The Road
The road out of Donath predated the town by more years than anyone could count.
That much was obvious from the stones, hollowed in the center, cracked at the edges where the Shake had worked at the seams over generations. Someone had repaired a section near the well gate with a different stone, lighter in color, and the mismatch stood out in the morning light, pale against dark, new against old. She was noticing things now that she hadn't before.
Kai watched the road ahead and stopped watching Donath behind her.
She had told herself she wouldn't look back, and she didn't, but she felt the town at her back with every step. Everything she knew about herself had happened inside those walls. The girl who had slept two years of Shakes on the south side of the Third Communal and learned which part of the floor had a tilt. The woman who had become her sister's mother before she had any say in the matter.
The greater light was behind them and climbing, turning their shadows long and thin on the road ahead, four of them stretched out at different lengths and different weights.
Ace walked with his hands free and his coat done to the collar, steady and unhurried, nothing wasted and nothing showing on his face. He carried it quietly, evenly, until it was easy to forget it was something he carried at all.
Mary kept pace just behind, her breathing steady, her braid pinned back against the wind. She was watching everything they passed with the quiet attention that separated her from most people Kai knew. Some people looked at the world around them. Mary saw it.
Thuse moved differently from the rest of them. He covered ground without effort or expectation, each step placed and released, owing nothing to the road and asking nothing of it.
Kai fell in between them and tried to figure out what kind of person she was on a road she'd never walked before.
The Southlands were open country, farmland mostly, the soil rich and dark where it hadn't been broken, or at least trying to be. She counted three fields in the first hour that had been abandoned, soil cracked in hexagonal patterns where the moisture had left and not come back after a hard Shake. A world that should have been easy to feed people on, and increasingly wasn't. She had known this without ever naming it. She hadn't seen it laid out all at once before.
Ace walked beside her for a long stretch of road and said nothing, which was its own kind of talking.
"You knew he was going to ask," Kai said.
"I knew," Ace said. "I knew before he said it."
"You could have told me."
Ace walked another few paces. "You would have talked yourself out of it. Before you could feel it."
Kai said nothing to that, because the truth of it sat in a place she didn't want to look at yet.
After another stretch of road Ace spoke again, quieter this time: "Your mother felt things before she understood them, too. You're not all that different from her."
She had no answer to that, and Ace didn't seem to need one.
Ahead, Thuse had slowed. When Kai and Ace drew level, he fell into step beside her.
"The wall stones," she said eventually, nodding at the field's edge. Someone had started a wall along the boundary and stopped halfway. The cut stones sat in a neat pile at the end of the finished section.
"Shake?" she asked.
Thuse looked. "No."
"What then?"
"He stopped because the work got hard and the season changed before he was ready for it. A Shake would have scattered them."
Kai looked back at the pile. He was right. They were stacked with care, edges aligned, and a man stacked things that way when he meant to come back to them.
"Will he?" she asked.
"No," Thuse said. "But he thinks so. That's why he stacked them."
Mary appeared on Kai's other side. She must have been listening the whole time.
"That's sad," Mary said.
Thuse glanced at her. "No, that's hope. Sometimes hope and sadness look the same from a distance, and you don't know which one you're looking at until you get close enough to see the stacking."
Mary turned this over in silence, and whatever she was deciding about it, she kept it to herself.
The road dipped at the bottom of a long field and she heard the river before she saw it. A low, constant sound underneath the wind.
Ace was already angling toward the near bank, water skin in hand.
The river moved slow in the cold season, green-grey and wide enough to cause real trouble if you misread where the bottom dropped. Kai stopped at the edge and looked across. The far bank was sparse scrub, empty land, the road picking up again where the ford was shallowest. North of that, the ground rose slowly toward something she couldn't make out yet. Just shape. Just the suggestion of height.
Three days of walking, and whatever waited at the end of it.
She filled her water skin and Mary crouched beside her to do the same.
"What do you think is there?" Mary said. "The ridge. What's at it."
Kai watched the water move past her feet and thought about the question.
The honest answer was that she didn't know. She had gone her whole life knowing what to do next. What Ace needed, what the Shake required of her, what Mary needed from her. And she had been right enough often enough that knowing had become armor. She wore it so well she'd almost forgotten she was wearing it.
"I don't know," she said, and meant it completely.
Mary waited.
"That's new for me," Kai said.
Mary capped her skin and stood without saying anything else, which was Mary's way of letting a conversation end where it needed to.
Behind them, Ace had already found the shallowest line and was checking the depth with a stick. Thuse stood at the bank and looked north with the same patient attention he'd been turning that direction since they left Donath.
Kai pulled the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder and stepped into the ford. The water was cold, immediately and completely, a fact that started at her ankles and climbed through her bones before she'd taken a second step.
Midstream, the current pushed at her knees.
She found her footing one step at a time with her boots soaking through fast and the cold settling into her feet. She kept her eyes on the far bank.
Ace was already on the other side with his stick planted in the mud. Mary was a few steps behind Kai, hand on her bag strap, chin forward, her braid going damp at the ends where it swung against the water.
Thuse was already on the far bank.
Kai hadn't seen him cross and she looked back, half-convinced she'd missed something obvious. He was just there, dry from the shins up, watching the water move past with his hands still at his sides.
"How did he—" Mary started.
"Don't ask," Kai said.
She stepped out onto the scrub-tufted bank and wrung the hem of her coat with both hands, cold through to the bone and trying not to show it.
North of the ford the road aged fast, growing narrower and sinking lower into the earth, the stones heaved and tilted, some cracked through entire with deep-set fractures that looked older than anything they'd walked on so far. The land rose slowly on either side. Scrub-covered rock at first, then outcroppings that leaned in close and threw long shadows across the path.
Thuse pointed out two things in the first hour north of the ford without explaining either one.
The first was a crack in the roadbed running north-south for the length of a cart, its edges clean and not crumbled, which meant it was new.
The second was a rockslide off a lower switchback where the stone was still pale and fresh where it had broken from the cliff face.
Both times he pointed, and both times he kept walking without a word.
Kai looked, and she tried to figure out what she was supposed to see in each one. She didn't ask, because she suspected that not asking was the lesson.
Dusk came fast in the hills. The cliff faces cut off the greater light before she was ready for it, and by the time they found a flat stretch of ground beside a deep-rooted thorn grove, the cold had already settled in for the night.
Ace had a fire going in the time it took Kai to walk the campsite and decide it was good enough, and Mary arranged the packs along the grove's sheltered side while Kai broke dead branches off the thorns for the morning fire. Her hands were still cold from the ford and the dry wood bit at her palms.
She didn't hear Thuse leave the fire, and when she turned he was forty strides out in the open clearing with his back to the camp, looking at the sky with his coat still and his hands loose at his sides.
The greater light was gone. The dome above was darkening in the east, still pale gold in the west, and the first stars were coming out, faint at first, then certain. He stood in the open and watched them with his chin raised and his hands still, reading something in the arrangement that only he could see.
Kai went on breaking branches and tried not to stare.
He came back when the food was on and sat on a low stone near the fire, accepted a bowl from Ace, and ate without ceremony.
"You were watching the sky," Kai said.
"Yes."
She waited.
"The cold-season constellation is rising earlier," he said. "It was a hand's width lower last month at this hour. It's moving." He looked at her. "Have you been watching it?"
"No," she admitted. "I never thought to."
"Start tonight."
Kai looked up at the sky. She knew the constellation, everyone in Donath did, the seven bright stars in the high arc that her mother had pointed out to her when she was small. But she'd never thought of it as moving. She'd always thought of it as fixed, a reference point that stayed where it was while everything else shifted around it.
"Why does it matter?" Mary said.
"Everything matters," Thuse said. "What you notice and what you dismiss. The difference is what you're made of."
Mary turned this over in the firelight. Ace watched his daughters from across the flames and said nothing, and the fire popped and shifted between them.
At the edge of camp, just inside the shadow of the thorn grove, Kai noticed a low plant growing between the stones. Dark leaves. Small white flowers, closed in the dark.
She thought about looking at the underside of the leaves.
She didn't sleep well, and the cold was only part of it.
She lay on her side and watched the fire burn down to its coals and thought about the crack in the road and the pale rockface and the constellation moving across a sky she had never once thought to read.
She didn't know what she was supposed to see in any of it, and she was fairly sure that was still the lesson.