The Ridge
The road turned to a path on the third morning.
No clear moment where it happened, just a gradual narrowing as the stones sank deeper and then disappeared altogether into packed earth, and then the packed earth gave 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, leading now instead of flanking, and the sureness of his feet on the rock told Kai he'd walked this path before.
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, and he kept it quiet enough that she only noticed because she'd spent forty years listening to the difference between her father's normal and his not-normal.
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, her eyes on the ground and her mind on her footing, and when she finally 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, small and clear, each piece exactly the size it had always been but seen now from far enough away to hold it all at once.
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 into a different country that was darker than the Southlands, the vegetation lower and thicker, no visible road or sign that people had worked it. A north without names.
Kai had spent her entire life not knowing any of this existed thirty miles from her door, and she wasn't sure yet whether that made her angry or embarrassed or just tired.
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, and the word felt honest.
Thuse was already moving along the ridgeline.
He went north and east, following the spine of the ridge and picking a line across the pale rock that only he could see. Kai watched him for a moment and then followed, leaving Mary at the view and Ace with Mary.
They walked the ridge alone, just the two of them, the wind between them loud enough to swallow anything they didn't say out loud.
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 still present but manageable now that the rock walls blocked the worst of it. 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, and Kai crouched beside him.
"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, and tried not to let the disappointment show.
"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 you did."
"The dark was thinner along the veins," she said. "It was faint but it was there."
"Yes," he said.
The wind moved across the rock above them, and somewhere behind she could hear Ace and Mary, low voices and the sound of a pack being set down on stone.
"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 and felt the question forming before she had the words for it.
"What comes after the light?"
Thuse considered this for a long moment.
"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 came again, and the rock was cold under her hands.
"Was she on this path?" Kai asked, and felt the answer already sitting in her chest before he spoke.
"She was." Thuse stood and 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, the weight of it sitting between them on the cold rock.
"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 south at the Southlands, everything she'd known laid out small and distant below her, and the weight of what Thuse was asking her to carry was real and she didn't push back against it.
After a while she said: "How much worse are we talking about."
Thuse looked north, which was where he always looked when the answer was hard.
"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 in the wind, letting the words settle into her understanding of what the world actually was.
"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, and Kai's hands were cold. She rubbed them once on her coat and didn't stand, because standing would mean the conversation was over and she wasn't done yet.
Ace had a small fire burning in the lee of the rock by the time they came back, having found enough dry scrub in the sheltered spots between the formations 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 and then at the exposed rock around them.
"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, and for the first time since Donath, she was in no hurry for it to end.