Schaffa, uncharacteristically, does not move to comfort her. He only watches her, expression weary but otherwise unreadable.
“I know they can’t do it.” Yes. Speaking helps. Her stomach doesn’t settle, but she no longer feels on the brink of dry heaves. “I know they – the stills – won’t ever stop being afraid. If my father couldn’t —” Queasiness. She jerks her thoughts away from the end of that sentence. “They’ll just go on being scared forever, and we’ll just go on living like this forever, and it isn’t right. There should be a – a fix. It isn’t right that there’s no end to it.”
“But do you mean to impose a fix, little one?” Schaffa asks. It’s soft. He’s guessed already, she realizes. He knows her so much better than she knows herself, and she loves him for it. “Or an end?”
She gets to her feet and starts pacing, tight little circles between his pack and hers. It helps the nausea and the jittery, rising tension beneath her skin that she cannot name. “I don’t know how to fix it.”
But that is not the whole truth, and Schaffa scents lies the way predators scent blood. His eyes narrow. “If you did know how, would you fix it?”
And then, in a sudden blaze of memory that Nassun has not permitted herself to see or consider for more than a year, she remembers her last day in Tirimo.
Coming home. Seeing her father standing in the middle of the den breathing hard. Wondering what was wrong with him. Wondering why he did not quite look like her father, in that moment – his eyes too wide, his mouth too loose, his shoulders hunched in a way that seemed painful. And then Nassun remembers looking down.
Looking down and staring and staring and thinking What is that? and staring and thinking Is it a ball? like the ones that the kids at creche kick around during lunchtime, except those balls are made of leather while the thing at her father’s feet is a different shade of brown, brown with purplish mottling all over its surface, lumpy and leathery and half-deflated but No, it’s not a ball, wait is that an eye? Maybe but it’s so swollen shut that it looks like a big fat coffee bean. Not a ball at all because it’s wearing her brother’s clothes including the pants Nassun put on him that morning while Jija was busy trying to get their lunch satchels together for creche. Uche didn’t want to wear those pants because he was still a baby and liked to be silly so Nassun had done the butt dance for him and he’d laughed so hard, so hard! His laugh was her favorite thing ever, and when the butt dance was over he’d let her put his pants on as a thank-you, which means the unrecognizable deflated ball-thing on the floor is Uche that is Uche he is Uche —
“No,” Nassun breathes. “I wouldn’t fix it. Not even if I knew how.”
She has stopped pacing. She has one arm wrapped around her middle. The other hand is a fist, crammed against her mouth. She spits out words around it now, she chokes on them as they gush up her throat, she clutches her belly, which is full of such terrible things that she must let them out somehow or be torn apart from within. These things have distorted her voice, made it a shaky growl that randomly spikes into a higher pitch and a louder volume, because it’s everything she can do not to just start screaming. “I wouldn’t fix it, Schaffa, I wouldn’t, I’m sorry, I don’t want to fix it I want to kill everybody that hates me —”
Her middle is so heavy that she can’t stand. Nassun drops into a crouch, then to her knees. She wants to vomit but instead she spits words onto the ground between her splayed hands. “G-g-gone! I want it all GONE, Schaffa! I want it to BURN, I want it burned up and dead and gone, gone, NOTHING l-l-left, no more hate and no more killing just nothing, r-rusting nothing, nothing FOREVER —”
Schaffa’s hands, hard and strong, pull her up. She flails against him, tries to hit him. It isn’t malice or fear. She never wants to hurt him. She just has to let some of what’s in her out somehow, or she will go mad. For the first time she understands her father, as she screams and kicks and punches and bites and yanks at her clothes and her hair and tries to slam her forehead against his. Quickly, Schaffa turns her about and wraps one of his big arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides so that she cannot hurt him or herself in the transport of her rage.
This is what Jija felt, observes a distant, detached, floating-obelisk part of herself. This is what came up inside him when he realized Mama lied, and I lied, and Uche lied. This is what made him push me off the wagon. This is why he came up to Found Moon this morning with a glassknife in his hand.
This. This is the Jija in her, making her thrash and shout and weep. She feels closer than ever to her father in this moment of utter broken rage.
Schaffa holds her until she is exhausted. Finally she slumps, shaking and panting and moaning a little, her face all over tears and snot.
When it’s clear that Nassun will not lash out again, Schaffa shifts to sit down cross-legged, pulling Nassun into his lap. She curls against him the way another child curled against him once, many years before and many miles away, when he told her to pass a test for him so that she could live. Nassun’s test has already been met, though; even the old Schaffa would agree with that assessment. In all her rage, Nassun’s orogeny did not twitch once, and she did not reach for the silver at all.
“Shhh,” Schaffa soothes. He’s been doing this all the while, though now he rubs her back and thumbs away her occasional tears. “Shhh. Poor thing. How unfair of me. When only this morning —” He sighs. “Shhh, my little one. Just rest.”
Nassun is wrung out and empty of everything but the grief and fury that run in her like fast lahars, grinding everything else away in a churning hot slurry. Grief and fury and one last precious, whole feeling.
“You’re the only one I love, Schaffa.” Her voice is raw and weary. “You’re the only reason I w-wouldn’t. But… but I…”
He kisses her forehead. “Make the end you need, my Nassun.”
“I don’t want.” She has to swallow. “I want you to – to be alive!”
He laughs softly. “Still a child, despite all you’ve been through.” This stings, but his meaning is clear. She cannot have both Schaffa alive and the world’s hatred dead. She must choose one ending or the other.
But then, firmly, Schaffa says again: “Make the end you need.”
Nassun pulls back so she can look at him. He’s smiling again, clear-eyed. “What?”
He squeezes her, very gently. “You’re my redemption, Nassun. You are all the children I should have loved and protected, even from myself. And if it will bring you peace…” He kisses her forehead. “Then I shall be your Guardian till the world burns, my little one.”
It is a benediction, and a balm. The nausea finally releases its hold on Nassun. In Schaffa’s arms, safe and accepted, she sleeps at last, amid dreams of a world glowing and molten and in its own way, at peace.
***
“Steel,” she calls, the next morning.
Steel blurs into presence before them, standing in the middle of the road with his arms folded and an expression of faint amusement on his face.
“The nearest way to Corepoint is not far, relatively speaking,” he says when she has asked him for the knowledge that Schaffa lacks. “A month’s travel or so. Of course…” He lets this trail off, conspicuously. He has offered to take Nassun and Schaffa to the other side of the world himself, which is apparently a thing that stone eaters can do. It would save them a great deal of hardship and danger, but they would have to entrust themselves to Steel’s care as he transports them in the strange, terrifying manner of his kind, through the earth.
“No, thank you,” Nassun says again. She doesn’t ask Schaffa for his opinion on this, though he leans against a boulder nearby. She doesn’t need to ask him. That Steel’s interest is wholly in Nassun is obvious. It would be nothing to him to simply forget to bring Schaffa – or lose him along the way to Corepoint. “But could you tell us about this place we have to go? Schaffa doesn’t remember.”
Steel’s gray gaze shifts to Schaffa. Schaffa smiles back, deceptively serene. Even the silver inside him goes still, just for this moment. Maybe Father Earth doesn’t like Steel, either.