The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(15)

So you’re holding your own, just slowly at first, and you’re getting faster as the days go by. But here’s the problem with all of this: You’re going the wrong way.

Tonkee comes over to sit by you one evening. “You can’t leave until we’re a lot further west,” she says without preamble. “Almost to the Merz, I’m thinking. If you want to make it that far, you’re going to have to patch things up with Ykka.”

You glare at her, though for Tonkee, this is discreet. She’s waited till Hjarka is snoring in her bedroll and Lerna’s gone off to use the camp latrine. Hoa is still nearby, standing unsubtle guard over your small group within the comm encampment, the curves of his black marble face underlit by your fire. Tonkee knows he’s loyal to you, though, to the degree that loyalty means anything to him.

“Ykka hates me,” you finally say, after glaring fails to produce anything like chagrin or regret in Tonkee.

She rolls her eyes. “Trust me, I know hate. What Ykka’s got is… scared, and a good bit of mad, but some of that you deserve. You’ve put her people in danger.”

“I saved her people from danger.”

Across the encampment, as if to illustrate your point, you notice someone moving about clunkily. It’s one of the Rennanis soldiers, a few of whom were captured alive after the last battle. They’ve put a pranger on her – a hinged wooden collar round her neck, with holes in the planks holding her arms up and apart, linked by two chains to manacles on her ankles. Primitive but effective. Lerna’s been tending the prisoners’ chafing sores, and you understand they’re allowed to put the prangers aside at night. It’s better treatment than Castrimans would have gotten from Rennanis if the situations were reversed, but still, it makes everything awkward. It’s not like the Rennies can leave, after all. Even without the prangers, if any one of them escapes now, with no supplies and lacking the protection of a large group, they’ll be meat within days. The prangers are just insult on top of injury, and a disquieting reminder to all that things could be worse. You look away.

Tonkee sees you looking. “Yeah, you saved Castrima from one danger and then delivered them into something just as bad. Ykka only wanted the first half of that.”

“I couldn’t have avoided the second half. Should I have just let the stone eaters kill all the roggas? Kill her? If they’d succeeded, none of the geode’s mechanisms would’ve worked anyway!”

“She knows that. That’s why I said it wasn’t hate. But…” Tonkee sighs as if you’re being especially stupid. “Look. Castrima was – is – an experiment. Not the geode, the people. She’s always known it was precarious, trying to make a comm out of strays and roggas, but it was working. She made the old-timers understand that we needed the newcommers. Got everybody to think of roggas as people. Got them to agree to live underground, in a deadciv ruin that could’ve killed us all at any moment. Even kept them from turning on each other when that gray stone eater gave them a reason —”

“I stopped that,” you mutter. But you’re listening.

“You helped,” Tonkee concedes, “but if it had just been you? You know full well it wouldn’t have worked. Castrima works because of Ykka. Because they know she’ll die to keep this comm going. Help Castrima, and Ykka will be on your side again.”

It will be weeks, maybe even months, before you reach the now-vacant Equatorial city of Rennanis. “I know where Nassun is now,” you say, seething. “By the time Castrima gets to Rennanis, she might be somewhere else!”

Tonkee sighs. “It’s been a few weeks already, Essun.”

And Nassun was probably somewhere else before you even woke up. You’re shaking. It’s not rational and you know it, but you blurt, “But if I go now, maybe – maybe I can catch up, maybe Hoa can tune in on her again, maybe I can —” Then you falter silent because you hear the shaky, high-pitched note of your own voice and your mother instincts kick back in, rusty but unblunted, to chide you: Stop whining. Which you are. So you bite back more words, but you’re still shaking, a little.

Tonkee shakes her head, an expression on her face that might be sympathy, or maybe it’s just rueful acknowledgment of how pathetic you sound. “Well, at least you know it’s a bad idea. But if you’re that determined, then you’d better get started now.” She turns away. Can’t really blame her, can you? Venture into the almost certainly deadly unknown with a woman who’s destroyed multiple communities, or stay with a comm that at least theoretically will soon have a home again? That’s barely even a question.

But you should really know better than to try to predict what Tonkee will do. She sighs, after you subside and sit back on the rock you’ve been using for a chair. “I can probably wrangle some extra supplies out of the quartermaster, if I tell them I need to go scout something for the Innovators. They’re used to me doing that. But I’m not sure I can convince them to give me enough for two.”

It’s a surprise to realize how grateful you are, for her – hmm. Loyalty isn’t the word for it. Attachment? Maybe. Maybe it’s just that you’ve been her research subject for all this time already, so of course she’s not going to let you slip away when she’s followed you across decades and half the Stillness.

But then you frown. “Two? Not three?” You thought things were working out with her and Hjarka.