The Fifth Season

20 Syenite, stretched and snapped back

IT’S NOT QUITE WHAT SYENITE had in mind for the rest of her life, sitting around being useless, so she goes to find Innon one day as the Clalsu crew is outfitting the ship for another raiding run.

“No,” he says, staring at her like she’s insane. “You are not being a pirate when you just had a baby.”

“I had the baby two years ago.” She can only change so many diapers, pester people for lessons in Eturpic so often, and help with the net-fishing so many times before she goes mad. She’s done with nursing, which is the excuse Innon’s used up to now to put her off — and which was pointless anyway, since in Meov that sort of thing is done communally, same as everything else. When she’s not around, Alabaster just takes the baby to one of the other mothers in the comm, just as Syen fed their babies in turn if they happened to be hungry while she was nearby and full of milk. And since ’Baster does most of the diaper changes and sings little Corundum to sleep, and coos at him and plays with him and takes him for walks and so on, Syenite has to keep busy somehow.

“Syenite.” He stops in the middle of the loading ramp that leads into the ship’s hold. They’re putting storage barrels of water and food aboard, along with baskets of more esoteric things — buckets of chain for the catapult, bladders of pitch and fish oil, a length of heavy cloth meant to serve as a replacement sail should they require it. When Innon stops with Syenite standing down-ramp from him, everything else stops, and when there are loud complaints from the dock, he lifts his head and glowers until everyone shuts up. Everyone, of course, except Syenite.

“I’m bored,” she says in frustration. “There’s nothing to do here except fish and wait for you and the others to come back from a raid, and gossip about people I don’t know, and tell stories about things I don’t care about! I’ve spent my whole life either training or working, for Earth’s sake; you can’t expect me to just sit around and look at water all day.”

“Alabaster does.”

Syenite rolls her eyes, although this is true. When Alabaster isn’t with the baby, he spends most of his days up on the heights above the colony, gazing out at the world and thinking unfathomable thoughts for hours on end. She knows; she’s watched him do it. “I’m not him! Innon, you can use me.”

And Innon’s expression twists, because — ah, yes. That one hits home for him.

It’s an unspoken thing between them, but Syenite’s not stupid. There are a lot of things a skilled rogga can do to help on the kinds of sorties Innon’s crew makes. Not starting shakes or blows, she won’t and he’d never ask it — but it is a simple thing to draw enough strength from the ambient to lower the temperature at the water’s surface, and thus cloak the ship in fog to hide its approach or retreat. It is equally easy to disturb forests along the shoreline with the most delicate of underground vibrations, causing flocks of birds or hordes of mice to flood out of the trees and into nearby settlements as a distraction. And more. Orogeny is damned useful, Syenite is beginning to understand, for far, far more than just quelling shakes.

Or rather, it could be useful, if Innon could use his orogeny that way. Yet for all his awesome charisma and physical prowess, Innon is still a feral, with nothing more than what little training Harlas — himself a feral and poorly trained — could give him. She’s felt Innon’s orogeny when he quells local minor shakes, and the crude inefficiency of his power shocks her sometimes. She’s tried to teach him better control, and he listens, and he tries, but he doesn’t improve. She doesn’t understand why. Without that level of skill, the Clalsu crew earns its spoils the old-fashioned way: They fight, and die, for every scrap.

“Alabaster can do these things for us,” Innon says, looking uneasy.

“Alabaster,” Syen says, trying for patience, “gets sick just looking at this thing.” She gestures at Clalsu’s curving bulk. The joke all over the comm is that ’Baster somehow manages to look green despite his blackness whenever he is forced aboard a ship. Syen threw up less when she had morning sickness. “What if I don’t do anything but cloak the ship? Or whatever you order me to do.”

Innon puts his hands on his hips, his expression derisive. “You pretend that you will follow my orders? You don’t even do that in bed.”

“Oh, you bastard.” Now he’s just being an ass, because he doesn’t actually try to give her orders in bed. It’s just a weird Meovite thing to tease about sex. Now that Syen can understand what everyone’s saying, every other statement seems to be about her sharing her bedtime with two of the best-looking men in the comm. Innon says they only do this to her because she turns such interesting colors when little old ladies make vulgar jokes about positions and rope knots. She’s trying to get used to it. “That’s completely irrelevant!”

“Is it?” He pokes her in the chest with a big finger. “No lovers on ship; that is the rule I have always followed. We cannot even be friends once we set sail. What I say goes; anything else and we die. You question everything, Syenite, and there is no time for questioning, on the sea.”

That’s… not an unfair point. Syen shifts uneasily. “I can follow orders without question. Earth knows I’ve done enough of that. Innon—” She takes a deep breath. “Earth’s sake, Innon, I’ll do anything to get off this island for a while.”

“And that is another problem.” He steps closer and lowers his voice. “Corundum is your son, Syenite. Do you feel nothing for him, that you constantly chafe to be away?”

“I make sure he’s taken care of.” And she does. Corundum is always clean and well fed. She never wanted a child, but now that she’s had it — him — and held him, and nursed him, and all that… she does feel a sense of accomplishment, maybe, and rueful acknowledgment, because she and Alabaster have managed to make one beautiful child between them. She looks into her son’s face sometimes and marvels that he exists, that he seems so whole and right, when both his parents have nothing but bitter brokenness between them. Who’s she kidding? It’s love. She loves her son. But that doesn’t mean she wants to spend every hour of every rusting day in his presence.

Innon shakes his head and turns away, throwing up his hands. “Fine! Fine, fine, ridiculous woman. Then you go and tell Alabaster we will both be away.”

“All ri—” But he’s gone, up the ramp and into the hold, where she hears him yelling at someone else about something that she can’t quite catch because her ears can’t parse Eturpic when it echoes at that volume.

Regardless, she bounces a little as she heads down the ramp, waving in vague apology to the other crew members who are standing around looking mildly annoyed. Then she heads into the comm.

Alabaster’s not in the house, and Corundum’s not with Selsi, the woman who most often keeps the smaller children of the colony when their parents are busy. Selsi raises her eyebrows at Syen when she pokes her head in. “He said yes?”

“He said yes.” Syenite can’t help grinning, and Selsi laughs.

“Then we will never see you again, I wager. Waves wait only for the nets.” Which Syenite guesses is some sort of Meov proverb, whatever it means. “Alabaster is on the heights with Coru, again.”

Again. “Thanks,” she says, and shakes her head. It’s a wonder their child doesn’t sprout wings.

She heads up the steps to the topmost level of the island and over the first rise of rock, and there they are, sitting on a blanket near the cliff. Coru looks up as she approaches, beaming and pointing at her; Alabaster, who probably felt her footsteps on the stairs, doesn’t bother turning.

“Innon’s finally taking you with them?” he asks when Syen gets close enough to hear his soft voice.

“Huh.” Syenite settles on the blanket beside him, and opens her arms for Coru, who clambers out of Alabaster’s lap, where he’s been sitting, and into Syenite’s. “If I’d known you already knew, I wouldn’t have bothered walking up all those steps.”

“It was a guess. You don’t usually come up here with a smile on your face. I knew it had to be something.” Alabaster turns at last, watching Coru as he stands in her lap and pushes at her breasts. Syenite holds him reflexively, but he’s actually doing a good job of keeping his balance, despite the unevenness of her lap. Then Syen notices that it’s not just Corundum that Alabaster’s watching.

“What?” she asks, frowning.

“Will you come back?”

And that, completely out of the blue as it is, makes Syenite drop her hands. Fortunately, Coru’s got the trick of standing on her legs, which he does, giggling, while she stares at Alabaster. “Why are you even—What?”

Alabaster shrugs, and it’s only then that Syenite notices the furrow between his brows, and the haunted look in his eyes, and it’s only then that she understands what Innon was trying to say to her. As if to reinforce this, Alabaster says, bitterly, “You don’t have to be with me anymore. You have your freedom, like you wanted. And Innon’s got what he wanted — a rogga child to take care of the comm if something happens to him. He’s even got me to train the child better than Harlas ever could, because he knows I won’t leave.”

Fire-under-Earth. Syenite sighs and pushes away Coru’s hands, which hurt. “No, little greedy child, I don’t have milk anymore. Settle down.” And because this immediately makes Coru’s face screw up with thwarted sorrow, she pulls him close and wraps her arms around him and starts playing with his feet, which is usually a good way to distract him before he gets going. It works. Apparently small children are inordinately fascinated by their own toes; who knew? And with that child taken care of, she can focus on Alabaster, who’s now looking out to sea again, but who’s probably just as close to a meltdown.

“You could leave,” she says, pointing out the obvious because that’s what she always has to do with him. “Innon’s offered before to take us back to the mainland, if we want to go. If we don’t do anything stupid like still a shake in front of a crowd of people, either of us could probably make a decent life somewhere.”

“We have a decent life here.” It’s hard to hear him over the wind, and yet she can actually feel what he’s not saying. Don’t leave me.

“Crusty rust, ’Baster, what is wrong with you? I’m not planning to leave.” Not now, anyway. But it’s bad enough that they’re having this conversation at all; she doesn’t need to make it worse. “I’m just going somewhere I can be useful—”

“You’re useful here.” And now he turns to glare at her full-on, and it actually bothers her, the hurt and loneliness that lurk beneath the veneer of anger on his face. It bothers her more that this bothers her.

“No. I’m not.” And when he opens his mouth to protest, she runs over him. “I’m not. You said it yourself; Meov has a ten-ringer now to protect it. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how we haven’t had so much as a subsurface twitch in my range, not in all the time we’ve been here. You’ve been quelling any possible threat long before Innon or I can feel it—” But then she trails off, frowning, because Alabaster is shaking his head, and there’s a smile on his lips that makes her abruptly uneasy.

“Not me,” he says.

“What?”

“I haven’t quelled anything for about a year now.” And then he nods toward the child, who is now examining Syenite’s fingers with intent concentration. She stares down at Coru, and Coru looks up at her and grins.

Corundum is exactly what the Fulcrum hoped for when they paired her with Alabaster. He hasn’t inherited much of Alabaster’s looks, being only a shade browner than Syen and with hair that’s already growing from fuzz into the beginnings of a proper ashblow bottlebrush; she’s the one with Sanzed ancestors, so that didn’t come from ’Baster, either. But what Coru does have from his father is an almighty powerful awareness of the earth. It has never occurred to Syenite before now that her baby might be aware enough to sess, and still, microshakes. That’s not instinct, that’s skill.

“Evil Earth,” she murmurs. Coru giggles. Then Alabaster abruptly reaches over and plucks him out of her arms, getting to his feet. “Wait, this—”

“Go,” he snaps, grabbing the basket he’s brought up with them and crouching to dump baby toys and a folded diaper back into it. “Go, ride your rusting boat, get yourself killed along with Innon, what do I care. I will be here for Coru, no matter what you do.”

And then he’s gone, his shoulders tight and his walk brisk, ignoring Coru’s shrill protest and not even bothering to take the blanket that Syen’s still sitting on.

Earthfires.

Syenite stays topside awhile, trying to figure out how she ended up becoming the emotional caretaker for a crazy ten-ringer while stuck out in the middle of rusting nowhere with his inhumanly powerful baby. Then the sun sets and she gets tired of thinking about it, so she gets up and grabs the blanket and heads back down to the comm.

Everyone’s gathering for the evening meal, but Syenite begs off being social this time, just grabbing a plate of roasted tulifish and braised threeleaf with sweetened barley that must have been stolen from some mainland comm. She carries this back to the house, and is unsurprised to find Alabaster there already, curled up in the bed with a sleeping Coru. They’ve upgraded to a bigger bed for Innon’s sake, this mattress suspended from four sturdy posts by a kind of hammock-like net that is surprisingly comfortable, and durable despite the weight and activity they put on it. Alabaster’s quiet but awake when Syen comes in, so she sighs and scoops up Coru and puts him to bed in the nearby smaller suspended bed, which is lower to the ground in case he rolls or climbs out in the night. Then she climbs into bed with Alabaster, just looking at him, and after a while he gives up the distant treatment and edges a little closer. He doesn’t meet her eyes as he does this. But Syenite knows what he needs, so she sighs and rolls onto her back, and he edges closer still, finally resting his head on her shoulder, where he’s probably wanted to be all along.

“Sorry,” he says.

Syenite shrugs. “Don’t worry about it.” And then, because Innon’s right and this is partly her fault, she sighs and adds, “I’m coming back. I do like it here, you know. I just get… restless.”

“You’re always restless. What are you looking for?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

But she thinks, almost but not quite subconsciously: A way to change things. Because this is not right.

He’s always good at guessing her thoughts. “You can’t make anything better,” he says, heavily. “The world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there’s no changing it.” He sighs, rubs his face against her breast. “Take what you can get out of it, Syen. Love your son. Even live the pirate life if that makes you happy. But stop looking for anything better than this.”

She licks her lips. “Corundum should have better.”

Alabaster sighs. “Yes. He should.” He says nothing more, but the unspoken is palpable: He won’t, though.

It isn’t right.

She drifts off to sleep. And a few hours later she wakes up because Alabaster is blurting, “Oh fuck, oh please, oh Earth, I can’t, Innon,” against Innon’s shoulder, and jerking in a way that disturbs the bed’s gentle sway while Innon pants and ruts against him, cock on oily cock. And then because Alabaster is spent but Innon isn’t, and Innon notices her watching, he grins at her and kisses Alabaster and then slides a hand between Syen’s legs. Of course she’s wet. He and Alabaster are always beautiful together.

Innon is a considerate lover, so he leans over and nuzzles her breasts and does marvelous things with his fingers, and does not stop thrusting against Alabaster until she curses and demands all of his attention for a while, which makes him laugh and shift over.

Alabaster watches while Innon obliges her, and his gaze grows hot with it, which Syenite still doesn’t understand even after being with them for almost two years. ’Baster doesn’t want her, not that way, nor she him. And yet it’s unbelievably arousing for her to watch Innon drive him to moaning and begging, and Alabaster also clearly gets off on her going to pieces with someone else. She likes it more when ’Baster’s watching, in fact. They can’t stand sex with each other directly, but vicariously it’s amazing. And what do they even call this? It’s not a threesome, or a love triangle. It’s a two-and-a-half-some, an affection dihedron. (And, well, maybe it’s love.) She should worry about another pregnancy, maybe from Alabaster again given how messy things get between the three of them, but she can’t bring herself to worry because it doesn’t matter. Someone will love her children no matter what. Just as she doesn’t think overmuch about what she does with her bed time or how this thing between them works; no one in Meov will care, no matter what. That’s another turn-on, probably: the utter lack of fear. Imagine that.

So they fall asleep, Innon snoring on his belly between them and ’Baster and Syen with their heads pillowed on his big shoulders, and not for the first time does Syenite think, If only this could last.

She knows better than to wish for something so impossible.

* * *

The Clalsu sets sail the next day. Alabaster stands out on the pier with half the rest of the comm that is waving and well-wishing. He doesn’t wave, but he does point to them as the ship pulls away, encouraging Coru to wave when Syenite and Innon do. Coru does it, and for a moment Syenite feels something like regret. It passes quickly.

Then there is only the open sea, and work to be done: casting lines for fish and climbing high up into the masts to do things to the sails when Innon tells them to, and at one point securing several barrels that have come loose down in the hold. It’s hard work, and Syenite falls asleep in her little bunk under one of the bulkheads not long after sunset, because Innon won’t let her sleep with him and anyway, she doesn’t have the energy to make it up to his cabin.

But it gets better, and she gets stronger as the days pass, beginning to see why the Clalsu crew have always seemed a little more vibrant, a little more interesting, than everyone else in Meov. On the fourth day out there’s a call from the left — rust, from the port side of the ship, and she and the others come to the railing to see something amazing: the curling plumes of ocean spray where great monsters of the deep have risen to swim alongside them. One of them breaches the surface to look at them and it’s ridiculously huge; its eye is bigger than Syen’s head. One slap of its fins could capsize the ship. But it doesn’t hurt them, and one of the crew members tells her that it’s just curious. She seems amused by Syenite’s awe.

At night, they look at the stars. Syen has never paid much attention to the sky; the ground beneath her feet was always more important. But Innon points out patterns in the ways that the stars move, and explains that the “stars” she sees are actually other suns, with other worlds of their own and perhaps other people living other lives and facing other struggles. She has heard of pseudosciences like astronomestry, knows that its adherents make unprovable claims like this, but now, looking at the constantly moving sky, she understands why they believe it. She understands why they care, when the sky is so immutable and irrelevant to most of daily life. On nights like these, for a little while, she cares, too.

Also at night, the crew drinks and sings songs. Syenite mispronounces vulgar words, inadvertently making them more vulgar, and makes instant friends of half the crew by doing so.

The other half of the crew reserves judgment, until they spy a likely target on the seventh day. They’ve been lurking near the shipping lanes between two heavily populated peninsulas, and people up in the mast-nest have been watching with spyglasses for ships worth the effort of robbing. Innon doesn’t give the order until the lookout tells them he’s spotted an especially large vessel of the sort often used to ferry trade goods too heavy or dangerous for easy overland carting: oils and quarried stone and volatile chemicals and timber. The very sorts of things that a comm stuck on a barren island in the middle of nowhere might need most. This one’s accompanied by another vessel, which is smaller and which, according to those who see it through the spyglass and can tell such things by sight, is probably bristling with militia soldiers, battering rams, and armaments of its own. (Maybe one’s a carrack and the other’s a caravel, those are the words the sailors use, but she can’t remember which one’s which and it’s a pain in the ass to try so she’s going to stick with “the big boat” and “the small boat.”) Their readiness to fight off pirates confirms that the freighter carries something worth pirating.

Innon looks at Syenite, and she grins fiercely.

She raises two fogs. The first requires her to pull ambient energy at the farthest edge of her range — but she does it, because that’s where the smaller ship is. The second fog she raises in a corridor between Clalsu and the cargo vessel, so that they will be on their target almost before it sees them coming.

It goes like clockwork. Innon’s crew are mostly experienced and highly skilled; the ones like Syenite, who don’t know what they’re doing yet, are pushed to the periphery while the others set to. The Clalsu comes out of the fog and the other vessel starts ringing bells to sound the alarm, but it’s too late. Innon’s people fire the catapults and shred their sails with baskets of chain. Then the Clalsu sidles up close — Syen thinks they’re going to hit, but Innon knows what he’s doing — and others in the crew throw hooks across the gap between them, hitching the ships together and then winching them closer with the big crankworks that occupy much of the deck.

It’s dangerous at this point, and one of the older members of the crew shoos Syen belowdecks when people on the cargo ship start firing arrows and slingstones and throwing-knives at them. She sits in the shadow of the steps while the other crew members run up and down them, and her heart is pounding; her palms are damp. Something heavy thuds into the hull not five feet from her head, and she flinches.

But Evil Earth, this is so much better than sitting around on the island, fishing and singing lullabies.

It’s over in minutes. When the commotion dies down and Syenite dares to venture up top again, she sees that planks have been run between the two vessels and Innon’s people are running back and forth along them. Some of them have captured members of the cargo vessel’s crew and corralled them on deck, holding them at glassknife-point; the rest of the crew is surrendering, giving up weapons and valuables, for fear the hostages will be hurt. Already some of Innon’s sailors are going into the holds, bringing up barrels and crates and carting them across to the Clalsu’s deck. They’ll sort out the booty later. Speed is of the essence now.

But all at once there are shouts and someone in the rigging hits a bell frantically — and out of the roiling fog looms the attack ship that accompanied the cargo vessel. It’s on them, and belatedly Syenite realizes her error: she had assumed that the attack ship would stop given that it couldn’t see, knowing itself in proximity to other vessels. People are not that logical. Now the attack ship is coming at full speed, and even though she can hear cries of alarm from its decks as they also realize the danger, there’s no way it will be able to stop before it rams into Clalsu and the cargo ship… and probably sinks all three.

Syenite is brimming with power drawn from the warmth and boundless waves of the sea. She reacts, as she has been taught in a hundred Fulcrum drills, without thinking. Down, through the strange slipperiness of seawater minerals, through the soggy uselessness of the ocean sediment, down. There is stone beneath the ocean, and it is old and raw and hers to command.

In another place she claws up with her hands and shouts and thinks Up, and suddenly the attack ship cracks loudly and jerks to a halt. People stop screaming, shocked into silence, on all three vessels. This is because suddenly there is a massive, jagged knife of bedrock jutting several feet above the attack ship’s deck, skewering the vessel from the keel up.

Shaking, Syenite lowers her hands slowly.

The cries aboard the Clalsu turn from alarm into ragged cheers. Even a few of the cargo vessel’s people look relieved; one ship damaged is better than three ships sunk.

Things go quickly after that, with the attack ship helpless and skewered as it is. Innon comes to find her just as the crew reports that the cargo ship’s hold is empty. Syen has moved to the bow, where she can see people on the attack ship’s deck trying to chisel at the pillar.

Innon stops beside her, and she looks up, braced for his anger. But he is far from angry.

“I did not know one could do such things,” he says wonderingly. “I thought you and Alabaster were only boasting.”

It is the first time Syenite has been praised for her orogeny by someone not of the Fulcrum, and if she had not already begun to love Innon, she would now. “I shouldn’t have brought it up so high,” she says, sheepishly. “If I’d thought first, I would’ve raised the column only enough to breach the hull so they’d think they ran over an obstacle.”

Innon sobers as he understands. “Ah. And now they know we have an orogene of some skill aboard.” His expression hardens in a way that Syenite does not understand, but she decides not to question it. It feels so good to stand here, with him, basking in the glow of success. For a while they just watch the cargo vessel’s unloading together.

Then one of Innon’s crewmen runs up to say they’re done, the planks have been withdrawn, the ropes and hooks rolled back onto their crankwheels. They’re ready to go. Innon says in a heavy voice, “Hold.”

She almost knows what is coming then. But it still makes her feel ill when he looks at Syenite, his expression ice. “Sink them both.”

She has promised never to question Innon’s orders. Even so, she hesitates. She has never killed anyone before, not deliberately. It was just a mistake that she brought the stone projection up so high. Is it really necessary that people die for her folly? He steps close, and she flinches preemptively, even though he has never harmed her. Her hand bones twinge regardless.

But Innon only says into her ear, “For ’Baster and Coru.”

That makes no sense. ’Baster and Coru are not here. But then the full implication of his words — that the safety of everyone in Meov depends on the mainlanders seeing them as a nuisance rather than a serious threat — sinks in, and makes her cold, too. Colder.

So she says, “You should move us away.”

Innon turns at once and gives the order for the Clalsu to set sail. Once they have drifted to a safe distance, Syenite takes a deep breath.

For her family. It is strange, thinking of them as such, though that is what they are. Stranger still to do something like this for a real reason, and not simply because she has been commanded to. Does that mean she is no longer a weapon? What does that make her, then, if not?

Doesn’t matter.

At a flick of her will, the bedrock column extracts itself from the attack ship’s hull — leaving a ten-foot hole near the stern. It begins sinking immediately, tipping upward as it takes on water. Then, dragging more strength from the ocean surface and raising fog enough to obscure sight for miles, Syenite shifts the column to aim at the cargo vessel’s keel. A quick thrust up, a quicker withdrawal. Like stabbing someone to death with a poniard. The ship’s hull cracks like an egg, and after a moment splits into two halves. It’s done.

The fog completely obscures both sinking ships as the Clalsu sails away. The two crews’ screams follow Syenite long after, into the drifting whiteness.

* * *

Innon makes an exception for her, that night. Later, sitting up in his captain’s bed, Syen says, “I want to see Allia.”

Innon sighs. “No. You don’t.”

But he gives the order anyway, because he loves her. The ship charts a new course.

* * *

According to legend, Father Earth did not originally hate life.

In fact, as the lorists tell it, once upon a time Earth did everything he could to facilitate the strange emergence of life on his surface. He crafted even, predictable seasons; kept changes of wind and wave and temperature slow enough that every living being could adapt, evolve; summoned waters that purified themselves, skies that always cleared after a storm. He did not create life — that was happenstance — but he was pleased and fascinated by it, and proud to nurture such strange wild beauty upon his surface.

Then people began to do horrible things to Father Earth. They poisoned waters beyond even his ability to cleanse, and killed much of the other life that lived on his surface. They drilled through the crust of his skin, past the blood of his mantle, to get at the sweet marrow of his bones. And at the height of human hubris and might, it was the orogenes who did something that even Earth could not forgive: They destroyed his only child.

No lorist that Syenite has ever talked to knows what this cryptic phrase means. It isn’t stonelore, just oral tradition occasionally recorded on ephemerals like paper and hide, and too many Seasons have changed it. Sometimes it’s the Earth’s favorite glassknife that the orogenes destroyed; sometimes it’s his shadow; sometimes it’s his most valued Breeder. Whatever the words mean, the lorists and ’mests agree on what happened after the orogenes committed their great sin: Father Earth’s surface cracked like an eggshell. Nearly every living thing died as his fury became manifest in the first and most terrible of the Fifth Seasons: the Shattering Season. Powerful as they were, those ancient people had no warning, no time to build storecaches, and no stonelore to guide them. It is only through sheer luck that enough of humankind survived to replenish itself afterward — and never again has life attained the heights of power that it once held. Earth’s recurrent fury will never allow that.

Syenite has always wondered about these tales. There’s a degree of poetic license in them, of course, primitive people trying to explain what they didn’t understand… but all legends contain a kernel of truth. Maybe the ancient orogenes did shatter the planet’s crust, somehow. How, though? It’s clear now that there’s more to orogeny than what the Fulcrum teaches — and maybe there’s a reason the Fulcrum doesn’t teach it, if the legend is true. But facts are facts: Even if somehow every orogene in existence down to the infants could be yoked together, they could not destroy the world’s surface. It would ice everything; there’s not enough warmth or movement anywhere to do that much damage. They’d all burn themselves out trying, and die.

Which means that part of the tale can’t be true; orogeny cannot be to blame for the Earth’s rage. Not that anyone but another rogga would accept this conclusion.

It is truly amazing, though, that humanity managed to survive the fires of that first Season. Because if the whole world was then as Allia is now… Syenite has a fresh understanding of just how much Father Earth hates them all.

Allia is a nightscape of red, blistering death. There is nothing left of the comm except the caldera ring that once cradled it, and even that is hard to see. Squinting through the red wavering haze, Syen thinks she can glimpse a few leftover buildings and streets on the caldera’s slopes, but that might just be wishful thinking.

The night sky is thick with ash clouds, underlit by the glow of fire. Where the harbor was, there is now a growing volcano cone, gushing deadly clouds and hot red birth-blood on its climb out of the sea. It’s already huge, occupying nearly the entire caldera bowl, and it has already borne offspring. Two additional vents crouch against its flank, belching gas and lava like their parent. Likely all three will eventually grow together to become a single monster, engulfing the surrounding mountains and threatening every comm in range of its gas clouds or subsequent blows.

Everyone Syenite met in Allia is dead now. The Clalsu can’t go within five miles of the shore; any closer and they risk death, whether by warping the ship’s hull in the heated waters, or by suffocating in the hot clouds that periodically gout forth from the mountain. Or by cooking themselves over one of the subsidiary vents that are still developing around the area, spreading out from what was once Allia’s harbor like the spokes of a wheel and lurking like deadly mines beneath the waters offshore. Syen can sess every one of these hot spots, bright churning ragestorms just beneath the Earth’s skin. Even Innon can sess them, and he’s steered the ship away from those that are most likely to burst through anytime soon. But as fragile as the strata are right now, a new vent could open right under them before Syen has a chance to detect or stop it. Innon’s risking a lot to indulge her.

“Many in the outlying parts of the comm managed to escape,” Innon says softly, beside her. The Clalsu’s whole crew has come up on deck, staring at Allia in silence. “They say there was a flash of red light from the harbor, then a series of flashes, in a rhythm. Like something… pulsing. But the initial concussion, when the whole damned harbor boiled away at once, flattened most of the smaller houses in the comm. That’s what killed most people. There was no warning.” Syenite twitches.

No warning. There were almost a hundred thousand people in Allia — small by the standards of the Equatorials, but big for a Coaster comm. Proud, justifiably so. They’d had such hopes.

Rust this. Rust it and burn it in the foul, hateful guts of Father Earth.

“Syenite?” Innon is staring at her. This is because Syen has raised her fists before her, as if she is grasping the reins of a straining, eager horse. And because a narrow, high, tight torus has suddenly manifested around her. It isn’t cold; there’s plenty of earth-power for her to tap nearby. But it is powerful, and even an untrained rogga can sess the gathering flex of her will. Innon inhales and takes a step back. “Syen, what are you—”

“I can’t leave it like this,” she murmurs, almost to herself. The whole area is a swelling, deadly boil ready to burst. The volcano is only the first warning. Most vents in the earth are tiny, convoluted things, struggling to escape through varying layers of rock and metal and their own inertia. They seep and cool and plug themselves and then seep upward again, twisting and winding every which way in the process. This, though, is a gigantic lava tube channeled straight up from wherever the garnet obelisk has gone, funneling pure Earth-hate toward the surface. If nothing is done, the whole region will soon blow sky-high, in a massive explosion that will almost surely touch off a Season. She cannot believe the Fulcrum has left things like this.

So Syenite stabs herself into that churning, building heat, and tears at it with all the fury she feels at seeing Allia, this was Allia, this was a human place, there were people here. People who didn’t deserve to die because

of me

because they were too stupid to let sleeping obelisks lie, or because they dared to dream of a future. No one deserves to die for that.

It’s almost easy. This is what orogenes do, after all, and the hot spot is ripe for her use. The danger lies in not using it, really. If she takes in all that heat and force without channeling it elsewhere, it will destroy her. But fortunately — she laughs to herself, and her whole body shakes with it — she’s got a volcano to choke off.

So she curls the fingers of one hand into a fist, and sears down its throat with her awareness, not burning but cooling, turning its own fury back on it to seal every breach. She forces the growing magma chamber back, back, down, down — and as she does so, she deliberately drags together the strata in overlapping patterns so that each will press down on the one below it and keep the magma down, at least until it finds another, slower way to wend its way to the surface. It’s a delicate sort of operation, for all that it involves millions of tons of rock and the sorts of pressures that force diamonds into existence. But Syenite is a child of the Fulcrum, and the Fulcrum has trained her well.

She opens her eyes to find herself in Innon’s arms, with the ship heaving beneath her feet. Blinking in surprise, she looks up at Innon, whose eyes are wide and wild. He notices that she’s back, and the expressions of relief and fear on his face are both heartening and sobering.

“I told everyone you would not kill us,” he says, over the churning of the sea spray and the shouts of his crew. She looks around and sees them frantically trying to lower the sails, so that they can have more control amid a sea that is suddenly anything but placid. “Please try not to make me a liar, would you?”

Shit. She’s used to working orogeny on land, and forgot to account for the effects of her fault-sealing on water. They were shakes for a good purpose, but shakes nevertheless, and — oh Earth, she can feel it. She’s touched off a tsunami. And — she winces and groans as her sessapinae set up a ringing protest at the back of her head. She’s overdone it.

“Innon.” Her head is ringing agony. “You need — nnh. Push waves of matching amplitude, subsurface…”

“What?” He looks away from her to shout something to one of the crewwomen in his tongue, and she curses inwardly. Of course he has no idea what she’s talking about. He does not speak Fulcrum.

But then, all at once, there is a chill in the air all around them. The wood of the ship groans with the temperature change. Syen gasps in alarm, but it’s not much of a change, really. Just the difference between a summer night and an autumn one, albeit over the span of minutes — and there is a presence to this change that is familiar as warm hands in the night. Innon abruptly inhales as he recognizes it, too: Alabaster. Of course his range stretches this far. He quells the gathering waves in moments.

When he’s done, the ship sits on placid waters once more, facing the volcano of Allia… which has now gone quiet and dark. It’s still smoking and will be hot for decades, but it no longer vents fresh magma or gas. The skies above are already clearing.

Leshiye, Innon’s first mate, comes over, throwing an uneasy look at Syenite. He says something too fast for Syenite to translate fully, but she gets the gist of it: Tell her next time she decides to stop a volcano, get off the ship first.

Leshiye’s right. “Sorry,” Syen mutters in Eturpic, and the man grumbles and stomps off.

Innon shakes his head and lets her go, calling for the sails to be unfurled once again. He glances down at her. “You all right?”

“Fine.” She rubs at her head. “Just never worked anything that big before.”

“I did not think you could. I thought only ones like Alabaster — with many rings, more than yours — could do so. But you are as powerful as he.”

“No.” Syenite laughs a little, gripping the railing and clinging to it so she won’t need to lean on him for support anymore. “I just do what’s possible. He rewrites the rusting laws of nature.”

“Heh.” Innon sounds odd, and Syenite glances at him in surprise to see an almost regretful look on his face. “Sometimes, when I see what you and he can do, I wish I had gone to this Fulcrum of yours.”

“No, you don’t.” She doesn’t even want to think about what he would be like if he had grown up in captivity with the rest of them. Innon, but without his booming laugh or vivacious hedonism or cheerful confidence. Innon, with his graceful strong hands weaker and clumsier for having been broken. Not Innon.

He smiles ruefully at her now, as if he has guessed her thoughts. “Someday, you must tell me what it’s like there. Why all who come out of that place seem so very competent… and so very afraid.”

With that, he pats her back and heads off to oversee the course change.

But Syenite stays where she is at the railing, suddenly chilled to the bone in a way that has nothing to do with the passing flex of Alabaster’s power.

That is because, as the ship tilts to one side in its turnabout, and she takes one last look back at the place that was Allia before her folly destroyed it—

— she sees someone.

Or she thinks she does. She’s not sure at first. She squints and can just make out one of the paler strips that wend down into the Allia bowl on its southern curve, which is more readily visible now that the ruddy light around the volcano has faded. It’s obviously not the Imperial Road that she and ’Baster traveled to get to Allia, once upon a time and one colossal mistake ago. Most likely what she’s looking at is just a dirt road used by the locals, carved out of the surrounding forest a tree at a time and kept clear by decades of foot traffic.

There is a tiny mote moving along that road that looks, from this distance, like a person walking downhill. But it can’t be. No sane person would stay so close to an active, deadly blow that had already killed thousands.

She squints more, moving to the ship’s stern so that she can continue to peer that way as the Clalsu peels away from the coast. If only she had one of Innon’s spyglasses. If only she could be sure.

Because for a moment she thinks, for a moment she sees, or hallucinates in her weariness, or imagines in her anxiety—

The Fulcrum seniors would not leave such a brewing disaster unmitigated. Unless they thought there was a very good reason to do so. Unless they had been ordered to do so.

— that the walking figure is wearing a burgundy uniform.

* * *

Some say the Earth is angry

Because he wants no company;

I say the Earth is angry

Because he lives alone.

— Ancient (pre-Imperial) folk song