The Fifth Season

7 you plus one is two

IN THE MORNING YOU RISE and move on, and the boy comes with you. The two of you trudge south through hill country and falling ash.

The child is an immediate problem. He’s filthy, for one. You couldn’t see this the night before in the dark, but he’s absolutely covered in dried and drying mud, stuck-on twigs, and Earth knows what else. Caught in a mudslide, probably; those happen a lot during shakes. If so, he’s lucky to be alive — but still when he wakes up and stretches, you grimace at the smears and flakes of dirt he’s left on your bedroll. It takes you twenty minutes to realize he’s naked under all the mess.

When you question him about this — and everything else — he’s cagey. He shouldn’t be old enough to be effectively cagey, but he is. He doesn’t know the name of the comm he’s from or the people who birthed him, who apparently are “not very many” in number. He says he doesn’t have any parents. He doesn’t know his use name — which, you are certain, is a blatant lie. Even if his mother didn’t know his father, he would’ve inherited her use-caste. He’s young, and maybe orphaned, but not too young to know his place in the world. Children far younger than this boy understand things like that. Uche was only three and he knew that he was an Innovator like his father, and that this was why all his toys were tools and books and items that could be used for building things. And he knew, too, that there were things he could not discuss with anyone except his mother, and even then only when they were alone. Things about Father Earth and his whispers, way-down-below things as Uche had called them—

But you’re not ready to think about that.

Instead you ponder the mystery of Hoa, because there’s so very much to ponder. He’s a squat little thing, you notice when he stands up; barely four feet tall. He acts maybe ten years old, so he’s either small for his age or has a manner too old for his body. You think it’s the latter, though you’re not sure why you think this. You can’t tell much else about him, except that he’s probably lighter-skinned; the patches where he’s shed mud are gray-dirty, not brown-dirty. So maybe he’s from somewhere near the Antarctics, or the western continental coast, where people are pale.

And now he’s here, thousands of miles away in the northeastern Somidlats, alone and naked. Okay.

Well, maybe something happened to his family. Maybe they were comm-changers. Lots of people do that, pick up roots and spend months or years traveling cross-continent to beg their way into a comm where they’ll stick out like pale flowers in a dun meadow…

Maybe.

Right.

Anyway.

Hoa also has icewhite eyes. Real, actual icewhite. Scared you a bit when you woke up in the morning and he looked at you: all that dark mud surrounding two points of glaring silvery-blue. He doesn’t look quite human, but then people with icewhite eyes rarely do. You’ve heard that in Yumenes, among the Breeder use-caste, icewhite eyes are — were — especially desirable. Sanzeds liked that icewhite eyes were intimidating, and a little creepy. They are. But the eyes aren’t what makes Hoa creepy.

He’s inordinately cheerful, for one. When you rose the morning after he joined you, he was already awake, and playing with your tinderbox. There was nothing in the meadow with which to make a fire — only the meadowgrass, which would’ve burned up in seconds even if you could have found enough dry, and probably touched off a grassfire in the process — so you hadn’t taken the box out of your pack the night before. But he had it, humming idly to himself as he twirled the flint in his fingers, and that meant he’d been digging in your pack. It didn’t put you in the best of moods for the day. The image stuck in your mind, though, as you packed up: a child who’d obviously been through some disaster, sitting naked in the middle of a meadow, surrounded by falling ash — and yet, playing. Humming, even. And when he saw you awake and looking, he smiled.

This is why you’ve decided to keep him with you, even though you think he’s lying about not knowing where he comes from. Because. Well. He is a child.

So when you’ve got your pack on, you look at him, and he looks back at you. He’s clutching to his chest that bundle you glimpsed the night before — a wad of rags tied around something, is all you can tell. It rattles a little when he squeezes it. You can tell that he’s anxious; those eyes of his can’t hide anything. His pupils are huge. He fidgets a little, shifting onto one foot and using the other to scratch the back of his calf.

“Come on,” you say, and turn away to head back to the Imperial Road. You try not to notice his soft exhalation, and the way he trots to catch up to you after a moment.

When you step onto the road again, there are a few people moving along it in knots and trickles, nearly all of them going south. Their feet stir up the ash, which is light and powdery for now. Big flakes: no need for masks yet, for those who remembered to pack one. A man walks beside a rickety cart and half-spavined horse; the cart is full of belongings and old people, though the walking man is hardly younger. All of them stare at you as you step from behind the hill. A group of six women who have clearly banded together for safety whisper among themselves at the sight of you — and then one of them says loudly to another, “Rusting Earth, look at her, no!” Apparently you look dangerous. Or undesirable. Or both.

Or maybe it’s Hoa’s appearance that puts them off, so you turn to the boy. He stops when you do, looking worried again, and you feel abruptly ashamed for letting him walk around like this, even if you didn’t ask to have some strange child tagging along.

You look around. There’s a creek on the other side of the road. No telling how long before you reach another roadhouse; they’re supposed to be stationed every twenty-five miles on an Imperial Road, but the shake from the north might have damaged the next one. There are more trees around now — you’re leaving the plains — but not enough to provide any real cover, and many of the trees are broken, anyway, after the shake from the north. The ashfall helps, a little; you can’t see more than a mile off. What you can see, though, is that the plainsland around the road is beginning to give way to rougher territory. You know from maps and talk that below the Tirimas mountains there’s an ancient, probably-sealed minor fault, a strip of young forest that’s grown up since the last Season, and then in perhaps a hundred miles the plains become salt flats. Beyond that is desert, where comms become few and far between, and where they tend to be even more heavily defended than comms in more hospitable parts.

(Jija can’t be going as far as the desert. That would be foolish; who would take him in there?)

There will be comms along the road between here and the salt plains, you’re certain. If you can get the boy decent-looking, one of them will probably take him in.

“Come with me,” you say to the boy, and veer off the road. He follows you down the gravel bed; you notice how sharp some of the rocks are and add good boots to the list of things you need to get for him. He doesn’t cut his feet, thankfully — though he does slip on the gravel at one point, badly enough that he falls and rolls down the slope. You hurry over when he stops rolling, but he’s already sitting up and looking disgruntled, because he’s landed square in the mud at the edge of the creek. “Here,” you say, offering him a hand up.

He looks at the hand, and for a moment you’re surprised to see something like unease on his face. “I’m okay,” he says then, ignoring your hand and pushing himself to his feet. The mud squelches as he does it. Then he brushes past you to collect the rag bundle, which he lost hold of during the fall.

Fine, then. Ungrateful little brat.

“You want me to wash,” he says, a question.

“How’d you guess?”

He doesn’t seem to notice the sarcasm. Setting his bundle down on the gravel bank, he walks forward into the water until it rises to about his waist, then he squats to try to scrub himself. You remember and rummage in your pack until you find the slab of soap. He turns at your whistle and you toss it to him. You flinch when he misses the catch entirely, but he immediately dives under and resurfaces with it in his hands. Then you laugh, because he’s staring at the soap like he’s never seen such a thing.

“Rub it on your skin?” You pantomime doing it: sarcasm again. But he straightens and smiles a little as if that actually clarified something for him, and then he obeys.

“Do your hair, too,” you say, rummaging in the pack again and shifting so you can keep an eye on the road. Some of the people passing by up there glance down at you, curiosity or disapproval in their gaze, but most don’t bother looking. You like it that way.

Your other shirt is what you were looking for. It’ll be like a dress on the boy, so you cut a short length off the spool of twine in your pack, which he can use to belt the shirt below his hips for modesty and to retain a little warmth around his torso. It won’t do in the long term, of course. Lorists say that it doesn’t take long for things to turn cold when a Season begins. You’ll have to see if the next town you pass is willing to sell you clothes and additional supplies, if they haven’t already implemented Seasonal Law.

Then the boy comes out of the water, and you stare.

Well. That’s different.

Free of mud, his hair is ashblow-coarse, that perfect weatherproof texture the Sanzed value so much, already beginning to stiffen and pouf up as it dries. It will be long enough to keep his back warm, at least. But it is white, not the normal gray. And his skin is white, not just pale; not even Antarctic people are ever quite that colorless, not that you’ve seen. His eyebrows are white, above his icewhite eyes. White white white. He almost disappears amid the falling ash as he walks.

Albino? Maybe. There’s also something off about his face. You wonder what you’re seeing, and then you realize: There’s nothing Sanzed about him, except the texture of his hair. There’s a broadness to his cheekbones, an angularity to his jaw and eyes, that seems wholly alien to your eyes. His mouth is full-lipped but narrow, so much so that you think he might have trouble eating, though obviously that’s not true or he wouldn’t have survived to this age. His short stature is part of it, too. He’s not just small but stocky, as if his people are built for a different kind of sturdiness than the ideal that Old Sanze has spent millennia cultivating. Maybe his race are all this white, then, whoever they are.

But none of this makes sense. Every race in the world these days is part Sanzed. They did rule the Stillness for centuries, after all, and they continue to do so in many ways. And they weren’t always peaceful about it, so even the most insular races bear the Sanzed stamp whether their ancestors wanted the admixture or not. Everyone is measured by their standard deviations from the Sanzed mean. This boy’s people, whoever they are, have clearly managed to remain outliers.

“What in fire-under-Earth are you?” you say, before it occurs to you that this might hurt his feelings. A few days of horror and you forget everything about taking care of children.

But the boy only looks surprised — and then he grins. “Fire-under-Earth? You’re weird. Am I clean enough?”

You’re so thrown by him calling you weird that only much later do you realize he avoided the question.

You shake your head to yourself, then hold out a hand for the soap, which he gives to you. “Yes. Here.” And you hold up the shirt for him to slip his arms and head into. He does this a bit clumsily, as if he’s not used to being dressed by someone else. Still, it’s easier than getting Uche dressed; at least this boy doesn’t wiggle—

You stop.

You go away for a bit.

When you return to yourself, the sky is brighter and Hoa has stretched out on the nearby low grass. At least an hour has passed. Maybe more.

You lick your lips and focus on him uncomfortably, waiting for him to say something about your… absence. He just perks up once he sees you’re back, gets to his feet, and waits.

Okay, then. You and he might get along, after all.

After that you get back on the road. The boy walks well despite having no shoes; you watch him closely for signs of limping or weariness, and you stop more frequently than you would have on your own. He seems grateful for the chance to rest, but aside from that, he does all right. A real little trouper.

“You can’t stay with me,” you say, though, during one of your rest breaks. Might as well not let him get his hopes up. “I’ll try to find you a comm; we’ll be stopping at several along the way, if they’ll open the gates to trade. But I have to move on, even if I find you a place. I’m looking for someone.”

“Your daughter,” the boy says, and you stiffen. A moment passes. The boy ignores your shock, humming and petting his little bundle of rags like it’s a pet.

“How did you know that?” you whisper.

“She’s very strong. I’m not sure it’s her, of course.” The boy looks back at you and smiles, oblivious to your stare. “There’s a bunch of you in that direction. That always makes it hard.”

There are a lot of things that probably should be in your mind right now. You only muster the wherewithal to speak one of them aloud. “You know where my daughter is.”

He hums again, noncommitally. You’re sure he knows just how insane this all sounds. You’re sure he’s laughing, somewhere behind that innocent mask of a face.

“How?”

He shrugs. “I just know.”

“How?” He’s not an orogene. You’d know your own. Even if he was, orogenes can’t track each other like dogs, homing in from a distance as if orogeny has a smell. Only Guardians can do anything like that, and then only if the rogga is ignorant or stupid enough to let them.

He looks up, and you try not to flinch. “I just know, all right? It’s something I can do.” He looks away. “It’s something I’ve always been able to do.”

You wonder. But. Nassun.

You’re willing to buy a lot of cockamamie things if any of them can help you find her.

“Okay,” you say. Slowly, because this is crazy. You’re crazy, but now you’re aware that the boy probably is, too, and that means you need to be careful. But on the thin chance that he’s not crazy, or that his crazy actually works the way he says it does…

“How… how far is she?”

“Many days’ walking. She’s going faster than you.”

Because Jija took the cart and horse. “Nassun’s still alive.” You have to pause after this. Too much to feel, too much to contain. Rask told you Jija left Tirimo with her then, but you’ve been afraid to let yourself think of her as alive now. Even though a part of you doesn’t want to believe that Jija could kill his own daughter, the rest of you not only believes it but anticipates it to some degree. An old habit, bracing yourself for pain to come.

The boy nods, watching you; his little face is oddly solemn now. There’s really not much that’s childlike about this child, you notice absently, belatedly.

But if he can find your daughter, he can be the Evil Earth incarnate and you won’t give a damn.

So you rummage in the pack and find your canteen, the one with the good water; you refilled the other at the creek but need to boil it first. After you take a swig yourself, however, you hand it to him. When he’s finished drinking, you give him a handful of raisins. He shakes his head and hands them back. “I’m not hungry.”

“You haven’t eaten.”

“I don’t eat much.” He picks up his bundle. Maybe he’s got supplies in there. Doesn’t matter. You don’t really care, anyway. He’s not your kid. He just knows where your kid is.

You break camp and resume the journey south, this time with the boy walking beside you, subtly leading the way.

* * *

Listen, listen, listen well.

There was an age before the Seasons, when life and Earth, its father, thrived alike. (Life had a mother, too. Something terrible happened to Her.) Earth our father knew He would need clever life, so He used the Seasons to shape us out of animals: clever hands for making things and clever minds for solving problems and clever tongues for working together and clever sessapinae to warn us of danger. The people became what Father Earth needed, and then more than He needed. Then we turned on Him, and He has burned with hatred for us ever since.

Remember, remember, what I tell.

— Lorist recitation, “The Making of the Three Peoples,” part one