The Flora
She woke before the others.
The fire had gone to coals. The clearing was still. No wind, no Shake. Just the cold pressing down through the dark like weight. Kai lay on her side and watched the last red glow of the coals pulse once and dim.
She sat up.
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, head tilted back toward the sky. Or sleeping in the direction of it. She couldn’t tell which, and 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.
She committed it to memory.
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. 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. The leaf. The vein-light. 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. The Shake was milder in the cold season. She had always known that, and had never once asked why.
She was asking now.
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.
She walked with him in silence for a stretch. Kai could hear them back there. Feet on stone, two rhythms not quite matching. Thuse’s stride was long and even. Mary’s had a slight quickening to it.
Then: “How long have you known our family?”
Kai slowed.
“A long time,” Thuse said.
“How long?”
“Your grandmother’s grandmother was a young woman when I first came south.”
Kai stopped.
She stood in the road with her back to them and listened.
“How old are you?” Mary said.
A short sound came from Thuse. Dry. Near the edge of a laugh. “Old enough that the number stops meaning much.”
Mary walked on. A few paces, and then: “Did you know our mother?”
“Yes.”
“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, watching Kai. “She came to it before I could show her.”
Kai held his gaze.
Then she turned north and kept walking.
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.”
Kai did know it.
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. The ridge itself. A long, dark edge against the sky, running east to west farther than she could see. Still a day’s walk. But real now. A thing with an actual shape.
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.”