The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,47

and weak for a couple of days at one point, and on those days Schaffa calls a halt for rest sooner than she thinks he normally would have. On the third day the fever is gone, the wound is beginning to scab, and they resume.

They encounter almost no one else on the road, though that is unsurprising a year and a half into the Season. Anyone still commless at this point has joined a raider band, and there won’t be many of those left—just the most vicious, or the ones with some kind of edge beyond savagery and cannibalism. Most of those will have gone north, into the Somidlats where there are more comms to prey upon. Not even raiders like the Antarctics.

In many ways the near-solitude suits Nassun fine. No other Guardians to tiptoe around. No commfolk whose irrational fears must always be planned for. Not even other orogene children; Nassun misses the others, misses their chatter and the comradeship that she enjoyed with them for so brief a time, but at the end of the day, she resented how much time and attention Schaffa had to give them. She’s old enough to know that it’s childish for her to be jealous of such a thing. (Her parents doted on Uche, too, but it is horrifyingly obvious now that getting more attention isn’t necessarily favoritism.) Doesn’t mean she isn’t glad, and greedy, for the chance to have Schaffa all to herself.

Their time together is companionable, and largely silent, by day. At night they sleep, curled together against the deepening cold, secure because Nassun has reliably demonstrated that the slightest shift in the ambient, or footstep upon the nearby ground, is enough to wake her. Sometimes Schaffa does not sleep; he tries, but instead lies shuddering minutely, catching his breath now and again with half-suppressed muscle twitches, trying not to disturb her in his quiet agonies. When he does sleep, it is fitful and shallow. Sometimes Nassun does not sleep, either, aching in silent sympathy.

So she resolves to do something about it. It’s the thing she learned to do back in Found Moon, though to a lesser degree: She sometimes lets the little corestone in his sessapinae have some of her silver. She doesn’t know why it works, but she recalls seeing the Guardians in Found Moon all taking bits of silver from their charges and exhaling afterward, as if it eased something in them to give the corestone someone else to chew on.

Schaffa, however, has not taken silver from her or anyone else since the day she offered all of hers to him—the day she realized the true nature of the metal shard in his brain. She thinks maybe she understands why he stopped. Something changed between them that day, and he can no longer bring himself to feed on her like some sort of parasite. But that is why Nassun sneaks him magic now. Because something changed between them, and he’s not a parasite if she needs him, too, and if she gives what he will not take.

(One day soon, she will learn the word symbiosis and nod, pleased to have a name for it at last. But long before that, she will have already decided that family will do.)

When Nassun gives Schaffa her silver, though he is asleep, his body swallows it so quickly that she must snatch her hand away to avoid losing too much. She can spare only dribbles. Any more and she will be the one tired and unable to travel the next day. Even that tiny amount is enough to let him sleep, however—and as the days pass, Nassun finds herself gradually making more silver, somehow. It’s a welcome change; now she can ease his pain better without wearying herself. Every time she sees Schaffa settle into a deep, peaceful sleep, she feels proud and good, even though she knows she isn’t. Doesn’t matter. She is determined to be a better daughter to Schaffa than she was to Jija. Everything will be better, until the end.

Schaffa sometimes tells stories in the evenings, while dinner cooks. In them, the Yumenes of the past is a place both wondrous and strange, as alien as the bottom of the sea. (It is always the Yumenes of the past. Recent Yumenes is lost to him, along with his memories of the Schaffa he used to be.) Even the idea of Yumenes is hard for Nassun to comprehend: millions of people, none of them farmers or miners or