It’s Nassun’s turn to shrug at this. She lowers her gaze and scuffs at a weed that has worked its way up between two basalt columns. “I guess.”
He glances at her, his gaze sharpening. Whatever is wrong with him—and there is something wrong with all of Found Moon’s Guardians—it vanishes whenever she tries to hide something from him. It is as if he can sess obfuscations. “Tell me more of your mother.”
Nassun does not want to talk about her mother. “She’s probably dead.” It seems likely, though she remembers feeling her mother’s effort to shunt the Rifting away from Tirimo. People would’ve noticed that, though, wouldn’t they? Mama always warned Nassun against doing orogeny during a shake, because that is how most orogenes get discovered. And Uche is what happens when orogenes get discovered.
“Perhaps.” His head cocks, like that of a bird. “I’ve seen the marks of Fulcrum training in your technique. You are… precise. It’s unusual to see in a grit—” He pauses. Looks confused again for a moment. Smiles. “A child of your age. How did she train you?”
Nassun shrugs again, thrusting her hands into her pockets. He will hate her, if she tells him. If not that, he will surely at least think less of her. Maybe he will give up.
Schaffa moves to sit on a nearby terrace wall. He also keeps watching her, smiling politely. Waiting. Which makes Nassun think of a third, worse possibility: What if she refuses to tell him, and he gets angry and kicks her and her father out of Found Moon? Then she will have nothing left but Jija.
And—she sneaks another look at Schaffa. His brow has furrowed slightly, not in displeasure but concern. The concern does not seem false. He is concerned about her. No one has shown concern for her in a year.
Thus, finally, Nassun says, “We would go out to a place near the end of the valley, away from Tirimo. She would tell Daddy she was taking me out hunting for herbs.” Schaffa nods. That is something that children are normally taught in comms outside the Equatorial node network. A useful skill, should a Season come. “She would call it ‘girl time.’ Daddy used to laugh.”
“And you practiced orogeny there?”
Nassun nodded, looking at her hands. “She would talk to me about it, when Daddy wasn’t home. ‘Girl talk.’” Discussions of wave mechanics and math. Endless quizzes. Anger when Nassun did not answer quickly, or correctly. “But at the Tip—the place she took me to—it was just practice. She had drawn circles on the ground. I had to push around a boulder, and my torus couldn’t get any wider than the fifth ring, and then the fourth, and then the third. Sometimes she would throw the boulder at me.” Terrifying to have three tons of stone rumbling along the ground toward her, and to wonder, If I can’t do it, will Mama stop?
She had done it, so that question remains unanswered.
Schaffa chuckles. “Amazing.” At Nassun’s look of confusion, he adds, “That is precisely how orogene children are—were—trained at the Fulcrum. But it seems your training was substantially accelerated.” He tilts his head again, considering. “If you had only occasional practice sessions, to conceal them from your father…”
Nassun nods. Her left hand flexes closed and then open again, as if on its own. “She said there wasn’t time to teach me the gentle way, and anyway I was too strong. She had to do what would work.”
“I see.” Yet she can feel him watching her, waiting. He knows there’s more. He prompts, “It must have been challenging, though.”
Nassun nods. Shrugs. “I hated it. I yelled at her once. Told her she was mean. I told her I hated her and she couldn’t make me do it.”
Schaffa’s breathing is, when the silver light is not stuttering or flickering within him, remarkably even. She has thought before that he sounds like a sleeping person, so steady is it. She listens to him breathe, not asleep, but calming nevertheless.
“She got really quiet. Then she said, ‘Are you sure you can control yourself?’ And she took my hand.” She bites her lip then. “She broke it.”
Schaffa’s breath pauses, just for an instant. “Your hand?”
Nassun nods. She draws a finger across her palm, where each of the long bones connecting wrist to knuckle still ache sometimes, when it is cold. After he says nothing more, she can continue. “She said it didn’t m-matter if I hated her. It didn’t matter if I didn’t want to be good at orogeny. Then she took my hand and said don’t ice anything. She had a round rock, and she hit my, my… my hand with it.” The sound of stone striking flesh. Wet popping sounds as her mother set the bones. Her own voice screaming. Her mother’s voice cutting through the pounding of blood in her ears: You’re fire, Nassun. You’re lightning, dangerous unless captured in wires. But if you can control yourself through pain, I’ll know you’re safe. “I didn’t ice anything.”
After that, her mother had taken her home and told Jija that Nassun had fallen and caught herself badly. True to her word, she’d never made Nassun go to the Tip with her again. Jija had remarked, later, on how quiet Nassun had become that year. Just something that happens when girls start to grow up, Mama had said.
No. If Daddy was Jija, then Mama had to be Essun.
Schaffa is very quiet. He knows what she is now, though: a child so willful that her own mother broke her hand to make her mind. A girl whose mother never loved her, only refined her, and whose father will only love her again if she can do the impossible and become something she is not.
“That was wrong,” Schaffa says. His voice is so soft she can barely hear it. She turns to look at him in surprise. He is staring at the ground, and there is a strange look on his face. Not the usual wandering, confused look that he gets sometimes. This is something he actually remembers, and his expression is… guilty? Rueful. Sad. “It’s wrong to hurt someone you love, Nassun.”
Nassun stares at him. Her own breath catches, and she doesn’t notice until her chest aches and she is forced to suck in air. It’s wrong to hurt someone you love. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. It has always been wrong.
Then Schaffa lifts a hand to her. She takes it. He pulls, and she falls willingly, and then she is in his arms and they are very tight and strong around her the way her father’s have not been since before he killed Uche. In that moment, she does not care that Schaffa cannot possibly love her, when he has known her for only a few weeks. She loves him. She needs him. She will do anything for him.
With her face pressed into Schaffa’s shoulder, Nassun sesses it when the silver flicker happens again. This time, in contact with him, she also feels the slight flinch of his muscles. It is barely a fluctuation, and might be anything: a bug bite, a shiver in the cooling evening breeze. Somehow, though, she realizes that it is actually pain. Frowning against his uniform, Nassun cautiously reaches toward that strange place at the back of Schaffa’s head, where the silver threads come from. They are hungry, the threads, somehow; as she gets closer to them, they lick at her, seeking something. Curious, Nassun touches them, and sesses… what? A faint tug. Then she is tired.
Schaffa flinches again and pulls back, holding her at arm’s length. “What are you doing?”
She shrugs awkwardly. “You needed it. You were hurting.”
Schaffa turns his head from side to side slowly, not in negation, but as if checking for something he expects to be there, which is now gone. “I am always hurting, little one. It’s part of what Guardians are. But…” His expression is wondering. By this, Nassun knows the pain is gone, at least for now.
“You’re always hurting?” She frowns. “Is it that thing in your head?”
His gaze snaps back to her immediately. She has never been afraid of his icewhite eyes, even now as they turn very cold. “What?”