N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

Nothing good. “Yes, Daddy,” she says.

This mollifies him, as it usually does. “If you have to talk to him during your lessons, fine. I don’t want you making the Guardians angry. But don’t talk to him outside of that.” He sighs. “I don’t like that you spend so much time up there.”

He grumbles on about it for the rest of the meal, but says nothing worse, so eventually Nassun relaxes.

The next morning, at Found Moon, she says to Schaffa, “I need to learn how to hide what I am better.”

Schaffa is carrying two satchels uphill to the Found Moon compound as she says this. They’re heavy, and he’s freakishly strong, but even he has to breathe hard to do this, so she does not pester him for a response while he walks. When he has reached one of the compound’s tiny storeshacks, he sets the satchels down and catches his breath. It’s easier to keep goods up here for things like the children’s meals than to go back and forth to the Jekity storecaches or communal mealhouse.

“Are you safe?” he asks then, quietly. This is why she loves him.

She nods, biting her bottom lip, because it is wrong that she must wonder this about her own father. He looks at her for a long, hard moment, and there is a cold consideration to this look that warns her he’s begun to think of a simple solution to her problem. “Don’t,” she blurts.

He lifts an eyebrow. “Don’t…?” he challenges.

Nassun has lived a year of ugliness. Schaffa is at least clean and uncomplicated in his brutality. This makes it easy for her to set her jaw and lift her chin. “Don’t kill my father.”

He smiles, but his eyes are still cold. “Something causes a fear like that, Nassun. Something that has nothing to do with you, or your brother, or your mother’s lies. Whatever it is has left its wound in your father—a wound that obviously has festered. He will lash out at anything that touches upon or even near that reeking old sore… as you have seen.” She thinks of Uche, and nods. “That cannot be reasoned with.”

“I can,” she blurts. “I’ve done it before. I know how to…” manipulate him , those are the words for it, but she’s barely ten years old so she actually says, “I can stop him from doing anything bad. I always have before.” Mostly.

“Until you fail to stop him, once. That would be enough.” He eyes her. “I will kill him if he ever hurts you, Nassun. Keep that in mind, if you value your father’s life more than your own. I do not.” Then he turns back to the shed to arrange the satchels, and that’s the end of the conversation.

Some while later, Nassun tells the others of this exchange. Little Paido suggests: “Maybe you should move into Found Moon with the rest of us.”

Ynegen, Shirk, and Lashar are sitting nearby, relaxing and recovering after an afternoon spent finding and pushing around the marked rocks buried beneath the crucible floor. They nod and murmur agreement with this. “It’s only right,” says Lashar, in her haughty way. “You’ll never be truly one of us if you continue living down there among them .”

Nassun has thought this herself, often. But… “He’s my father,” she says, spreading her hands.

This elicits no understanding from the others, and a few looks of pity. Many of them still bear the marks of violence inflicted by the trusted adults in their lives. “He’s a still,” Shirk snaps back, and that is the end of the matter as far as most of them are concerned. Eventually Nassun gives up on trying to convince them otherwise.

These thoughts invariably begin to affect her orogeny. How can they not, when an unspoken part of her wants to please her father? It takes all of herself, and the confidence that comes of delight, to engage with the earth to her fullest. And that afternoon, when she tries to touch the spinning silver threads of the hot spot and it goes so horribly wrong that she gasps and claws her way back to awareness only to find that she has iced all ten rings of the crucible, Schaffa puts his foot down.

“You will sleep here tonight,” he says, after walking across the crusted earth to carry her back to a bench. She’s too exhausted to walk. It took everything she had not to die. “Tomorrow when you wake, I’m going with you to your house, and we’ll bring back your belongings.”

“D-don’t want to,” she pants, even though she knows Schaffa doesn’t like it when the children say no to him.

“I don’t care what you want, little one. This is interfering with your training. It is why the Fulcrum took children from their families. What you do is too dangerous to allow any distractions, however beloved.”

“But.” She does not have the strength to object more strongly. He holds her in his lap, trying to warm her up because the edge of her own torus was barely an inch from her skin.

Schaffa sighs. For a while he says nothing, except to shout for someone to bring a blanket; Eitz is the one who delivers it, having already gone to fetch it once he saw what happened. (Everyone saw what happened. It is embarrassing. As you realized back during Nassun’s dangerous early childhood, she is a very, very proud girl.) As Nassun finally stops shivering and feeling as though her sessapinae have been methodically beaten, Schaffa finally says, “You serve a higher purpose, little one. Not any single man’s desire—not even mine. You were not made for such petty things.”

She frowns. “What… what was I made for, then?”

He shakes his head. The silver flashes through him, the webwork of it alive and shifting as the thing lodged in his sessapinae weaves its will again, or tries to. “To remedy a great mistake. One to which I once contributed.”

This is too interesting to fall asleep to, though Nassun’s whole body craves it. “What was the mistake?”

“To enslave your kind.” When Nassun sits back to frown at him, he smiles again, but this time it is sad. “Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that we perpetuated their enslavement of themselves, under Old Sanze. The Fulcrum was nominally run by orogenes, you see—orogenes whom we had culled and cultivated, shaped and chosen carefully, so that they would obey. So that they knew their place. Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.”

For some reason he pauses here, sighs. Takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Smiles. This is how Nassun knows without sessing that the pain which lives always in Schaffa’s head has begun to flare hotter again. “And my kind—Guardians such as I once was—were complicit in this atrocity. You’ve seen how your father knaps a stone? Hammering at it, flaking away its weaker bits. Breaking it, if it cannot bear the pressure, and starting over with another. That is what I did, back then, but with children.”

Nassun finds this hard to believe. Of course Schaffa is ruthless and violent, but that is to his enemies. A year commless has taught Nassun the necessity of cruelty. But with the children of Found Moon, he is so very gentle and kind. “Even me?” she blurts. It is not the clearest of questions, but he understands what she means: If you had found me, back then?

He touches her head, smooths a hand over it, rests his fingertips against the nape of her neck. He takes nothing from her this time, but perhaps the gesture comforts him, for he looks so sad. “Even you, Nassun. I hurt many children, back then.”

So sad. Nassun decides he would not have meant it back then, even if he’d done something bad.

“It was wrong to treat your kind so. You’re people. What we did, making tools of you, was wrong. It is allies that we need—more than ever now, in these darkening days.”