The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(11)
Some of the children in question are standing on the porch of the dormitory, awakened by the concussion of the sapphire when Nassun summoned it into longknife form. They have witnessed everything, Nassun sees. A couple are weeping at the sight of their Guardians dead, but most just stare at her and Schaffa in silent shock. One of the smaller children is vomiting off the side of the steps.
Schaffa gazes at them for a long moment, and then glances sidelong at her. Some of the coldness is still there, saying what his voice does not. “They’ll need to leave Jekity, quickly. Without Guardians, the commfolk are unlikely to tolerate their presence.” Or Schaffa can kill them. That’s what he’s done with every other orogene they’ve met who isn’t under his control. They are either his, or they are a threat.
“No,” Nassun blurts. Speaking to that silent coldness, not to what he’s said. The coldness increases fractionally. Schaffa never likes it when she says no. She takes a deep breath, marshaling a little more calm, and corrects herself. “Please, Schaffa. I just… I can’t take any more.”
This is rank hypocrisy. The decision Nassun has recently made, a silent promise over her father’s corpse, belies it. Schaffa cannot know what she has chosen, but at the corner of her vision, she is painfully aware of Steel’s lingering, blood-painted smile.
She presses her lips together and means it anyway. It isn’t a lie. She can’t take the cruelty, the endless suffering; that’s the whole point. What she means to do will be, if nothing else, quick and merciful.
Schaffa regards her for a moment. Then he twitch-winces a little, as she has seen him do often in the past few weeks. When the spasm passes, he puts on a smile and comes over to her, though first he closes his hand firmly around the metal bit he’s taken from Umber. “How is your shoulder?”
She reaches up to touch it. The cloth of her sleep-shirt is wet with blood, but not sodden, and she can still use the arm. “It hurts.”
“That will last for a time, I’m afraid.” He looks around, then rises and goes to Umber’s corpse. Ripping off one of Umber’s shirtsleeves – one that isn’t as splattered with blood as the other, Nassun notes with distant relief – he comes over and pushes up her sleeve, then helps her tie the strip of cloth around her shoulder. He ties it tight. Nassun knows this is good and will possibly prevent her from needing to have the wound sewn up, but for a moment the pain is worse and she leans against him briefly. He allows this, stroking her hair with his free hand. The gore-flecked other hand, Nassun notes, stays clenched tight around that metal shard.
“What will you do with it?” Nassun asks, staring at the clenched hand. She cannot help imagining something malevolent there, snaking its tendrils forth and looking for another person to infect with the Evil Earth’s will.
“I don’t know,” Schaffa says in a heavy voice. “It’s no danger to me, but I remember that in…” He frowns for a moment, visibly groping for a memory that is gone. “That once, elsewhere, we simply recycled them. Here, I suppose I’ll have to find somewhere isolated to drop it, and hope no one stumbles across it anytime soon. What will you do with that?”
Nassun follows his gaze to where the sapphire longknife, untended, has floated around behind her and positioned itself in the air, hovering precisely a foot away from her back. It moves slightly with her movements, humming faintly. She doesn’t understand why it’s doing that, though she takes some comfort from its looming, quiescent strength. “I guess I should put it back.”
“How did you…?”
“I just needed it. It knew what I needed and changed for me.” Nassun shrugs a little. It’s so hard to explain these things in words. Then she clutches at his shirt with her uninjured hand, because she knows that when Schaffa doesn’t answer a question, it isn’t a good thing. “The others, Schaffa.”
He sighs finally. “I’ll help them prepare packs. Can you walk?”
Nassun’s so relieved that for the moment she feels like she can fly. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Schaffa!”
He shakes his head, clearly rueful, though he smiles again. “Go to your father’s house and take anything useful and portable, little one. I’ll meet you there.”
She hesitates. If Schaffa decides to kill the other children of Found Moon… He won’t, will he? He’s said he won’t.
Schaffa pauses, raising an eyebrow above his smile, the picture of polite, calm inquiry. It’s an illusion. The silver is still a lashing whip within Schaffa, trying to goad him into killing her. He must be in astonishing pain. He resists the goad, however, as he has for weeks. He does not kill her, because he loves her. And she can trust nothing, no one, if she does not trust him.
“Okay,” Nassun says. “I’ll see you at Daddy’s.”
As she pulls away from him, she glances at Steel, who has turned to face Schaffa as well. Somewhere in the past few breaths, Steel has gotten the blood off his lips. She doesn’t know how. But he has held out one gray hand toward them – no. Toward Schaffa. Schaffa tilts his head at this for a moment, considering, and then after a moment he deposits the bloody iron shard into Steel’s hand. Steel’s hand flicks closed, then uncurls again, slowly, as if performing a sleight-of-hand trick. But the iron shard is gone. Schaffa inclines his head in polite thanks.