The Night

The greater light was gone behind the ridge to the west before the fire was fully built.

Ace worked by feel in the last of the dusk, packing the scrub tight, coaxing the coals from the embers of a fire made earlier in the lee of the ledge. Mary sat close with her wrap pulled up and her knees drawn in. Above them the sky deepened fast. In the Southlands, light pooled in low places before it left. Up here the ridge cut off every angle. Stars came out hard.

Kai didn’t sit.

She stood at the edge of the ledge and looked north, and for the first time understood why Thuse always did. From here the dark had depth. The land dropped away below, then the faint grey shapes of what might be trees or rock formations far down, then nothing, then stars beginning where the nothing ended. It was like looking down into a well that had no floor.

She stayed until Ace called her back to the fire.

Thuse ate and then sat with his back against the rock face and watched the sky clear. He said almost nothing for the better part of an hour. Mary fell asleep by the fire with her head on her pack. Ace tended the coals, checked on his daughters with his eyes every few minutes, and waited.

Kai watched the sky.

The cold-season constellation moved. She was tracking it now without thinking about it. Just the corner of her sight, checking, noting. It was still east and climbing. Higher than it had been at the thorn grove camp. Higher than she’d ever seen it from Donath.

When it was nearly overhead, Thuse stood.

He crossed to where Kai was sitting and looked at the constellation for a moment without speaking.

Then he looked at the flora covering the ledge beside them.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t point. He looked at the flora and then walked back to his stone near the fire and sat down.

Kai understood. She crossed to the ledge and crouched.

The underside of the leaf was not what it had been at the camp.

It was more than thinner dark along the veins. The whole surface of the underside ran with a soft, cold illumination. Not bright. Nothing that would light your hand if you held it close. Unmistakable. The veins were the brightest parts, threadlike lines of pale light running to every edge, and between them the leaf-skin itself held a faint luminescence, as if the leaf were a window and something was pressing gently against the other side.

She held the leaf and looked at it for a long time.

She tried what Thuse had described. She stopped looking and started listening.

What she heard first was the wind, and the fire, and the breathing of the others. She let those go. What she heard under that was harder to name. A low thing. Steady. Running through the rock under her feet, through the ledge under her knees, up through her palm where she held the edge of the stone. Not sound, exactly. Pressure. The earth was pressing back against her, steady and present.

She stayed with it.

The pressure was irregular. She hadn’t noticed that at first. She’d taken it for a constant and only after a long time did she feel the pattern underneath: a deep, slow pulse. Long pauses. Then a gathering. Long pauses. Then again.

She had felt this before.

The Shake. Coming.

Not now. Not yet. But the earth was already moving the way it moved before the worst ones. The long pre-trembling that people in the Southlands had learned to sleep through because it went on for days before anything arrived. She had slept through it her whole life without understanding what it was.

She understood now that it was the earth telling you something.

She set the leaf down and looked at Thuse across the fire.

He was watching her. He had been watching her the whole time.

It came an hour before dawn.

The ledge shuddered. Rock groaned somewhere below in the dark, a sound like a door too large to hang properly on its frame. The fire jumped. Ace was on his feet before Kai could fully process the motion. His hand found Mary’s shoulder, pulled her upright. Both of them pressed back against the rock face without discussion, without hesitation. Years of knowing what to do.

Kai grabbed the ledge and held.

The Shake ran through the rock in two waves, a pause between them, then a longer subsidence. Deeper. Slower. As if the whole ridge were settling into a new position. A rockslide somewhere to the east, the sound of it running down in the dark for a long time after the shaking stopped.

Then still.

The fire had scattered but not gone out. Ace kicked the embers back together and checked his daughters again with his eyes. Mary was breathing fast but steady. Kai was on her knees on the ledge, one hand on the rock, the other in her lap.

Thuse sat exactly as he had before. His back against the stone. His hands on his knees. Undisturbed.

“You felt it before it arrived,” he said. It was not a question.

Kai looked at her hand, the one that had held the leaf.

“Yes,” she said.

Thuse was quiet for a moment. Then: “Your mother never got that far.”

The fire cracked. Somewhere below in the dark, a last loose stone reached the bottom of its slide.

Kai stayed on the ledge and felt the silence that came after a Shake, the held breath of it, the world waiting to see if it was done. She had lived inside that silence her whole life. It had always felt like fear.

It felt different now.

Ace made tea at first light. Something Old Jara had given him before they left. Dried leaves wrapped in cloth, for the road. He didn’t explain what it was, just heated the water and handed cups around, and the four of them sat in the cold above the Southlands and drank it while the greater light came up slowly in the east.

The Southlands were far below, still in shadow, the pale smear of worked ground and the dark thread of the river indistinct in the early grey.

Mary looked at Kai over her cup.

Kai looked back.

“What happened out there?” Mary said. Not accusatory. Just asking.

Kai thought about how to answer. “I felt the Shake before it came,” she said. “In the plant.”

Mary turned this over. Ace watched the valley below and said nothing. The greater light kept climbing.

After a long time Ace said: “Your mother used to wake up before the bad ones. I thought she just slept light.”

Nobody answered that.

Thuse set down his cup and looked north.

“We go back to Donath today,” he said.

Kai had expected this and hadn’t.

“And then?” she said.

Thuse looked at her. The morning light caught every line in his face. His eyes stayed the same.

“And then,” he said, “you learn the rest.”