With help, Schaffa does manage to rise and stagger to the old man’s rowboat. He sits shivering in the prow while the old man rows them away from the cove, heading south along the coast. Some of why he’s shivering is cold—his clothes are still wet where he was lying down—and some of it is lingering shock. Some of it, however, is something entirely else.
(Damaya! With great effort he remembers this name, and an impression: a small frightened Midlatter girl superimposed over a tall, defiant Midlatter woman. Love and fear in her eyes, sorrow in his heart. He has hurt her. He needs to find her, but when he reaches for the sense of her that should be embedded in his mind, there is nothing. She is gone along with everything else.)
The old man chatters at him through the whole ride. He is Litz Strongback Metter, and Metter is a little fishing town a few miles south of Allia. They’ve been debating whether to move since that whole mess with Allia happened, but then suddenly the volcano went dormant, so maybe the Evil Earth isn’t out to get them, after all, or at least not this time. He’s got two children, one stupid and the other selfish, and three grandkids, all from the stupid one and hopefully not too stupid themselves. They don’t have much, Metter’s just another Coaster comm, can’t even afford a proper wall instead of a bunch of trees and sticks, but folks gotta do what folks gotta do, you know how it is, everyone will take good care of you, don’t you worry.
(What is your name? the old man asks amid the prattle, and Schaffa tells him. The man asks for more names than this, but Schaffa has only the one. What were you doing out there? The silence inside Schaffa yawns in answer.)
The village is an especially precarious one in that it is half on the shore and half on the water, houseboats and stilt-houses connected by jetties and piers. People gather round Schaffa when Litz helps him onto a pier. Hands touch him and he flinches, but they mean to help. It is not their fault that there is so little in them of what he needs that they feel wrong. They push him, guide him. He is beneath a cold shower of fresh water, and then he is put into short pants and a homespun sleeveless shirt. When he lifts his hair while washing it, they marvel at the scar on his neck, thick and stitched and vanishing into his hairline. (He wonders at it himself.) They puzzle over his clothing, so faded by sun and salt water that it has lost nearly all color. It looks brownish-gray. (He remembers that it should be burgundy, but not why.)
More water, the good kind. This time he can drink his fill. He eats a little. Then he sleeps for hours, with incessant angry whispering in the back of his mind.
When Schaffa wakes, it’s late in the night, and there’s a little boy standing in front of his bed. The lantern’s wick has been turned down low, but it’s bright enough in the room that Schaffa can see his old clothing, now washed and dry, in the boy’s hands. The boy has turned one pocket inside out; there, alone on the whole garment, has it retained something of its original color. Burgundy.
Schaffa pushes himself up on one elbow. Something about the boy… perhaps. “Hello.”
The boy looks so much like Litz that he needs only a few decades of weathering and less hair to be the old man’s twin. But there is a desperate hope in the boy’s eyes that would be completely out of place in Litz’s. Litz knows his place in the world. This boy, who is maybe eleven or twelve, old enough to be confirmed by his comm… something has unmoored him, and Schaffa thinks he knows what. “This is yours,” the boy says, holding up the garment.
“Yes.”
“You’re a Guardian?”
Fleeting almost-memory. “What is that?”
The boy looks as confused as Schaffa feels. He takes a step closer to the bed, and stops. (Come closer. Closer.) “They said you didn’t remember things. You’re lucky to be alive.” The boy licks his lips, uncertain. “Guardians… guard.”
“Guard what?”
Incredulity washes the fear from the boy. He steps closer still. “Orogenes. I mean… you guard people from them. So they don’t hurt anyone. And you guard them from people, too. That’s what the stories say.”
Schaffa pushes himself to sit up, letting his legs dangle over the edge of the bed. The pain of his injuries is nearly gone, his flesh repaired at a faster rate than normal by the angry power within him. He feels well, in fact, except for one thing.
“Guard orogenes,” he says thoughtfully. “Do I?”
The boy laughs a little, though his smile fades quickly. He’s very afraid, for some reason, though not of Schaffa. “People kill orogenes,” the boy says softly. “When they find them. Unless they’re with a Guardian.”
“Do they?” It seems uncivilized of them. But then he remembers the ridge of spiky stones across the ocean, and his utter conviction that it was the work of an orogene. That’s why they have to be drowned as babes, Litz had said.
Missed one, Schaffa thinks, then has to fight hysterical laughter.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” the boy is saying. “I will, one day, without… without training. I almost did when that volcano was doing things. It was so hard not to.”
“If you had, it would have killed you and possibly many other people,” Schaffa says. Then he blinks. How does he know that? “A hot spot is far too volatile for you to quell safely.”
The boy’s eyes alight. “You do know.” He comes forward, sinks to a crouch beside Schaffa’s knee. He whispers, “Please help me. I think my mother… she saw me, when the volcano… I tried to act like normal and I couldn’t. I think she knows. If she tells my grandfather…” He inhales suddenly, sharply, as if he is gasping for air. He’s holding back a sob, but the movement looks the same.
Schaffa knows how it feels to drown. He reaches out and strokes the boy’s dense cloud of hair, crown to nape, and lets his fingers linger at the nape.
“There is something I have to do,” Schaffa says, because there is. The anger and whispers within him have a purpose, after all, and this has become his purpose. Gather them, train them, make them the weapons they are meant to be. “If I take you with me, we must travel far from here. You’ll never see your family again.”
The boy looks away, his expression turning bitter. “They’d kill me if they knew.”
“Yes.” Schaffa presses, very gently, and draws the first measure of—something—from the boy. What? He cannot remember what it is called. Perhaps it has no name. All that matters is that it exists, and he needs it. With it, he knows somehow, he can hold on more tightly to the tattered remnants of who he is. (Was.) So he takes, and the first draught of it is like a sudden, sweet wash of fresh water amid gallons of burning salt. He yearns to drink it all, reaches for the rest as thirstily as he sought Litz’s canteen, though he forces himself to let go for the same reason. He can endure on what he has now, and if he is patient, the boy will have more for him later.
Yes. His thoughts are clearer now. Easier to think around the whispers. He needs this boy, and others like him. He must go forth and find them, and with their help, he can make it to—
—to—
—well. Not everything is clearer. Some things will never come back. He’ll make do.
The boy is searching his face. While Schaffa has been trying to put together the fragments of his identity, the boy has been wrestling with his future. They are made for each other. “I’ll go with you,” the boy says, having apparently spent the past minute thinking he has a choice. “Anywhere. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to die.”
For the first time since a moment on a ship a few days before, when he was a different person, Schaffa smiles. He strokes the boy’s head again. “You have a good soul. I’ll help you all I can.” The boy’s tension dissolves at once; tears wet his eyes. “Go and gather some things to travel. I’ll speak with your parents.”