“Do you want him?” he asks her.
Syen grimaces, mostly out of embarrassment. He’s spoken softly, but they’re right there next to Innon, and if he suddenly decides to pay attention… Well, what if he does? Maybe it would make things easier to get it all out into the open. She would really prefer to have a choice about that, though, and as usual Alabaster’s not giving her one. “You don’t have a subtle bone in your body, do you?”
“No, I don’t. Tell me.”
“What, then? Is this some kind of challenge?” Because she’s seen the way Alabaster looks at Innon. It’s almost cute, watching a forty-year-old man blush and stammer like a virgin. “Want me to back off?”
Alabaster flinches and looks almost hurt. Then he frowns as if confused by his own reaction—which makes two of them—and draws away a little. His mouth pulls to one side as he murmurs, “If I said yes, would you? Would you really?”
Syenite blinks. Well, she did suggest it. But would she? All of a sudden, she doesn’t know.
When she fails to respond, though, Alabaster’s expression twists in frustration. He mumbles something that might be “Never mind,” then gets up and steps out of the story circle, taking care not to disturb anyone else as he goes. It means Syenite loses the ability to follow the tale, but that’s all right. Innon is a joy to watch even without words, and since she doesn’t have to pay attention to the story, she can consider Alabaster’s question.
After a while the tale ends, and everyone claps; almost immediately there are calls for another story. In the general mill as people get up for second helpings from the massive pot of spiced shrimp, rice, and smoked sea-bubble that is tonight’s meal, Syenite decides to go find Alabaster. She not sure what she’s going to say, but… well. He deserves some kind of answer.
She finds him in their house, where he’s curled up in a corner of the big empty room, a few feet from the bed of dried seagrass and cured animal furs they’ve been sleeping on. He hasn’t bothered to light the lanterns; she makes him out as a darker blot against the shadows. “Go away,” he snaps when she steps into the room.
“I live here, too,” she snaps back. “Go somewhere else if you want to cry or whatever you’re doing.” Earth, she hopes he’s not crying.
He sighs. It doesn’t sound like he’s crying, although he’s got his legs drawn up and his elbows propped on his knees and his head’s half buried in his hands. He could be. “Syen, you’re such a steelheart.”
“So are you, when you want to be.”
“I don’t want to be. Not always. Rust, Syen, don’t you ever get tired of it all?” He stirs a little. Her eyes have adjusted, and she sees that he’s looking at her. “Don’t you ever just want to… to be human?”
She comes into the house and leans against the wall next to the door, crossing her arms and her ankles. “We aren’t human.”
“Yes. We. Are.” His voice turns fierce. “I don’t give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we’re not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don’t have to feel bad about how they treat us—”
This, too, is something all roggas know. Only Alabaster is vulgar enough to say it aloud. Syenite sighs and leans her head back against the wall. “If you want him, you idiot, just tell him so. You can have him.” And just like that, his question is answered.
Alabaster falls silent in mid-rant, staring at her. “You want him, too.”
“Yeah.” It costs her nothing to say this. “But I’m okay if…” She shrugs a little. “Yeah.”
Alabaster takes a deep breath, then another. Then a third. She has no idea what any of those breaths means.
“I should make the same offer you just did,” he says, at last. “Do the noble thing, or at least pretend to. But I…” In the shadows, he hunches more, tightening his arms around his knees. When he speaks again, his voice is barely audible. “It’s just been so long, Syen.”
Not since he’s had a lover, of course. Just since he’s had a lover he wanted.
There’s laughter from the center of the gathering-cavern, and now people are moving along the corridors, chattering and breaking up for the night. They can both hear Innon’s big voice rumbling not far off; even when he’s just having a normal conversation, practically everyone can hear him. She hopes he’s not a shouter, in bed.
Syen takes a deep breath. “Want me to go get him?” And just to be clear, she adds, “For you?”
Alabaster is silent for a long moment. She can feel him staring at her, and there’s a kind of emotional pressure in the room that she can’t quite interpret. Maybe he’s insulted. Maybe he’s touched. Rust if she’ll ever be able to figure him out… and rust if she knows why she’s doing this.
Then he nods, rubs a hand over his hair, and lowers his head. “Thank you.” The words are almost cold, but she knows that tone, because she’s used it herself. Any time she’s needed to hold on to her dignity with fingernails and pent breath.
So she leaves and follows that rumble, eventually finding Innon near the communal cookfire in deep conversation with Harlas. Everyone else has dissippated by now, and the cavern echoes in a steady overlapping drone of fussy toddlers fighting sleep, laughter, talking, and the hollow creaking of the boats in the harbor outside as they rock in their moorings. And over all of it, the hiss-purr of the sea. Syenite settles herself against a wall nearby, listening to all these exotic sounds, and waiting. After perhaps ten minutes, Innon finishes his conversation and rises. Harlas heads away, chuckling over something Innon’s said; ever the charmer. As Syen expected, Innon then comes over to lean against the wall beside her.
“My crew think I am a fool to pursue you,” he says casually, gazing up at the vaulted ceiling as if there’s something interesting up there. “They think you don’t like me.”
“Everyone thinks I don’t like them,” Syenite says. Most of the time, it’s true. “I do like you.”
He looks at her, thoughtful, which she likes. Flirting unnerves her. Much better to be straightforward like this. “I have met your kind before,” he says. “The ones taken to the Fulcrum.” His accent mangles this into fool crumb, which she finds especially fitting. “You are the happiest one I’ve seen.”
Syenite snorts at the joke—and then, seeing the wry twist to his lips, the heavy compassion in his gaze, she realizes he’s not joking at all. Oh. “Alabaster’s pretty happy.”
“No, he isn’t.”
No. He isn’t. But this is why Syenite doesn’t like jokes much, either. She sighs. “I’m… here for him, actually.”
“Oh? So you have decided to share?”
“He’s—” She blinks as the words register. “Uh?”
Innon shrugs, which is an impressive gesture given how big he is, and how it sets all his braids a-rustle. “You and he are already lovers. It was a thought.”
What a thought. “Er… no. I don’t—uh. No.” There are things she’s not ready to think about. “Maybe later.” A lot later.
He laughs, though not at her. “Yes, yes. You have come, then, what? To ask me to see to your friend?”
“He’s not—” But here she is procuring him a lover for the night. “Rust.”
Innon laughs—softly, for him—and shifts to lean sideways against the wall, perpendicular to Syenite so that she will not feel boxed in, even though he’s close enough that she can feel his body heat. Something big men do, if they want to be considerate rather than intimidating. She appreciates his thoughtfulness. And she hates herself for deciding in Alabaster’s favor, because, Earthfires, he even smells sexy as he says, “You are a very good friend, I think.”
“Yes, I rusting am.” She rubs her eyes.
“Now, now. Everyone sees that you are the stronger of the pair.” Syenite blinks at this, but he’s completely serious. He lifts a hand and draws a finger down the side of her face from temple to chin, a slow tease. “Many things have broken him. He holds him
self together with spit and endless smiling, but all can see the cracks. You, though; you are dented, bruised, but intact. It is kind of you. Looking out for him like so.”
“No one ever looks out for me.” Then she shuts her mouth so hard that her teeth snap. She hadn’t meant to say that.
Innon smiles, but it is a gentle, kindly thing. “I will,” he says, and leans down to kiss her. It is a scratchy sort of kiss; his lips are dry, his chin beginning to hair over. Most Coaster men don’t seem to grow beards, but Innon might have some Sanze in him, especially with all that hair. In any case, his kiss is so soft despite the scratchiness that it feels more like a thank-you than an attempt to seduce. Probably because that’s what he intends. “Later, I promise I will.”
Then he leaves, heading for the house she shares with Alabaster, and Syenite gazes after him and thinks belatedly, Now where the rust am I supposed to sleep tonight?
It turns out to be a moot question, because she’s not sleepy. She goes to the ledge outside the cavern, where there are others lingering to take in the night air or talk where half the comm can’t hear them, and she is not the only one standing wistfully at the railing, looking out over the water at night. The waves roll in steadily, making the smaller boats and the Clalsu rock and groan, and the starlight casts thin, diffuse reflections upon the waves that seem to stretch away into forever.
It’s peaceful here, in Meov. It’s nice to be who she is in a place that accepts her. Nicer still to know that she has nothing to fear for it. A woman Syen met in the baths—one of the Clalsu crew, most of whom speak at least a little Sanze-mat—explained it to her as they sat soaking in water warmed by rocks the children heat in the fire as part of their daily chores. It’s simple, really. “With you, we live,” she’d said to Syen, shrugging and letting her head fall back against the edge of the bath, and apparently not caring about the strangeness in her own words. On the mainland, everyone is convinced that with roggas nearby, they will all die.
And then the woman said something that truly unnerved Syen. “Harlas is old. Innon sees much danger, on raids. You and the laughing one”—that is the locals’ term for Alabaster, since the ones who don’t speak Sanze-mat have trouble pronouncing his name—“you have babies, give us one, yes? Or we have to go steal, from the mainland.”
The very idea of these people, who stick out like stone eaters in a crowd, trying to infiltrate the Fulcrum to kidnap a grit, or grabbing some feral child just ahead of the Guardians, makes Syenite shiver. She’s not sure she likes the idea of them greedily hoping she catches pregnant, either. But they’re no different from the Fulcrum in that, are they? And here, any child that she and Alabaster have won’t end up in a node station.
She lingers out on the ledge for a few hours, losing herself in the sound of the waves and gradually letting herself lapse into a kind of not-thinking fugue. Then she finally notices that her back is aching and her feet hurt, and the wind off the water is getting chilly; she can’t just stand out here all night. So she heads back into the cavern, not really sure where she means to go, just letting her feet carry her where they will. Which is probably why she eventually ends up back outside “her” house, standing in front of the curtain that passes for privacy and listening to Alabaster weep through it.
It’s definitely him. She knows that voice, even though it’s choked now with sobs and half muffled. Barely audible, really, despite the lack of doors and windows… but she knows the why of that, doesn’t she? Everyone who grows up in the Fulcrum learns to cry very, very quietly.
It is this thought, and the sense of camaraderie that follows it, that makes her reach up, slowly, and tug the curtain aside.
They’re on the mattress, thankfully half covered in furs—not that it matters, since she can see clothing discarded about the room, and the air smells of sex, so it’s obvious what they’ve been up to. Alabaster is curled up on his side, his back to her, bony shoulders shaking. Innon’s sitting up on one elbow, stroking his hair. His eyes flick up when Syenite opens the curtain, but he doesn’t seem upset, or surprised. In fact—and in light of their previous conversation she really shouldn’t be surprised, but she is—he lifts a hand. Beckoning.
She’s not sure why she obeys. And she’s not sure why she undresses as she walks across the room, or why she lifts up the furs behind Alabaster and slides into the redolent warmth with him. Or why, once she’s done this, she curves herself against his back, and drapes an arm over his waist, and looks up to see Innon’s sad smile of welcome. But she does.
Syen falls asleep like this. As far as she can tell, Alabaster cries for the rest of the night, and Innon stays up to comfort him the whole time. So when she wakes the next morning and claws her way out of bed and stumbles over to the chamber pot to throw up noisily into it, they both sleep through it. There is no one to comfort her as she sits there shaking in the aftermath. But that is nothing new.
Well. At least the people of Meov won’t have to go steal a baby, now.
* * *
Put no price on flesh.
—Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse six
INTERLUDE
There passes a time of happiness in your life, which I will not describe to you. It is unimportant. Perhaps you think it wrong that I dwell so much on the horrors, the pain, but pain is what shapes us, after all. We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be… not alive.
But what is important is that you know it was not all terrible. There was peace in long stretches, between each crisis. A chance to cool and solidify before the grind resumed.
Here is what you need to understand. In any war, there are factions: those wanting peace, those wanting more war for a myriad of reasons, and those whose desires transcend either. And this is a war with many sides, not just two. Did you think it was just the stills and the orogenes? No, no. Remember the stone eaters and the Guardians, too—oh, and the Seasons. Never forget Father Earth. He has not forgotten you.
So while she—you—rested, those are the forces that gathered round. Eventually they began their advance.
20
Syenite, stretched and snapped back
IT’S NOT QUITE WHAT SYENITE had in mind for the rest of her life, sitting around being useless, so she goes to find Innon one day as the Clalsu crew is outfitting the ship for another raiding run.
“No,” he says, staring at her like she’s insane. “You are not being a pirate when you just had a baby.”
“I had the baby two years ago.” She can only change so many diapers, pester people for lessons in Eturpic so often, and help with the net-fishing so many times before she goes mad. She’s done with nursing, which is the excuse Innon’s used up to now to put her off—and which was pointless anyway, since in Meov that sort of thing is done communally, same as everything else. When she’s not around, Alabaster just takes the baby to one of the other mothers in the comm, just as Syen fed their babies in turn if they happened to be hungry while she was nearby and full of milk. And since ’Baster does most of the diaper changes and sings little Corundum to sleep, and coos at him and plays with him and takes him for walks and so on, Syenite has to keep busy somehow.
“Syenite.” He stops in the middle of the loading ramp that leads into the ship’s hold. They’re putting storage barrels of water and food aboard, along with baskets of more esoteric things—buckets of chain for the catapult, bladders of pitch and fish oil, a length of heavy cloth meant to serve as a replacement sail should they require it. When Innon stops with Syenite standing down-ramp from him, everything else stops, and when there are loud complaints from the dock, he lifts his head and glowers until everyone shuts up. Everyone, of course, except Syenite.
“I’m bored,” she says in frustration. “There’s nothing to do here except fish and wait for you and the others to come back from a raid, and gossip about people I don’t know, and tell stories about things I don’t care about! I’ve spent my whole life either training or working, for Ea
rth’s sake; you can’t expect me to just sit around and look at water all day.”
“Alabaster does.”
Syenite rolls her eyes, although this is true. When Alabaster isn’t with the baby, he spends most of his days up on the heights above the colony, gazing out at the world and thinking unfathomable thoughts for hours on end. She knows; she’s watched him do it. “I’m not him! Innon, you can use me.”
And Innon’s expression twists, because—ah, yes. That one hits home for him.
It’s an unspoken thing between them, but Syenite’s not stupid. There are a lot of things a skilled rogga can do to help on the kinds of sorties Innon’s crew makes. Not starting shakes or blows, she won’t and he’d never ask it—but it is a simple thing to draw enough strength from the ambient to lower the temperature at the water’s surface, and thus cloak the ship in fog to hide its approach or retreat. It is equally easy to disturb forests along the shoreline with the most delicate of underground vibrations, causing flocks of birds or hordes of mice to flood out of the trees and into nearby settlements as a distraction. And more. Orogeny is damned useful, Syenite is beginning to understand, for far, far more than just quelling shakes.
Or rather, it could be useful, if Innon could use his orogeny that way. Yet for all his awesome charisma and physical prowess, Innon is still a feral, with nothing more than what little training Harlas—himself a feral and poorly trained—could give him. She’s felt Innon’s orogeny when he quells local minor shakes, and the crude inefficiency of his power shocks her sometimes. She’s tried to teach him better control, and he listens, and he tries, but he doesn’t improve. She doesn’t understand why. Without that level of skill, the Clalsu crew earns its spoils the old-fashioned way: They fight, and die, for every scrap.
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