DESERTS ARE WORSE THAN MOST places, during Seasons. Tonkee lets Ykka know that water will be easy; Castrima’s Innovators have already assembled a number of contraptions they’re calling dew-catchers. The sun won’t be an issue either, thanks to the ash clouds that you never thought you’d have cause to thank. It will be chilly, in fact, though less so by day. You might even get a bit of snow.
No, the danger of deserts during a Season is simply that nearly all animals and insects there hibernate, deep under the sand where it’s still warm. There are those who claim to have figured out a surefire method of digging up sleeping lizards and such, but those are usually scams; the few comms that edge the desert guard such secrets jealously. The surface plants will have already shriveled away or been eaten by creatures preparing for hibernation, leaving nothing aboveground but sand and ash. Stonelore’s advice on entering deserts during Seasons is simply: don’t. Unless you mean to starve.
The comm spends two days camped at the edge of the Merz, preparing, though the truth is—as Ykka has confided in you, while you sat with her sharing your last mellow—there’s really no amount of preparation that will make the journey any easier. People are going to die. You won’t be one of them; it’s a curious feeling knowing that Hoa can whisk you away to Corepoint if there’s any real danger. It’s cheating, maybe. Except it’s not. Except you’re going to help as much as you can—and because you won’t die, you’re going to watch a lot of other people suffer. That’s the least you can do, now that you’ve committed to the cause of Castrima. Bear witness, and fight like earthfires to keep death from claiming more than its share.
In the meantime, the folks on cookfire duty pull double shifts roasting insects, drying tubers, baking the last of the grain stores into cakes, salting meat. After they were fed enough to have some strength, Maxixe’s surviving people turned out to be especially helpful with foraging, since several are locals and remember where there might be abandoned farms or debris from the Rifting shake that hasn’t been too picked over. Speed will be of the essence; survival means winning the race between the Merz’s width and Castrima’s supplies. Because of this, Tonkee—who is increasingly becoming a spokesperson for the Innovators, much to her own disgruntlement—oversees a quick and dirty breakdown and rebuilding of the storage wagons to a new lighter, more shock-resistant design that should pull more easily over desert sand. The Resistants and Breeders redistribute the remaining supplies to make sure the loss of any one wagon, if it must be abandoned, won’t cause some kind of critical shortage.
The night before the desert, you’re hunkered down beside one of the cookfires, still-awkwardly navigating how to feed yourself with one arm, when someone sits down beside you. It startles you a little, and you jerk enough to knock your cornbread off the plate. The hand that reaches into your view to retrieve it is broad and bronze and nicked with combat scars, and there’s a bit of yellow watered silk—filthy and ragged now, but still recognizable as such—looped around the wrist. Danel.
“Thanks,” you say, hoping she won’t use the opportunity to strike up a conversation.
“They say you were Fulcrum once,” she says, handing the cornbread back to you. No such luck, then.
It really shouldn’t surprise you that the people of Castrima have been gossiping. You decide not to care, using the cornbread to sop up another mouthful of stew. It’s especially good today, thickened with corn flour and rich with the tender, salty meat that’s been plentiful since the stone forest. Everybody needs as much fat on them as they can pack away, to prepare for the desert. You don’t think about the meat.
“I was,” you say, in what you hope sounds like a tone of warning.
“How many rings?”
You grimace in distaste, consider trying to explain the “unofficial” rings that Alabaster gave you, consider how far you’ve come beyond even those, consider being humble … and then finally you settle for accuracy. “Ten.” Essun Tenring, the Fulcrum would call you now, if the seniors would bother to acknowledge your current name, and if the Fulcrum still existed. For what it’s worth.
Danel whistles appreciatively. So strange to encounter someone who knows and cares about such things. “They say,” she continues, “that you can do things with the obelisks. That’s how you beat us, at Castrima; I had no idea you’d be able to rile up the bugs that way. Or trap so many of the stone eaters.”
You pretend not to care and concentrate on the cornbread. It’s just a little sweet; the cookfire squad is trying to use up the sugar, to make room for edibles with more nutritional value. It’s delicious.
“They say,” Danel continues, watching you sidelong, “that a ten-ring rogga broke the world, up in the Equatorials.”
Okay, no. “Orogene.”
“What?”
“Orogene.” It’s petty, maybe. Because of Ykka’s insistence on making rogga a use-caste name, all the stills are tossing the word around like it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not petty. It means something. “Not ‘rogga.’ You don’t get to say ‘rogga.’ You haven’t earned that.”
Silence for a few breaths. “All right,” Danel says then, with no hint of either apology or humoring you. She just accepts the new rule. She also doesn’t insinuate again that you’re the person who caused the Rifting. “Point stands, though. You can do things most orogenes can’t. Yeah?”
“Yeah.” You blow a stray ash flake off the baked potato.
“They say,” Danel says, planting her hands on her knees and leaning forward, “that you know how to end this Season. That you’re going to be leaving soon to go somewhere and actually try. And that you’ll need people to go with you, when you do.”
What. You frown at your potato. “Are you volunteering?”
“Maybe.”
You stare at her. “You just got accepted into the Strongbacks.”
Danel regards you for a moment longer, expression unreadably still. You don’t realize she’s wavering, trying to decide whether to reveal something about herself to you, until she sighs and does it. “I’m Lorist caste, actually. Danel Lorist Rennanis, once. Danel Strongback Castrima’s never gonna sound right.”
You must look skeptical as you try to visualize her with black lips. She rolls her eyes and looks away. “Rennanis didn’t need lorists, the headman said. It needed soldiers. And everybody knows lorists are good in a fight, so—”
“What?”
She sighs. “Equatorial lorists, I mean. Those of us who come out of the old Lorist families train in hand-to-hand, the arts of war, and so forth. It makes us more useful during Seasons, and in the task of defending knowledge.”
You had no idea. But—“Defending knowledge?”
A muscle flexes in Danel’s jaw. “Soldiers might get a comm through a Season, but storytellers are what kept Sanze going through seven of them.”