Two good outcomes result from that fracas: Everyone trusts you more after seeing you shout at the top of your lungs in the middle of Flat Top without causing so much as a tremor, and the Breeders decide to speak up for the new baby in order to settle the dispute. Based on the favorable recent genealogy, they contribute one of their child-allocations to the family, though with the stipulation that it will have to join their use-caste if it is born perfect. That’s not so terrible a price to pay, they say, spending one’s reproductive years cranking out children for comm and caste, in exchange for the right to be born. The mother agrees.
Ykka hasn’t shared the protein situation with the comm, of course, or the Breeders wouldn’t be speaking up for anyone. (Tonkee figured it out on her own, naturally.) Ykka doesn’t want to tell anyone, either, until it’s clear there’s no hope of an alternate solution to the problem. You and the other council members agree reluctantly. There’s still a year left. But because of Ykka’s silence, a male Breeder visits you a few days after you bring Tonkee home to finish recuperating. The Breeder is an ashblow-haired, strong-shouldered, sloe-eyed thing, and he’s very interested to know that you’ve borne three healthy children, all powerful orogenes. He flatters you by talking about how tall and strong you are, how well you weathered months on the road with only travel rations to eat, and hinting that you’re “only” forty-three. This actually makes you laugh. You feel as old as the world, and this pretty fool thinks you’re ready to crank out another baby.
You turn down his tacit offer with a smile, but it’s… strange, having that conversation with him. Unpleasantly familiar. When the Breeder is gone, you think of Corundum and wake Tonkee by throwing a cup at the wall and screaming at the top of your lungs. Then you go to see Alabaster for another lesson, which is utterly useless because you spend it standing before him and trembling in utter, rage-filled silence. After five minutes of this, he wearily says, “Whatever the rust is wrong with you, you’re going to have to deal with it yourself. I can’t stop you anymore.”
You hate him for no longer being invincible. And for not hating you.
Alabaster suffers another bad infection during these six months. He survives it only by deliberately stoning what’s left of his legs. This self-induced surgery so stresses his body that his few bouts of lucid time shrink to a half hour apiece, interspersed with long stretches of stupor or fitful sleeping. He’s so weak when he’s awake that you have to strain to hear him, though thankfully this improves over the course of a few weeks. You’re making progress, connecting easily now to the newly arrived topaz and beginning to understand what he did to transform the spinel into the knifelike weapon he keeps nearby. (The obelisks are conduits. You flow through them, flow with them, as the magic flows. Resist and die, but resonate finely enough and many things become possible.)
That’s a far cry from chaining together multiple obelisks, though, and you know you’re not learning fast enough. Alabaster doesn’t have the strength to curse you for your cloddish pace, but he doesn’t have to. Watching him shrivel daily is what drives you to push at the obelisk again and again, plunging yourself into its watery light even when your head hurts and your stomach lurches and you want nothing more than to go curl up somewhere and cry. It hurts too much to look at him, so you mop yourself up and try that much harder to become him.
One good thing about all this: You’ve got a purpose now. Congratulations.
You cry on Lerna’s shoulder once. He rubs your back and suggests delicately that you don’t have to be alone in your grief. It’s a proposition, but one made in kindness rather than passion, so you don’t feel guilty about ignoring it. For now.
Thus do things reach a kind of equilibrium. It’s neither a time of rest, nor of struggle. You survive. In a Season, in this Season, that is itself a triumph.
And then Hoa returns.
It happens on a day of sorrows and lace. The sorrow is because more Hunters have died. In the middle of bringing back a rare hunting kill—a bear that was visibly too thin to safely hibernate, easy to shoot in its desperate aggression—the party was attacked in turn. Three Hunters died in a barrage of arrows and crossbow bolts. The two surviving Hunters did not see their assailants; the projectiles seemed to come from all directions. They wisely ran, though they circled back an hour later in hopes of recovering their fallen comrades’ bodies and the precious carcass. Amazingly, everything had been left unmolested by either assailants or scavengers—but left behind with the fallen was an object: a planted stick, around which someone tied a strip of ragged, dirty cloth. It was secured with a thick knot, something caught in its fraying loops.
You come into Ykka’s meeting room just as she begins to cut open the knot, even as Cutter stands over her and says in a tight voice, “This is completely unsafe, you have no idea—”
“I don’t care,” Ykka murmurs, concentrating on the knot. She’s being very careful, avoiding the thickest part of the knot, which clearly contains something; you can’t tell what, but it’s lumpy and seems light. The room is more crowded than usual because one of the Hunters is here, too, grimy with ash and blood and visibly determined to know what her companions died for. Ykka glances up in acknowledgment as you arrive, but then resumes work. She says, “Something blows up in my face, Cuts, you’re the new headman.”
That flusters and shuts Cutter up enough that she’s able to finish the knot undistracted. The loops and strands of once-white cloth are lace, and if you don’t miss your guess, it was of a quality that would once have made your grandmother lament her poverty. When the strands snap apart, what sits amid them is a small balled-up scrap of leather hide. It’s a note.
WELCOME TO RENNANIS, it reads in charcoal.
Hjarka curses. You sit down on a divan, because it’s better than the floor and you need to sit somewhere. Cutter looks disbelieving. “Rennanis is Equatorial,” he says. And therefore it should be gone; same reaction you had when Alabaster told you.
“May not be Rennanis proper,” Ykka says. She’s still examining the scrap of leather, turning it over, scraping at the charcoal with the edge of the knife as if to test its authenticity. “A band of survivors from that city, commless now and little better than bandits, naming themselves after home. Or maybe just Equatorial wannabes, taking the chance to claim something they couldn’t before the actual city got torched.”
“Doesn’t matter,” snaps Hjarka. “This is a threat, whoever it’s coming from. What are we going to do about it?”
They devolve into speculations and argument, all with a rising edge of panic. Without really planning to, you lean back against the wall of Ykka’s meeting room. Against the wall of the crystal that her apartment inhabits. Against the rind of the geode, in which the crystal shaft is rooted. It is not an obelisk. Not even the flickering portions of crystal in the control room feel of power as they should; even if they are in an obelisk-like state of unreality, that is the only point of similarity they share with real obelisks.
But you’ve also remembered something that Alabaster told you a long time ago, on a garnet-hued afternoon in a seaside comm that is now smoldering ruins. Alabaster murmuring of conspiracies, watchers, nowhere was safe. You’re saying someone could hear us through the walls? Through the stone itself? you remember asking him. Once upon a time, you thought the things he did were just miracles.
And now you’re a nine-ringer, Alabaster says. Now you know that miracles are a matter of just effort, just perception, and maybe just magic. Castrima exists amid ancient sedimentary rock laced through with veins of long-dead forests turned to crumbly coal, all of it balanced precariously over a crisscross of ancient fault-scars that have all but healed. The geode has been here long enough, however awkwardly jammed amid the strata, that its outermost layers are thoroughly fused with local minerals. This makes it easy for you to push your awareness beyond Castrima in a fine, gradually attenuating extrusion. This is not the same thing as extending your torus; a torus is your power, this is you. It’s harder. You can sense what your power cannot, though, and—