The Ridge
The road turned to a path on the third morning.
No clear moment where it happened. Just a gradual narrowing, the stones sinking deeper and then disappearing altogether into packed earth, and then the packed earth giving way to rock and root and whatever line boots had worn into the hillside over generations. Thuse walked ahead for the first time since Donath. He knew the path.
Frost had come in the night. The scrub was grey-white with it, stiff, the ground under their feet harder than the days before. Kai’s breath came in short clouds and she let the climb do what it was going to do to her legs and stopped thinking about the pace.
Ace was breathing harder than usual. He kept it quiet.
Mary climbed without complaint, her braid tight, her eyes on the path ahead. Two days of road had burned away whatever softness she’d carried out of Donath. Her feet were sure on the rock now, her chin up, her eyes ahead.
They crested the ridge at midmorning.
Kai had been watching the path. When she looked up, the sky was everywhere.
She stopped.
The ridge ran east and west farther than she could see in either direction, a long spine of pale rock with wind moving hard across it. But it was what was behind her that stopped her. The whole Southlands, laid out below, dropping away in long fields of colour and shadow. She could see the shape of things she had lived inside her whole life. A dark thread that might be the river. A pale smear of worked ground that could be Donath, could be any of a dozen settlements, impossible to tell from here. The green-grey of lowland farmland running all the way to where the sky met it.
Everything she knew was small from here. Not diminished, just small. The right size.
She stood on the ridge and the wind pushed at her coat and she looked at it for a long time.
Mary came up beside her and stood without speaking. Ace put his hand once on Kai’s shoulder and then moved off to sit on a flat rock behind them, giving them the view.
Ahead, to the north, the land went on. A different country. Darker, the vegetation lower and denser, no visible road. No sign that people had worked it. A north without names.
Kai had spent her entire life not knowing this existed thirty miles from her door.
Mary said, quietly, “We’re going to have to go back someday.”
Kai looked at her.
“Not yet,” Mary said. “I know. But someday.”
She wasn’t sad about it. Just noting the fact. Donath was back there in that pale smear. Their father’s house. The Third Communal. Old Jara and Tomin and the worn table with the game scratched into it. All of it small enough now to hold in one hand.
“Someday,” Kai agreed.
Thuse was already moving along the ridgeline.
He went north and east, following the spine of the ridge, picking a line across the pale rock. Kai watched him for a moment, then followed. Mary stayed at the view. Ace stayed with Mary.
They walked the ridge alone.
He stopped at a place where a broad ledge of rock faced east, sheltered on three sides by larger formations. Out of the wind. The cold was still there but manageable. And growing from the cracks and seams in the rock, up the face of the ledge, through every gap the stone offered: the flora.
More of it than Kai had ever seen in one place. Dense, low, the dark leaves catching what light reached the rock face. The white flowers closed.
Thuse crouched beside a cluster of it.
Kai crouched too.
“Lift a leaf,” he said.
She did. Turned it over, looked at the underside. In the full daylight the veins were just veins, thin, pale, carrying nothing visible. She held it for a moment and set it back.
“Nothing,” she said.
“No. Not now.” Thuse looked east, above the horizon. “The cold-season constellation is there. Invisible in the daylight. But present.” He paused. “The further north you are, the higher it sits. At the Southlands it leans toward the horizon. Here it passes almost directly overhead.” He looked at the plant. “The connection is strongest where the sky is closest.”
Kai sat back on her heels and looked at the ridge full of flora.
“I looked at it two nights ago,” she said. “Before dawn. Back at the camp.”
“I know.”
“The dark was thinner along the veins.”
“Yes.”
The wind moved across the rock above them. Somewhere behind, she could hear Ace and Mary. Low voices, the sound of a pack being set down.
“My mother sat with it,” Kai said. “For years, according to Father. He stopped asking what she was doing.”
Thuse was quiet for a moment.
“She found what you found,” he said. “The vein-light. Before anyone showed her. In the dark, on her own.” He moved his hand along the edge of the rock without touching the plant. “And she kept going. Past the light.”
Kai looked at him.
“What comes after the light?”
Thuse considered this.
“There is a listening,” he said. “The light in the leaves is the beginning. The sky and the earth are speaking to each other, and the flora is where that conversation can be heard. Most people look for the light and stop there. Your mother learned to listen.”
The wind again. The rock was cold under her hands.
“Was she on this path?” Kai asked.
“She was.” Thuse stood, looked out over the north. “She was close to becoming a practitioner. Years of sitting with it, listening, learning the alignment patterns. She had gotten further than most people do in a lifetime.” He turned. “And then she died.”
Kai held that for a moment.
“And now you’re here,” she said.
He looked at her. “And now I’m here. Yes.”
“Because she left it unfinished.”
“Because she left it unfinished, and because the line doesn’t end with her, and because someone has to know how to listen before the Shake gets worse than it already is.”
Kai sat on the cold ledge and looked at the Southlands. The weight of it was real. She didn’t push back against it.
After a while she said: “How much worse.”
Thuse looked north, as he often did.
“Worse than the stories,” he said. “Worse than what your father’s father’s generation called the worst year they’d known.” A pause. “The world is moving toward something. The Shake is one of the ways you can feel it.”
Kai turned this over.
“And listening to the flora does what, exactly?”
“It doesn’t stop it,” Thuse said. “Nothing stops it. But a practitioner can feel what’s coming before it arrives. Can act instead of react.” He looked down at the ledge full of flora. “Your mother understood that. She wanted to be ready.”
The greater light was past its high point now, leaning toward the west. Kai’s hands were cold. She rubbed them once on her coat and didn’t stand.
Ace had a small fire burning in the lee of the rock by the time they came back. He’d found enough dry scrub in the sheltered spots to make it work. Mary was sitting close to it, wrap across her shoulders, watching the north with their mother’s expression on her face.
Thuse stood at the fire for a moment and then said: “We’ll camp here tonight.”
“Here?” Ace looked at the sky.
“The cold-season constellation will be overhead before midnight. Directly overhead.” He looked at Kai. “Tonight the leaves will be worth looking at.”
Kai looked at the dense cluster of flora across the ledge. The dark leaves, the closed white flowers, all of it waiting.
She had a whole night ahead of her.
For the first time since Donath, she was in no hurry for it to end.