The Road Home

The path down was not the path they'd come up on.

Not by choice, and not by much. The Shake had moved enough rock in the night that the line of least resistance had shifted; when Thuse led them back down the east face at first light, the way was half-blocked at two points, loose stone covering the packed-earth track in fans of grey debris that hadn't been there three days ago. He picked his way around the first without comment, his staff finding the solid ground beneath the rubble. The second required them to cross a section of bare slope, forty feet of steep scree with nothing to hold but each other.

Thuse crossed first, slow and deliberate, testing each foothold before committing his weight. Ace second, his pack riding high on his shoulders. Then Mary, who crossed without looking down and said nothing when she reached the other side.

Kai crossed last, which meant she crossed alone.

She didn't look down. She looked out, at the long view north where the ridge dropped away into the dark country they'd walked through, that whole climbing distance now behind and below her, the cold-season air pressing against her face, and she put her feet where Ace had put his and let the motion of the crossing carry her across.

Halfway across she felt the scree shift under her right boot. Just a small movement. A handful of stones sliding six inches and then stopping. She paused, held her weight on the uphill foot, waited, and the slope held.

She kept moving. One foot, then the next, until the scree gave way to packed earth and she was across.

On the other side, Ace looked at her and she shook her head. Nothing worth stopping for. He nodded and they kept walking.

By midmorning they were below the frost line and the path widened back into something recognizable. The thorn grove where they'd camped on the first night was ahead somewhere, maybe another hour. Thuse walked in the middle now, not at the front. He hadn't explained the change, and nobody had asked him to.

Kai walked beside her father, matching his stride without thinking about it.

They went for a long time without talking. That was normal between them, and always had been. Ace had never been a man who filled silence because it was there.

"She kept them inside," Ace said eventually. "The cuttings. Through every cold season. She said they did better by the window."

Kai didn't have to ask who.

"The south window," he said. "Always the south window. I moved them once when I was cleaning and she moved them back before I'd even put the rag down."

He said it watching the path, his mouth doing something between fond and tired.

"She never told you why," Kai said. She already knew the answer but wanted to hear him say it.

"She never told me much about any of it. I figured she just liked them." He was quiet for a moment. "She knew what she was doing. I know that now."

Kai watched the path ahead. A crow landed on a low branch above the track, regarded them with one dark eye, and left without a sound.

"Were you angry?" she said.

Ace thought about that. "No," he said. "I don't think that's the right word for it." He shifted his pack. "I didn't understand it. I understood less than I thought I did, about a lot of things. About her." He paused. "There's a difference between not understanding and being angry about not understanding."

Kai let that sit.

"She'd have been glad," Ace said. "What Thuse told you up there. She'd have wanted you to know." He looked at the track ahead. "I should have found a way to tell you sooner, but I didn't have the words for it. I barely had the words for any of it."

"You didn't know."

"Some of it I knew." He left it there, and the silence that followed had weight to it but not sharpness. Kai walked beside him and let the track carry them forward, because there would be more of this. Her father opened things slowly. You waited. You let the ground warm.

They stopped at midday where the track widened into a flat section of open grass, the first flat ground they'd had since leaving the Southlands. Ace found water in a rocky channel and they filled the skins. Thuse sat on a stone and ate without saying anything. Mary sat close to Kai, close enough that their shoulders touched when either of them moved.

For a while they were all just tired people eating, and the flat ground held them and the water was cold and clean and nobody needed to say anything because the act of sitting still after three days of climbing was its own kind of conversation.

Then Mary said: "Are you going to keep doing it?"

Kai looked at her.

"The listening," Mary said. "Or whatever it is. Is that what this is now?"

"Yes," Kai said. She didn't hesitate.

Mary pulled at a loose thread on her wrap, winding it around one finger. "Is it going to be dangerous?"

Kai thought about the scree slope that morning. The Shake on the ridge. The ground moving under her before she knew why. She thought about what Thuse had said about Mother. Close, getting closer, and then she died. He'd left the connection between those two facts hanging in the air for Kai to find on her own.

"I don't know," she said. And that was the honest answer.

Mary nodded slowly. She was still pulling at the thread. "Okay," she said.

"That's it?" Kai said.

"What else is there to say?" Mary looked up. "You were going to do it anyway. I could tell. You've been gone since the first night, even when you were right there."

Kai opened her mouth and closed it again. There was nothing to argue with.

"I'm not upset," Mary said. "I just wanted to know if you knew." She dropped the thread. "You should probably eat."

Kai looked at the food in her hand and realized she'd forgotten it was there. She ate, and the bread was stale but she barely noticed.

Thuse had been watching this exchange from his stone. Now he looked away, out toward the south, and said nothing.

They made the Southlands before the greater light turned. The thorn grove was behind them, the high ground behind that, and when the track flattened out into the last long stretch of the valley floor Kai could see the river again. The dark thread she'd barely noticed on the way north, now familiar and significant.

Donath was another full day's walk south, and tonight they'd camp in the open with no shelter and no walls and nothing between them and the sky but whatever warmth they could make from scrub and each other.

Mary walked ahead with Ace, the two of them falling into an easy pace together. Kai fell back until she was level with Thuse.

"She didn't ask what I can do," Kai said. "She asked if I was going to keep doing it."

"Yes," Thuse said.

"That's the right question."

"She's known you longer than I have," he said. "That girl knows what questions to ask and who to ask them of."

Kai thought about that. Behind them, the ridge was still visible against the sky, a dark line above the tree cover fading in the late light, and she realized she was already thinking of the return trip differently than the journey out. The going had been about what she might find. The coming back was about what she'd do with it.

It was what you did about it once you were home.