The Flora

She woke before the others.

The fire had gone to coals and the clearing was still, no wind and no Shake, just the cold pressing down through the dark, heavy and close. Kai lay on her side and watched the last red glow of the coals flare once and dim until it looked like nothing more than a few dull stones.

She sat up slowly, joints stiff, and listened for any sign of the ground deciding to move again.

Across the clearing, Mary was a shape under her wrap. Ace had his back to a flat stone, coat across his chest, head dropped forward. Thuse sat at the edge of camp on his low stone with his head tilted back toward the sky, either watching or sleeping with his eyes open. She couldn't tell which, and she decided it didn't matter.

The cold-season constellation was lower now. It had crossed overhead while she wasn't paying attention and was leaning toward the west, the seven stars beginning to flatten into the horizon's haze. She thought about the hand-width Thuse had described, lower last month at this hour, and held the position in her mind.

The flora was where she'd noticed it last night. She crossed the camp and crouched at the base of the stones. Dark leaves, small flowers shut against the cold. She lifted one of the leaves and turned it over.

The dark was thinner along the veins.

She held still, her breath coming out in a slow cloud, and after a moment she set the leaf back down. She didn't feel anything in her hand the way she had at the Cellar wall, no warmth answering her skin, but the thinness along the veins was there all the same, a quiet fact that didn't care whether she could explain it. Behind her, wood shifted in the fire, and when she turned, Thuse had leaned forward and added two sticks from the pile Kai had broken the night before. The coals caught into a small flame. He sat back on his stone and watched it.

She crossed back to the camp and sat on her bedroll and watched the fire build. Across the clearing the constellation had gone. The sky in the east was going dark-grey at the bottom. The long blue before the greater light.

Mary stirred, resettled, went still again.

She sat with the fire and the leaf and the vein-light, with the crack in the road and the pale rockface and the constellation moving across a sky she'd never thought to read.

She put a hand flat on the cold ground beside her. The earth was still, solid under her palm, and she realized how rare it was to trust the ground without thinking about it.

The Shake was milder in the cold season. She had always known that, had built her whole life around it, and had never once asked why it should be true.

She was asking now, because she had finally met someone who spoke as if the world had reasons, not just habits.

Ace woke when the greater light crested the ridge to the east. No transition. Just present, hands already moving to check the fire and the packs and his daughters in the same quiet sweep. He looked at Kai, and she nodded, and he nodded back.

They broke camp without talking.

The road had straightened by mid-morning, dropping into a dry creek bed and following it north. The cold was still there but it had lost some of its insistence, or Kai had stopped noticing it.

Kai walked ahead. Ace was a few paces behind her. They had settled into the same spacing as the day before without discussing it.

Mary fell into step beside Thuse. Kai could hear them back there. Feet on stone, two cadences trying to match and failing. Thuse's stride was long and even. Mary's had a slight quickening to it.

Then Mary asked, "How long have you known our family?"

Kai slowed without meaning to.

"A long time," Thuse said.

Mary didn't let it go. "How long is a long time?"

"Your grandmother's grandmother was a young woman when I first came south," Thuse said, and he said it as if that answer should be enough.

Kai stopped anyway, because the words did something to her sense of scale that she didn't like.

She stood in the road with her back to them and listened, letting Ace and Thuse and Mary fall closer behind her until she could hear each word clearly.

"How old are you?" Mary said.

A short sound came from Thuse, dry and near the edge of a laugh. "Old enough that the number stops meaning much." He glanced at her. "Old enough to have watched the same mistakes repeat until they start to look like the only story people know how to tell."

Mary walked on. A few paces, and then: "Did you know our mother?" Mary asked, and the question came out quiet, like she didn't want it overheard by anything but the road.

"Yes," Thuse said.

Mary hesitated, then nodded toward the place they'd camped. "The plant at the edge of camp, where Kai went this morning. Did she know what it was?"

Kai turned.

Thuse's eyes had found her before she'd finished turning. They held for a moment, his and hers, with the road and the cold between them.

"Your mother knew," he said to Mary, still watching Kai. "She came to it before I could show her, and once she did she never forgot it."

Kai held his gaze and felt something tighten in her chest at the certainty in his voice, because it sounded like grief and pride braided together.

Then she turned north and kept walking, because standing still in the road was starting to feel like the wrong kind of listening.

She caught up with Ace in the early afternoon, when the road widened briefly and the creek bed fell away to their left. He had been carrying the same pace all day, and she matched it without thinking.

They walked together for a stretch.

"Did you know?" she said. "About the plant. What she could see in it."

Ace was quiet long enough that she thought he might not answer. Then: "She'd take it out in the evenings sometimes. Just sit with it. Whatever it gave her, she kept to herself." He paused. "I stopped asking what she was doing. The look on her face when she did it. I didn't want to interrupt that."

Kai kept her eyes on the road.

"She never told you."

"No."

"Did it bother you?"

Ace walked another few steps. "No," he said. "She had whole rooms in her I never got to see. That's not the same thing as being kept out." He glanced at Kai. "You know that."

They walked on. The terrain had been rising all afternoon, the scrub thinning out, the rock faces on either side growing taller.

Ace saw it first.

"There," he said.

Kai looked up.

The ridge.

Not the suggestion of it she'd been tracking since the ford, not the faint change in horizon that could have been a trick of light. The ridge itself. A long, dark edge against the sky, running east to west farther than she could see, and the sight of it made her stomach tighten because it meant the road was really taking them somewhere.

Still a day's walk, but real now, a thing with an actual shape that didn't care whether she felt ready for it.

She stopped.

Thuse came up beside her. He stood there for a moment, looking at the same line on the horizon.

"That's it," Kai said.

"Yes."

"What's up there?"

Thuse looked at her.

"That," he said, "is what we're going to find out."