common sense, because she blurts, “But you do. You miss Uche, too. I can tell.”
Jija goes rigid, and he stares at her in something that falls between shock that she would say this out loud and horror at what she has said. And then, as Nassun has come to understand is normal for her father, the shock of the unexpected abruptly transforms into anger.
“Is that what they’re teaching you up in that… place?” he asks suddenly. “To disrespect your father?”
Suddenly Nassun is more tired. So very tired of trying to dance around his senselessness.
“I wasn’t disrespecting you,” she says. She tries to keep her voice even, inflectionless, but she can hear the frustration there. She can’t help it. “I was just saying the truth, Daddy. But I don’t mind that you—”
“It isn’t the truth. It’s an insult. I don’t like that kind of language, young lady.”
Now she is confused. “What kind of language? I didn’t say anything bad.”
“Calling someone a rogga-lover is bad!”
“I… didn’t say that.” But in a way, she did. If Jija misses Mama and Uche, then that means he loves them, and that makes him a rogga-lover. But. I’m a rogga. She knows better than to say this. But she wants to.
Jija opens his mouth to retort, then seems to catch himself. He looks away, propping his elbows on the table and steepling his hands in the way he so often does when he’s trying to rein in his temper.
“Roggas,” he says, and the word sounds like filth in his mouth, “lie, sweetening. They threaten, and manipulate, and use. They’re evil, Nassun, as evil as Father Earth himself. You aren’t like that.”
That’s a lie, too. Nassun has done what she had to do to survive, including lying and murder. She’s done some of these things in order to survive him. She hates that she’s had to, and is exasperated by the fact that he apparently never realized it. That she’s doing it now and he doesn’t see.
Why do I even love him anymore? Nassun finds herself thinking as she stares at her father.
Instead she says: “Why do you hate us so much, Daddy?”
Jija flinches, perhaps at her casual us. “I don’t hate you.”
“You hate Mama, though. You must have hated U—”
“I did not!” Jija pushes back from the table and stands. Nassun flinches despite herself, but he turns away and starts to pace in short, vicious half circles around the room. “I just—I know what they’re capable of, sweetening. You wouldn’t understand. I needed to protect you.”
In a sudden blur of understanding as powerful as magic, Nassun realizes Jija does not remember standing over Uche’s body, his shoulders and chest heaving, his teeth clenched around the words Are you one, too? Now he believes he has never threatened her. Never shoved her off a wagon seat and down a hill of sticks and stones. Something has rewritten the story of his orogene children in Jija’s head—a story that is as chiseled and unchangeable as stone in Nassun’s mind. It is perhaps the same thing that has rewritten Nassun for him as daughter and not rogga, as if the two can be fissioned from each other somehow.
“I learned about them when I was a boy. Younger than you.” Jija’s not looking at her anymore, gesticulating as he talks and paces. “Makenba’s cousin.” Nassun blinks. She remembers Miss Makenba, the quiet old lady who always smelled like tea. Lerna, the town doctor, was her son. Miss Makenba had a cousin in town? Then Nassun gets it.
“I found him behind the spadeseed silo one day. He was squatting there, shaking. I thought he was sick.” Jija’s shaking his head the whole time, still pacing. “There was another boy with me. We always used to play together, the three of us. Kirl went to shake Litisk and Litisk just—” Jija stops abruptly. He’s baring his teeth. His shoulders are heaving the same way they were on that day. “Kirl was screaming and Litisk was saying he couldn’t stop, he didn’t know how. The ice ate up Kirl’s arm and his arm broke off. The blood was in chunks on the ground. Litisk said he was sorry, he even cried, but he just kept freezing Kirl. He wouldn’t stop. By the time I ran away K
irl was reaching for me, and the only thing left of him that wasn’t frozen was his head and his chest and that arm. It was too late, though. I knew that. It was too late even before I ran away to get help.”
It does not comfort Nassun to know that there is a reason—a specific reason—for what her father has done. All she can think is, Uche never lost control like that; Mama wouldn’t have let him. It’s true. Mama had been able to sess, and still, Nassun’s orogeny from all the way across town sometimes. Which means Uche didn’t do anything to provoke Jija. Jija killed his own son for what a completely different person did, long before that son’s birth. This, more than anything, helps her finally understand that there is no reasoning with her father’s hatred.
So Nassun is almost prepared when Jija’s gaze suddenly shifts to her, sidelong and suspicious. “Why haven’t you cured yourself yet?”
No reasoning. But she tries, because once upon a time, this man was her whole world.
“I might be able to soon. I learned how to make things happen with the silver, and how to take things out of people. I don’t know how orogeny works, or where it comes from, but if it’s something that can be taken out, then—”
“None of the other monsters in that camp have cured themselves. I’ve asked around.” Jija’s pacing has gotten noticeably faster. “They go up there and they don’t get better. They live there with those Guardians, more of them every day, and none of them have been cured! Was it a lie?”
“It isn’t a lie. If I get good enough, I’ll be able to do it.” She understands this instinctively. With enough fine control and the sapphire obelisk’s aid, she will be able to do almost anything. “But—”
“Why aren’t you good enough now? We’ve been here almost a year!”