The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(15)
Tonkee and Hoa lag behind with you. It’s almost like the old days, except that now Hoa appears as you walk, gets left behind as you keep walking, then appears again somewhere ahead of you. Most times he adopts a neutral posture, but occasionally he’s doing something ridiculous, like the time you find him in a running pose. Apparently stone eaters get bored, too. Hjarka stays with Tonkee, so that’s four of you. Well, five: Lerna lingers to walk with you, too, angry at what he perceives as the mistreatment of one of his patients. He didn’t think a recently comatose woman should be made to walk at all, let alone left to fall behind. You try to tell him not to stick with you, not to draw Castrima’s wrath upon himself, but he snorts and says that if Castrima really wants to antagonize the only person in the comm who’s formally trained to do surgery, they don’t deserve to keep him. Which is… well, it’s a very good point. You shut up.
You’re managing better than Lerna expected, at least. That’s mostly because it wasn’t really a coma, and also because you hadn’t lost all of your road conditioning during the seven or eight months that you lived in Castrima. The old habits come back easily, really: finding a steady, if slow, pace that nevertheless eats up the miles; wearing your pack low so that the bulk of its weight braces against your butt rather than pulling on your shoulders; keeping your head down as you walk so that the falling ash doesn’t cover your goggles. The loss of the arm is more a nuisance than a real hardship, at least with so many willing helpers around. Aside from throwing off your balance and plaguing you with phantom itches or aches from fingers or an elbow that doesn’t exist, the hardest part is getting dressed in the morning. It’s surprising how quickly you master squatting to piss or defecate without falling over, but maybe you’re just more motivated after days in a diaper.
So you’re holding your own, just slowly at first, and you’re getting faster as the days go by. But here’s the problem with all of this: You’re going the wrong way.
Tonkee comes over to sit by you one evening. “You can’t leave until we’re a lot further west,” she says without preamble. “Almost to the Merz, I’m thinking. If you want to make it that far, you’re going to have to patch things up with Ykka.”
You glare at her, though for Tonkee, this is discreet. She’s waited till Hjarka is snoring in her bedroll and Lerna’s gone off to use the camp latrine. Hoa is still nearby, standing unsubtle guard over your small group within the comm encampment, the curves of his black marble face underlit by your fire. Tonkee knows he’s loyal to you, though, to the degree that loyalty means anything to him.
“Ykka hates me,” you finally say, after glaring fails to produce anything like chagrin or regret in Tonkee.
She rolls her eyes. “Trust me, I know hate. What Ykka’s got is… scared, and a good bit of mad, but some of that you deserve. You’ve put her people in danger.”
“I saved her people from danger.”
Across the encampment, as if to illustrate your point, you notice someone moving about clunkily. It’s one of the Rennanis soldiers, a few of whom were captured alive after the last battle. They’ve put a pranger on her – a hinged wooden collar round her neck, with holes in the planks holding her arms up and apart, linked by two chains to manacles on her ankles. Primitive but effective. Lerna’s been tending the prisoners’ chafing sores, and you understand they’re allowed to put the prangers aside at night. It’s better treatment than Castrimans would have gotten from Rennanis if the situations were reversed, but still, it makes everything awkward. It’s not like the Rennies can leave, after all. Even without the prangers, if any one of them escapes now, with no supplies and lacking the protection of a large group, they’ll be meat within days. The prangers are just insult on top of injury, and a disquieting reminder to all that things could be worse. You look away.
Tonkee sees you looking. “Yeah, you saved Castrima from one danger and then delivered them into something just as bad. Ykka only wanted the first half of that.”
“I couldn’t have avoided the second half. Should I have just let the stone eaters kill all the roggas? Kill her? If they’d succeeded, none of the geode’s mechanisms would’ve worked anyway!”
“She knows that. That’s why I said it wasn’t hate. But…” Tonkee sighs as if you’re being especially stupid. “Look. Castrima was – is – an experiment. Not the geode, the people. She’s always known it was precarious, trying to make a comm out of strays and roggas, but it was working. She made the old-timers understand that we needed the newcommers. Got everybody to think of roggas as people. Got them to agree to live underground, in a deadciv ruin that could’ve killed us all at any moment. Even kept them from turning on each other when that gray stone eater gave them a reason —”
“I stopped that,” you mutter. But you’re listening.
“You helped,” Tonkee concedes, “but if it had just been you? You know full well it wouldn’t have worked. Castrima works because of Ykka. Because they know she’ll die to keep this comm going. Help Castrima, and Ykka will be on your side again.”
It will be weeks, maybe even months, before you reach the now-vacant Equatorial city of Rennanis. “I know where Nassun is now,” you say, seething. “By the time Castrima gets to Rennanis, she might be somewhere else!”