The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(57)
Schaffa’s voice is very soft and cold. “This could have killed her.”
Steel is still smiling. Nassun finally begins to suspect that this is Steel’s attempt to mock a Guardian’s frequent smiles. “Yes, if she hadn’t used the obelisk.” There is nothing of apology in his tone. “Death is what usually happens when someone charges the system. Orogenes capable of channeling magic can survive it, however – as can Guardians, who usually can draw upon an outside source.”
Magic? Nassun thinks in fleeting confusion.
But Schaffa stiffens. Nassun is confused by his fury at first, and then she realizes: Ordinary Guardians, the uncontaminated kind, draw silver from the earth and put it into the vines. Guardians like Umber and Nida can probably do the same, though they would try only if it served Father Earth’s interests. But Schaffa, despite his corestone, cannot rely on the Earth’s silver, and cannot draw more of it at will. If Nassun was in danger from the vine, that was because of Schaffa’s inadequacy.
Or so Steel means to suggest. Nassun stares at him incredulously, then turns back to Schaffa. She’s getting some of her strength back already. “I knew I could do it,” she says. Schaffa is still glaring at Steel. Nassun balls up her fists in his shirt and tugs to make him look at her. He blinks and does so, in surprise. “I knew! And I wouldn’t have let you do the vines, Schaffa. It’s because of me that —”
She falters then, her throat closing with impending tears. Some of this is just nerves and exhaustion. Much of it, though, is the sense of guilt that has been lurking and growing within her for months, only now spilling out because she’s too tired to keep it in. It’s her fault that Schaffa has lost everything: Found Moon, the children he cared for, the companionship of his fellow Guardians, the reliable power that should have come from his corestone, even peaceful sleep at night. She’s why he’s down here in the dust of a dead city, and why they’re about to entrust themselves to machinery older than Sanze and maybe the whole Stillness, to go to an impossible place and do an impossible thing.
Schaffa sees all this instantly, with the skill of a longtime caretaker of children. The frown clears from his face, and he shakes his head and crouches to face her. “No,” he says. “Nothing is your fault, my Nassun. No matter what it has cost me, and no matter what it may cost yet, always remember that I – that I —”
His expression falters. For a fleeting instant, that horrible, blurry confusion is there, threatening to wipe away even this moment in which he means to declare his strength to her. Nassun catches her breath and focuses on him in the silver and bares her teeth as she sees that the corestone in him is alive again, working viciously along his nerves and spidering over his brain, even now trying to force him to heel.
No, she thinks in a sudden fury. She grips his shoulders and shakes him. It takes her whole body to do this because he’s such a big man, but it makes him blink and focus through the blur. “You’re Schaffa,” she says. “You are! And… and you chose.” Because that’s important. That’s the thing the world doesn’t want people like them to do. “You’re not my Guardian anymore, you’re —” She dares to say it aloud at last. “You’re my new father. Okay? And th-that means we’re family, and… and we have to work together. That’s what family does, right? You let me protect you sometimes.”
Schaffa stares at her, then he sighs and leans forward to kiss her forehead. He stays there after the kiss, nose pressed into her hair; Nassun makes a mighty effort and does not burst into tears. When he speaks at last, the horrible blurriness has faded, as have even some of the pain-lines around his eyes. “Very well, Nassun. Sometimes, you may protect me.”
That settled, she sniffs, wipes her nose on a sleeve, and then turns to face Steel. He hasn’t changed position, so she pulls away from Schaffa and goes over to him, stopping right in front of him. His eyes shift to follow her, lazily slow. “Don’t do that again.”
She half expects him to say, in his too-knowing voice, Do what? Instead he says, “It’s a mistake to bring him with us.”
Cold washes through Nassun, followed by hot. Is it a threat, or a warning? She doesn’t like it, either way. Her jaw feels so tight that she almost bites her tongue trying to speak. “I don’t care.”
Silence in reply. Is this capitulation? Agreement? Refusal to argue? Nassun doesn’t know. She wants to yell at him: Say you won’t hurt Schaffa again! Even though it feels wrong to yell at any adult. Yet she has also spent the past year and a half learning that adults are people, and sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes somebody should yell at them.
But Nassun is tired, so instead she retreats to Schaffa, taking his hand tightly and glaring back at Steel, daring him to say anything else. He doesn’t, though. Good.
The huge green thing sort of ripples then, and they all turn to face it. Something is – Nassun shudders, both revolted and fascinated. Something is growing from the weird nodules all over the thing’s surface. Each is several feet long, narrow, featherlike, attenuating near the tips. In a moment there are dozens of them, curling and waving gently in an unfelt breeze. Cilia, Nassun thinks suddenly, remembering a picture in an old biomestry creche book. Of course. Why wouldn’t people who made buildings out of plants also make carriages that look like germs?