The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,33

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