The Fifth Season

3 you’re on your way

YOU’RE STILL TRYING TO DECIDE who to be. The self you’ve been lately doesn’t make sense anymore; that woman died with Uche. She’s not useful, unobtrusive as she is, quiet as she is, ordinary as she is. Not when such extraordinary things have happened.

But you still don’t know where Nassun is buried, if Jija bothered to bury her. Until you’ve said farewell to your daughter, you have to remain the mother that she loved.

So you decide not to wait for death to come.

It is coming for you — perhaps not right now, but soon. Even though the big shake from the north missed Tirimo, everyone knows it should have hit. The sessapinae do not lie, or at least not with such jangling, nerve-racking, mind-screaming strength. Everyone from newborns to addled elders sessed that one coming. And by now, with refugees wandering down the road from less fortunate towns and villages — refugees who are all heading southward — the folk of Tirimo will have begun to hear stories. They will have noticed the sulfur on the wind. They will have looked up at the increasingly strange sky, and seen the change there as an ill omen. (It is.) Perhaps the headman, Rask, has finally sent someone over to see about Sume, the town in the next valley over. Most Tirimos have family there; the two towns have been trading goods and people for generations. Comm comes before all else, of course, but as long as nobody’s starving, kin and race can mean something, too. Rask can still afford to be generous, for now. Maybe.

And once the scouts return and report the devastation that you know they’ll find in Sume — and the survivors that you know they won’t find, or at least not in any great number — denial will no longer be possible. That will leave only fear. Frightened people look for scapegoats.

So you make yourself eat, this time carefully not thinking of other times and other meals with Jija and the kids. (Uncontrollable tears would be better than uncontrollable vomiting, but hey, you can’t choose your grief.) Then, letting yourself quietly out through Lerna’s garden door, you go back to your house. No one’s around, outside. They must all be at Rask’s waiting for news or duty assignments.

In the house, one of the storecaches hidden beneath the rugs holds the family’s runny-sack. You sit on the floor in the room where Uche was beaten to death, and there you sort through the sack, taking out anything you won’t need. The set of worn, comfortable travel-clothing for Nassun is too small; you and Jija put this pack together before Uche was born, and you’ve been neglectful in not refreshing it. A brick of dried fruit has molded over in fuzzy white; it might still be edible, but you’re not desperate enough for that. (Yet.) The sack contains papers that prove you and Jija own your house, and other papers showing that you’re current on your quartent taxes and were both registered Tirimo comm and Resistant use-caste members. You leave this, your whole financial and legal existence for the past ten years, in a little discarded pile with the moldy fruit.

The wad of money in a rubber wallet — paper, since there’s so much of it — will be irrelevant once people realize how bad things are, but until then it’s valuable. Good tinder once it’s not. The obsidian skinning knife that Jija insisted upon, and which you’re unlikely to ever use — you have better, natural weapons — you keep. Trade goods, or at least a visual warn-off. Jija’s boots can also be traded, since they’re in good condition. He’ll never wear them again, because soon you will find him, and then you will end him.

You pause. Revise that thought to something that better befits the woman you’ve chosen to be. Better: You will find him and ask him why he did what he did. How he could do it. And you will ask him, most importantly, where your daughter is.

Repacking the runny-sack, you then put it inside one of the crates Jija used for deliveries. No one will think twice of seeing you carry it around town, because until a few days ago you did so often, to help out Jija’s ceramics and tool-knapping business. Eventually it will occur to someone to wonder why you’re filling delivery orders when the headman is probably on the brink of declaring Seasonal Law. But most people will not think of it at first, which is what matters.

As you leave, you pass the spot on the floor where Uche lay for days. Lerna took the body and left the blanket; the blood splatters are not visible. Still, you do not look in that direction.

Your house is one of several in this corner of town, nestled between the southern edge of the wall and the town greenland. You picked the house, back when you and Jija decided to buy it, because it’s isolated on a narrow, tree-shrouded lane. It’s a straight run across the green to the town center, which Jija always liked. That was something you and he always argued about: You didn’t like being around other people more than necessary, while Jija was gregarious and restless, frustrated by silence—

The surge of absolute, grinding, head-pounding rage catches you by surprise. You have to stop in the doorway of your home, bracing your hand against the door frame and sucking in deep breaths so that you don’t start screaming, or perhaps stabbing someone (yourself?) with that damn skinning knife. Or worse, making the temperature drop.

Okay. You were wrong. Nausea isn’t so bad as a response to grief, comparatively speaking.

But you have no time for this, no strength for this, so you focus on other things. Any other things. The wood of the doorsill, beneath your hand. The air, which you notice more now that you’re outside. The sulfur smell doesn’t seem to be getting worse, at least for now, which is perhaps a good thing. You sess that there are no open earth vents nearby — which means this is coming from up north, where the wound is, that great suppurating rip from coast to coast that you know is there even though the travelers along the Imperial Road have only brought rumors of it so far. You hope the sulfur concentration doesn’t get much worse, because if it does people will start to retch and suffocate, and the next time it rains the creek’s fish will die and the soil will sour…

Yes. Better. After a moment you’re able to walk away from the house at last, your veneer of calm back firmly in place.

Not many people are out and about. Rask must have finally declared an official lockdown. During lockdown the comm’s gates are shut — and you guess by the people moving about near one of the wall watchtowers that Rask has taken the preemptive step of putting guards in place. That’s not supposed to happen till a Season is declared; privately you curse Rask’s caution. Hopefully he hasn’t done anything else that will make it harder for you to slip away.

The market is shut down, at least for the time being, so that no one will hoard goods or fix prices. A curfew starts at dusk, and all businesses that aren’t crucial for the protection or supply of the town are required to close. Everyone knows how things are supposed to go. Everyone has assigned duties, but many of these are tasks that can be done indoors: weaving storage baskets, drying and preserving all perishable food in the house, repurposing old clothing and tools. It’s all Imperially efficient and lore-letter, following rules and procedures that are simultaneously meant to be practical and to keep a large group of anxious people busy. Just in case.

Still, as you walk the path around the green’s edge — during lockdown no one walks on it, not because of any rule but because such times remind them that the green is cropland to be and not just a pretty patch of clover and wildflowers — you spy a few other Tirimo denizens out and about. Strongbacks, mostly. One group is building the paddock and shed that will segregate a corner of the green for livestock. It’s hard work, building something, and the people doing it are too engrossed in the task to pay much heed to a lone woman carrying a crate. A few faces you vaguely recognize as you walk, people you’ve seen before at the market or via Jija’s business. You catch a few glances from them, too, but these are fleeting. They know your face enough that you are Not Stranger. For now, they’re too busy to remember that you may also be rogga’s mother.

Or to wonder from which parent your dead rogga child might have inherited his curse.

In the town center there are more people about. Here you blend in, walking at the same pace as everyone else, nodding if nodded to, trying to think about nothing so that your face falls into bored, disengaged lines. It’s busy around the headman’s office, block captains and caste spokespeople coming in to report what lockdown duties have been completed before heading back out to organize more. Others mill about, clearly hoping for word on what’s happened in Sume and elsewhere — but even here, no one cares about you. And why should they? The air stinks of broken earth and everything past a twenty-mile radius has been shattered by a shake greater than any living person has ever known. People have more important matters to concern them.

That can change quickly, though. You don’t relax.

Rask’s office is actually a small house nestled between the stilted grain-caches and the carriageworks. As you stand on tiptoe to see above the crowd, you’re unsurprised to see Oyamar, Rask’s second, standing on its porch and talking with two men and a woman who are wearing more mortar and mud than clothing. Shoring up the well, probably; that’s one of the things stonelore advises in the event of a shake, and which Imperial lockdown procedure encourages, too. If Oyamar is here, then Rask is elsewhere either working or — knowing Rask — sleeping, after having worn himself out in the three days since the event. He won’t be at home because people can find him too easily there. But because Lerna talks too much, you know where Rask hides when he doesn’t want to be disturbed.

Tirimo’s library is an embarrassment. The only reason they have one is that some previous headwoman’s husband’s grandfather raised a stink and wrote letters to the quartent governor until finally the governor funded a library to shut him up. Few people have used it since the old man died, but although there are always motions to shut it down at the all-comm meetings, those motions never get quite enough votes to proceed. So it lingers: a ratty old shack not much bigger than the den of your house, packed nearly full with shelves of books and scrolls. A thin child could walk between the shelves without contorting; you’re neither thin nor a child, so you have to slip in sideways and sort of crabwalk. Bringing the crate is out of the question: You set it down just inside the door. But that doesn’t matter, because there’s no one here to peek inside it — except Rask, who’s curled up on a tiny pallet at the back of the shack, where the shortest shelf leaves a space just wide enough for his body.

As you finally manage to push your way between the stacks, Rask starts out of a snore and blinks up at you, already beginning to scowl at whoever has disturbed him. Then he thinks, because he’s a levelheaded fellow and that’s why Tirimo elected him, and you see in his face the moment when you go from being Jija’s wife to Uche’s mother to rogga’s mother to, oh Earth, rogga, too.

That’s good. Makes things easier.

“I’m not going to hurt anyone,” you say quickly, before he can recoil or scream or whatever he has tensed to do. And to your own surprise, at these words Rask blinks and thinks again, and the panic recedes from his face. He sits up, leaning his back against a wooden wall, and regards you for a long, thoughtful moment.

“You didn’t come here just to tell me that, I assume,” he says.

You lick your lips and try to hunker down in a crouch. It’s awkward because there’s not much room. You have to brace your butt against a shelf, and your knees encroach more than you like on Rask’s space. He half-smiles at your obvious discomfort, then his smile fades as he remembers what you are, and then he frowns to himself as if both reactions annoy him.

You say, “Do you know where Jija might have gone?”

Rask’s face twitches. He’s old enough to be your father, just, but he’s the least paternal man you’ve ever met. You’ve always wanted to sit down somewhere and have a beer with him, even though that doesn’t fit the ordinary, meek camouflage you’ve built around yourself. Most of the people in town think of him that way, despite the fact that as far as you know he doesn’t drink. The look that comes into his face in this moment, however, makes you think for the first time that he would make a good father, if he ever had children.

“So that’s it,” he says. His voice is gravelly with sleep. “He kill the kid? That’s what people think, but Lerna said he wasn’t sure.”

You nod. You couldn’t say the word yes to Lerna, either.

Rask’s eyes search your face. “And the kid was…?”

You nod again, and Rask sighs. He does not, you note, ask whether you are anything.

“Nobody saw which way Jija went,” he says, shifting to draw his knees up and rest one arm on them. “People have been talking about the — the killing — because it’s easier than talking about—” He lifts and drops his hands in a helpless gesture. “Lots of gossip, I mean, and a lot of it’s more mud than stone. Some people saw Jija load up your horse cart and go off with Nassun—”

Your thoughts stutter. “With Nassun?”

“Yeah, with her. Why—” Then Rask understands. “Oh, shit, she’s one, too?”

You try not to start shaking. You do clench your fists in an effort to prevent this, and the earth far below you feels momentarily closer, the air immediately around you cooler, before you contain your desperation and joy and horror and fury.

“I didn’t know she was alive,” is all you say, after what feels like a very long moment.

“Oh.” Rask blinks, and that compassionate look returns. “Well, yeah. She was when they left, anyway. Nobody knew anything was wrong, or thought anything of it. Most people figured it was just a father trying to teach his firstborn the business, or keep a bored child out of trouble, the usual. Then that shit up north happened, and everybody forgot about it till Lerna said he’d found you and… and your boy.” He pauses here, jaw flexing once. “Never would’ve figured Jija for the type. He hit you?”

You shake your head. “Never.” It might have been easier to bear, somehow, if Jija had been violent beforehand. Then you could have blamed yourself for poor judgment or complacency, and not just for the sin of reproducing.

Rask takes a deep, slow breath. “Shit. Just… shit.” He shakes his head, rubs a hand over the gray fuzz of his hair. He’s not a born-gray, like Lerna and others with ashblow hair; you remember when his hair was brown. “You going after him?” His gaze flickers away and back. It is not quite hope, but you understand what he is too tactful to say. Please leave town as soon as possible.

You nod, happy to oblige. “I need you to give me a gate pass.”

“Done.” He pauses. “You know you can’t come back.”

“I know.” You make yourself smile. “I don’t really want to.”

“Don’t blame you.” He sighs, then shifts again, uncomfortable. “My… my sister…”

You didn’t know Rask had a sister. Then you understand. “What happened to her?”

He shrugs. “The usual. We lived in Sume, then. Somebody realized what she was, told a bunch of other somebodies, and they came and took her in the night. I don’t remember much about it. I was only six. My folks moved here with me after that.” His mouth twitches, not really smiling. “S’why I never wanted kids, myself.”

You smile, too. “I didn’t, either.” Jija had, though.

“Rusting Earth.” He closes his eyes for a moment, then abruptly gets to his feet. You do, too, since otherwise your face will be entirely too close to his stained old trousers. “I’ll walk you to the gate, if you’re going now.”

This surprises you. “I’m going now. But you don’t have to.” You’re not sure this is a good idea, really. It might draw more attention than you want. But Rask shakes his head, his jaw set and grim.

“I do. Come on.”

“Rask—”

He looks at you, and this time you are the one who winces. This isn’t about you anymore. The mob that took his sister from him wouldn’t have dared to do so if he’d been a man at the time.

Or maybe they’d have just killed him, too.

He carries the crate as you walk down Seven Seasons, the town’s main street, all the way up to Main Gate. You’re twitchy, trying to look confident and relaxed even though you feel anything but. It would not have been your choice to walk this route, through all these people. Rask draws all the attention at first, as people wave or call out to him or come over to ask him if there’s any news… but then they notice you. People stop waving. They stop approaching and start — at a distance, in twos and threes — watching. And occasionally following. There’s nothing to this except the usual small-town nosiness, at least on the surface. But you see these knots of people also whispering, and you feel them staring, and that sets all your nerves a-jangle in the worst way.

Rask hails the gate guards as you approach. A dozen or so Strongbacks who are probably miners and farmers under ordinary circumstances are there, just milling about in front of the gate with no real organization. Two are up in the crow’s nests built atop the wall, where they can overlook the gate; two are standing near the gate’s eyeholes at ground level. The rest are just there, looking bored or talking or joking with one another. Rask probably chose them for their ability to intimidate, because all of them are Sanzed-big and look like they can handle themselves even without the glassknives and crossbows they carry.

The one who steps forward to greet Rask is actually the smallest of them — a man you know, though you don’t remember his name. His children have been in your classes at the town creche. He remembers you, too, you see, when his eyes fix on you and narrow.

Rask stops and sets the crate down, opening it and handing you the runny-sack. “Karra,” he says to the man you know. “Everything okay here?”

“Was till now,” Karra says, not taking his eyes off you. The way he’s looking at you makes your skin tighten. A couple of the other Strongbacks are watching, too, glancing from Karra to Rask and back, ready to follow someone’s lead. One woman is openly glaring at you, but the rest seem content to glance at you and away in quick slashes.

“Good to hear,” Rask says. You see him frown a little, perhaps as he reads the same signals you’re picking up on. “Tell your people to open the gate for a minute, will you?”

Karra doesn’t take his eyes off you. “Think that’s a good idea, Rask?”

Rask scowls and steps sharply up to Karra, getting right in his face. He’s not a big man, Rask — he’s an Innovator, not a Strongback, not that it really matters anymore — and right now he doesn’t need to be. “Yeah,” Rask says, his voice so low and tight that Karra focuses on him at last with a stiffening of surprise. “I do. Open the gate, if you don’t mind. If you’re not too rusting busy.”

You think of a line from stonelore, Structures, verse three. The body fades. A leader who lasts relies on more.

Karra’s jaw flexes, but after a moment he nods. You try to look absorbed in shrugging on the runny-sack. The straps are loose. Jija was the last one to try it on.

Karra and the other gate-minders get moving, working on the system of pulleys that helps to winch the gate open. Most of Tirimo’s wall is made of wood. It’s not a wealthy comm with the resources to import good stone or hire the number of masons needed, although they’re doing better than poorly managed comms, or newcomms that don’t even have a wall yet. The gate, though, is stone, because a gate is the weakest point of every comm wall. They only need to open it a little for you, and after a few slow, grinding moments and calls from those hauling to those spotting for approaching intruders, they stop.

Rask turns to you, plainly uncomfortable. “Sorry about — about Jija,” he says. Not about Uche, but maybe that’s for the best. You need to keep your head clear. “About all of it, shit. Hope you find the bastard.”

You only shake your head. Your throat is tight. Tirimo has been your home for ten years. You only started to think of it as such — home — around the time of Uche’s birth, but that’s more than you ever expected to do. You remember chasing Uche across the green after he first learned to run. You remember Jija helping Nassun build a kite and fly it, badly; the kite’s remmants are still in a tree somewhere on the eastern side of town.

But it is not as hard to leave as you thought it would be. Not now, with your former neighbors’ stares sliding over your skin like rancid oil.

“Thanks,” you mutter, meaning for it to cover many things, because Rask didn’t have to help you. He has damaged himself by doing so. The gate-minders respect him less now, and they’ll talk. Soon everyone will know he’s a rogga-lover, which is dangerous. Headmen can’t afford that kind of weakness when a Season’s coming on. But for the moment what matters most to you is this moment of public decency, which is a kindness and an honor you never expected to receive. You aren’t sure how to react to it.

He nods, uncomfortable as well, and turns away as you start toward the gap in the gate. Perhaps he does not see Karra nod to another of the gate-minders; perhaps he does not see the latter woman quickly shoulder her weapon and orient it on you. Perhaps, you will think later, Rask would have stopped the woman, or somehow prevented everything to come, if he had seen.

You see her, though, mostly out of the periphery of your vision. Then everything happens too fast to think. And because you don’t think, because you’ve been trying not to think and this means you’re out of the habit, because thinking means you will remember that your family is dead and everything that meant happiness is now a lie and thinking of that will make you break and start screaming and screaming and screaming

and because once upon a time and in another life you learned to respond to sudden threats in a very particular way, you

reach for the air around you and pull and

brace your feet against the earth beneath you and anchor and narrow and

when the woman fires the crossbow, the bolt blurs toward you. Just before the bolt hits, it bursts into a million glittering, frozen flecks.

(Naughty, naughty, chides a voice in your head. The voice of your conscience, deep and male. You forget this thought almost the instant it occurs. That voice is from another life.)

Life. You look at the woman who just tried to kill you.

“What the — Shit!” Karra stares at you, as if stunned by your failure to fall down dead. He crouches, hands balled into fists, nearly jumping up and down in his agitation. “Shoot her again! Kill her! Shoot, Earth damn it, before—”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Rask, finally noticing what’s happening, turns back. It’s too late.

Down below your feet and everyone else’s, a shake begins.

It’s hard to tell, at first. There is no warning jangle of sesuna, as there would be if the movement of the earth came from the earth. That’s why people like these fear people like you, because you’re beyond sense and preparation. You’re a surprise, like a sudden toothache, like a heart attack. The vibration of what you’re doing rises, fast, to become a rumble of tension that can be perceived with ears and feet and skin if not sessapinae, but by this point it’s too late.

Karra frowns, looking at the ground beneath his feet. Crossbow Woman pauses in the middle of loading another bolt, eyes widening as she stares at the shivering string of her weapon.

You stand surrounded by swirling flecks of snow and disintegrated crossbow bolt. Around your feet, there is a two-foot circle of frost riming the packed earth. Your locks waft gently in the rising breeze.

“You can’t.” Rask whispers the words, his eyes widening at the look on your face. (You don’t know what you look like right now, but it must be bad.) He shakes his head as if denial will stop this, taking a step back and then another. “Essun.”

“You killed him,” you say to Rask. This is not a rational thing. You mean you-plural, even though you’re speaking to you-specific. Rask didn’t try to kill you, had nothing to do with Uche, but the attempt on your life has triggered something raw and furious and cold. You cowards. You animals, who look at a child and see prey. Jija’s the one to blame for Uche, some part of you knows that — but Jija grew up here in Tirimo. The kind of hate that can make a man murder his own son? It came from everyone around you.

Rask inhales. “Essun—”

And then the valley floor splits open.

The initial jolt of this is violent enough to knock everyone standing to the ground and sway every house in Tirimo. Then those houses judder and rattle as the jolt smooths into a steady, ongoing vibration. Saider’s Cart-Repair Shop is the first to collapse, the old wooden frame of the building sliding sideways off its foundation. There are screams from inside, and one woman manages to run out before the door frame crumples inward. On the eastern edge of town, closest to the mountain ridges that frame the valley, a rockslide begins. A portion of the eastern comm wall and three houses are buried beneath a sudden grinding slurry of mud and trees and rocks. Far below the ground, where no one but you can detect, the clay walls of the underground aquifer that supplies the village wells are breached. The aquifer begins to drain. They will not realize for weeks that you killed the town in this moment, but they will remember when the wells run dry.

Those who survive the next few moments will, anyhow. From your feet, the circle of frost and swirling snow begins to expand. Rapidly.

It catches Rask first. He tries to run as the edge of your torus rolls toward him, but he’s simply too close. It catches him in mid-lunge, glazing his feet and solidifying his legs and eating its way up his spine until, in the span of a breath, he falls to the ground stone-stiff, his flesh turning as gray as his hair. The next to be consumed by the circle is Karra, who’s still screaming for someone to kill you. The shout dies in his throat as he falls, flash-frozen, the last of his warm breath hissing out through clenched teeth and frosting the ground as you steal the heat from it.

You aren’t just inflicting death on your fellow villagers, of course. A bird perched on a nearby fence falls over frozen, too. The grass crisps, the ground grows hard, and the air hisses and howls as moisture and density is snatched from its substance… but no one has ever mourned earthworms.

Fast. The air swirls briskly all down Seven Seasons now, making the trees rustle and anyone nearby cry out in alarm as they realize what’s happening. The ground hasn’t stopped moving. You sway with the ground, but because you know its rhythms, it is easy for you to shift your balance with it. You do this without thinking, because there is only room left in you for one thought.

These people killed Uche. Their hate, their fear, their unprovoked violence. They.

(He.)

Killed your son.

(Jija killed your son.)

People run out into the streets, screaming and wondering why there was no warning, and you kill any of them who are stupid or panicked enough to come near.

Jija. They are Jija. The whole rusting town is Jija.

Two things save the comm, however, or at least most of it. The first is that most of the buildings don’t collapse. Tirimo might be too poor to build with stone, but most of its builders are ethical and well paid enough to use only techniques that stonelore recommends: the hanging frame, the center beam. Second, the fault line of the valley — which you’re currently peeling apart with a thought — is actually a few miles to the west. Because of these things, most of Tirimo will survive this, at least until the wells die.

Because of these things. And because of the terrified, bouncing scream of a little boy as his father runs out of a madly swaying building.

You pivot toward the sound instantly, habitually, orienting on the source with a mother’s ears. The man clutches the boy with both arms. He doesn’t even have a runny-sack; the first and only thing he took the time to grab was his son. The boy looks nothing like Uche. But you stare as the child bounces and reaches back toward the house for something the man has left behind (favorite toy? the boy’s mother?), and suddenly, finally, you think.

And then you stop.

Because, oh uncaring Earth. Look what you’ve done.

The shake stops. The air hisses again, this time as warmer, moister air rushes into the space around you. The ground and your skin grow instantly damp with condensation. The rumble of the valley fades, leaving only screams and the creak of falling wood and the shake-siren that has only belatedly, forlornly, begun to wail.

You close you eyes, aching and shaking and thinking, No. I killed Uche. By being his mother. There are tears on your face. And here you thought you couldn’t cry.

But there’s no one between you and the gate now. The gate-minders who could, have fled; besides Rask and Karra, several more were too slow to get away. You shoulder the runny-sack and head for the gate opening, scrubbing at your face with one hand. You’re smiling, too, though, and it is a bitter, aching thing. You just can’t help acknowledging the irony of the whole thing. Didn’t want to wait for death to come for you. Right.

Stupid, stupid woman. Death was always here. Death is you.

* * *

Never forget what you are.

— Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse ten