The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  Something happened up north, Lerna said.

  Children are the undoing of us, someone said to you once, long ago.

  “Nassun,” you whisper to your reflection. In the mirror are the eyes your daughter has inherited from you, gray as slate and a little wistful. “He left Uche in the den. Where did he put you?”

  No answer. You shut off the tap. Then you whisper to no one in particular, “I have to go now.” Because you do. You need to find Jija, and anyway you know better than to linger. The townsfolk will be coming for you soon.

  * * *

  The shake that passes will echo. The wave that recedes will come back. The mountain that rumbles will roar.

  —Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse five

  2

  Damaya, in winters past

  THE STRAW IS SO WARM that Damaya doesn’t want to come out of it. Like a blanket, she thinks through the bleariness of half-sleep; like the quilt her great-grandmother once sewed for her out of patches of uniform cloth. Years ago and before she died, Muh Dear worked for the Brevard militia as a seamstress, and got to keep the scraps from any repairs that required new cloth. The blanket she made for Damaya was mottled and dark, navy and taupe and gray and green in rippling bands like columns of marching men, but it came from Muh Dear’s hands, so Damaya never cared that it was ugly. It always smelled sweet and gray and a bit fusty, so it is easy now to imagine that the straw—which smells mildewy and like old manure yet with a hint of fungal fruitiness—is Muh’s blanket. The actual blanket is back in Damaya’s room, on the bed where she left it. The bed in which she will never sleep again.

  She can hear voices outside the straw pile now: Mama and someone else talking as they draw closer. There’s a rattle-creak as the barn door is unlocked, and then they come inside. Another rattle as the door shuts behind them. Then Mother raises her voice and calls, “DamaDama?”

  Damaya curls up tighter, clenching her teeth. She hates that stupid nickname. She hates the way Mother says it, all light and sweet, like it’s actually a term of endearment and not a lie.

  When Damaya doesn’t respond, Mother says: “She can’t have gotten out. My husband checked all the barn locks himself.”

  “Alas, her kind cannot be held with locks.” This voice belongs to a man. Not her father or older brother, or the comm headman, or anyone she recognizes. This man’s voice is deep, and he speaks with an accent like none she’s ever heard: sharp and heavy, with long drawled o’s and a’s and crisp beginnings and ends to every word. Smart-sounding. He jingles faintly as he walks, so much so that she wonders whether he’s wearing a big set of keys. Or perhaps he has a lot of money in his pockets? She’s heard that people use metal money in some parts of the world.

  The thought of keys and money makes Damaya curl in on herself, because of course she’s also heard the other children in creche whisper of child-markets in faraway cities of beveled stone. Not all places in the world are as civilized as the Nomidlats. She laughed off the whispers then, but everything is different now.

  “Here,” says the man’s voice, not far off now. “Fresh spoor, I think.”

  Mother makes a sound of disgust, and Damaya burns in shame as she realizes they’ve seen the corner she uses for a bathroom. It smells terrible there, even though she’s been throwing straw down as a cover each time. “Squatting on the ground like an animal. I raised her better.”

  “Is there a toilet in here?” asks the child-buyer, in a tone of polite curiosity. “Did you give her a bucket?”

  Silence from Mother, which stretches on, and belatedly Damaya realizes the man has reprimanded Mother with those quiet questions. It isn’t the sort of reprimand Damaya is used to. The man hasn’t raised his voice or called anyone names. Yet Mother stands still and shocked as surely as if he’d followed the words with a smack to the head.

  A giggle bubbles up in her throat, and at once she crams her fist into her mouth to stop it from spilling out. They’ll hear Damaya laugh at her mother’s embarrassment, and then the child-buyer will know what a terrible child she really is. Is that such a bad thing? Maybe her parents will get less for her. That alone almost makes the giggles break free, because Damaya hates her parents, she hates them, and anything that will make them suffer makes her feel better.

  Then she bites down on her hand, hard, and hates herself, because of course Mother and Father are selling Damaya if she can think such thoughts.

  Footsteps nearby. “Cold in here,” says the man.

  “We would have kept her in the house if it was cold enough to freeze,” says Mother, and Damaya almost giggles again at her sullen, defensive tone.

  But the child-buyer ignores Mother. His footsteps come closer, and they’re… strange. Damaya can sess footsteps. Most people can’t; they sess big things, shakes and whatnot, but not anything so delicate as a footfall. (She has known this about herself all her life but only recently realized it was a warning.) It’s harder to perceive when she’s out of direct contact with the ground, everything conveyed through the wood of the barn’s frame and the metal of the nails holding it together—but still, even from a story up, she knows what to expect. Beat beat, the step and then its reverberation into the depths, beat beat, beat beat. The child-buyer’s steps, though, go nowhere and do not echo. She can only hear them, not sess them. That’s never happened before.

  And now he’s coming up the ladder, to the loft where she huddles under the straw.

  “Ah,” he says, reaching the top. “It’s warmer up here.”

  “DamaDama!” Mother sounds furious now. “Get down here!”

  Damaya scrunches herself up tighter under the straw and says nothing. The child-buyer’s footsteps pace closer.

  “You needn’t be afraid,” he says in that rolling voice. Closer. She feels the reverberation of his voice through the wood and down to the ground and into the rock and back again. Closer. “I’ve come to help you, Damaya Strongback.”

  Another thing she hates, her use name. She doesn’t have a strong back at all, and neither does Mother. All “Strongback” means is that her female ancestors were lucky enough to join a comm but too undistinguished to earn a more secure place within it. Strongbacks get dumped same as commless when times get hard, her brother Chaga told her once, to tease her. Then he’d laughed, like it was funny. Like it wasn’t true. Of course, Chaga is a Resistant, like Father. All comms like to have them around no matter how hard the times, in case of sickness and famine and such.

  The man’s footsteps stop just beyond the straw pile. “You needn’t be afraid,” he says again, more softly now. Mother is still down on the ground level and probably can’t hear him. “I won’t let your mother hurt you.”

  Damaya inhales.

  She’s not stupid. The man is a child-buyer, and child-buyers do terrible things. But because he has said these words, and because some part of Damaya is tired of being afraid and angry, she uncurls. She pushes her way through the soft warm pile and sits up, peering out at the man through coils of hair and dirty straw.

  He is as strange-looking as he sounds, and not from anywhere near Palela. His skin is almost white, he’s so paper-pale; he must smoke and curl up in strong sunlight. He has long flat hair, which together with the skin might mark him as an Arctic, though the color of it—a deep heavy black, like the soil near an old blow—doesn’t fit. Eastern Coasters’ hair is black like that, except fluffy and not flat, but people from the east have black skin to match. And he’s big—taller, and with broader shoulders, than Father. But where Father’s big shoulders join a big chest and a big belly, this man sort of tapers. Everything about the stranger seems lean and attenuated. Nothing about him makes racial sense.

  But what strikes Damaya most are the child-buyer’s eyes. They’re white, or nearly so. She can see the whites of his eyes, and then a silvery-gray disc of color that she can barely distinguish from the white, even up close. The pupils of his eyes are wide in the barn’s dimness, and startling amid the desert of colorlessness. She’
s heard of eyes like these, which are called icewhite in stories and stonelore. They’re rare, and always an ill omen.

  But then the child-buyer smiles at Damaya, and she doesn’t even think twice before she smiles back. She trusts him immediately. She knows she shouldn’t, but she does.

  “And here we are,” he says, still speaking softly so that Mother won’t hear. “DamaDama Strongback, I presume?”

  “Just Damaya,” she says, automatically.

  He inclines his head gracefully, and extends a hand to her. “So noted. Will you join us, then, Damaya?”

  Damaya doesn’t move and he does not grab her. He just stays where he is, patient as stone, hand offering and not taking. Ten breaths pass. Twenty. Damaya knows she’ll have to go with him, but she likes that he makes it feel like a choice. So at last, she takes his hand and lets him pull her up. He keeps her hand while she dusts off as much of the straw as she can, and then he tugs her closer, just a little. “One moment.”

  “Hnh?” But the child-buyer’s other hand is already behind her head, pressing two fingers into the base of her skull so quickly and deftly that she doesn’t startle. He shuts his eyes for a moment, shivers minutely, and then exhales, letting her go.

  “Duty first,” he says, cryptically. She touches the back of her head, confused and still feeling the lingering sensation of his fingers’ pressure. “Now let’s head downstairs.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Just a little ritual, of sorts. Something that will make it easier to find you, should you ever become lost.” She cannot imagine what this means. “Come, now; I need to tell your mother you’ll be leaving with me.”

  So it really is true. Damaya bites her lip, and when the man turns to head back to the ladder, she follows a pace or two behind.

  “Well, that’s that,” says the child-buyer as they reach Mother on the ground floor. (Mother sighs at the sight of her, perhaps in exasperation.) “If you could assemble a package for her—one or two changes of clothing, any travel food you can provide, a coat—we’ll be on our way.”

  Mother draws up in surprise. “We gave away her coat.”

  “Gave it away? In winter?”

  He speaks mildly, but Mother looks abruptly uncomfortable. “She’s got a cousin who needed it. We don’t all have wardrobes full of fancy clothes to spare. And—” Here Mother hesitates, glancing at Damaya. Damaya just looks away. She doesn’t want to see if Mother looks sorry for giving away the coat. She especially doesn’t want to see if Mother’s not sorry.

  “And you’ve heard that orogenes don’t feel cold the way others do,” says the man, with a weary sigh. “That’s a myth. I assume you’ve seen your daughter take cold before.”

  “Oh, I.” Mother looks flustered. “Yes. But I thought…”

  That Damaya might have been faking it. That was what she’d said to Damaya that first day, after she got home from creche and while they were setting her up in the barn. Mother had raged, her face streaked with tears, while Father just sat there, silent and white-lipped. Damaya had hidden it from them, Mother said, hidden everything, pretended to be a child when she was really a monster, that was what monsters did, she had always known there was something wrong with Damaya, she’d always been such a little liar—

  The man shakes his head. “Nevertheless, she will need some protection against the cold. It will grow warmer as we approach the Equatorials, but we’ll be weeks on the road getting there.”

  Mother’s jaw flexes. “So you’re really taking her to Yumenes, then.”

  “Of course I—” The man stares at her. “Ah.” He glances at Damaya. They both look at Damaya, their gazes like an itch. She squirms. “So even thinking I was coming to kill your daughter, you had the comm headman summon me.”

  Mother tenses. “Don’t. It wasn’t, I didn’t—” At her sides, her hands flex. Then she bows her head, as if she is ashamed, which Damaya knows is a lie. Mother isn’t ashamed of anything she’s done. If she was, why would she do it?

  “Ordinary people can’t take care of… of children like her,” says Mother, very softly. Her eyes dart to Damaya’s, once, and away, fast. “She almost killed a boy at school. We’ve got another child, and neighbors, and…” Abruptly she squares her shoulders, lifting her chin. “And it’s any citizen’s duty, isn’t it?”

  “True, true, all of it. Your sacrifice will make the world better for all.” The words are a stock phrase, praise. The tone is uniquely not. Damaya looks at the man again, confused now because child-buyers don’t kill children. That would defeat the point. And what’s this about the Equatorials? Those lands are far, far to the south.

  The child-buyer glances at Damaya and somehow understands that she does not understand. His face softens, which should be impossible with those frightening eyes of his.

  “To Yumenes,” the man says to Mother, to Damaya. “Yes. She’s young enough, so I’m taking her to the Fulcrum. There she will be trained to use her curse. Her sacrifice, too, will make the world better.”

  Damaya stares back at him, realizing just how wrong she’s been. Mother has not sold Damaya. She and Father have given Damaya away. And Mother does not hate her; actually, she fears Damaya. Is there a difference? Maybe. Damaya doesn’t know how to feel in response to these revelations.

  And the man, the man is not a child-buyer at all. He is—

  “You’re a Guardian?” she asks, even though by now, she knows. He smiles again. She did not think Guardians were like this. In her head they are tall, cold-faced, bristling with weapons and secret knowledge. He’s tall, at least.

  “I am,” he says, and takes her hand. He likes to touch people a lot, she thinks. “I’m your Guardian.”

  Mother sighs. “I can give you a blanket for her.”

  “That will do, thank you.” And then the man falls silent, waiting. After a few breaths of this, Mother realizes he’s waiting for her to go fetch it. She nods jerkily, then leaves, her back stiff the whole way out of the barn. So then the man and Damaya are alone.

  “Here,” he says, reaching up to his shoulders. He’s wearing something that must be a uniform: blocky shoulders and long, stiff lines of sleeve and pant leg, burgundy cloth that looks sturdy but scratchy. Like Muh’s quilt. It has a short cape, more decorative than useful, but he pulls it off and wraps it around Damaya. It’s long enough to be a dress on her, and warm from his body.

  “Thank you,” she says. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Schaffa Guardian Warrant.”

  She’s never heard of a place called Warrant, but it must exist, because what good is a comm name otherwise? “‘Guardian’ is a use name?”

  “It is for Guardians.” He drawls this, and her cheeks grow warm with embarrassment. “We aren’t much use to any comm, after all, in the ordinary course of things.”

  Damaya frowns in confusion. “What, so they’ll kick you out when a Season comes? But…” Guardians are many things, she knows from the stories: great warriors and hunters and sometimes—often—assassins. Comms need such people when hard times come.

  Schaffa shrugs, moving away to sit on a bale of old hay. There’s another bale behind Damaya, but she keeps standing, because she likes being on the same level with him. Even sitting he’s taller, but at least not by so much.

  “The orogenes of the Fulcrum serve the world,” he says. “You will have no use name from here forth, because your usefulness lies in what you are, not merely some familial aptitude. From birth, an orogene child can stop a shake; even without training, you are orogene. Within a comm or without one, you are orogene. With training, however, and with the guidance of other skilled orogenes at the Fulcrum, you can be useful not merely to a single comm, but all the Stillness.” He spreads his hands. “As a Guardian, via the orogenes in my care, I have taken on a similar purpose, with a similar breadth. Therefore it’s fitting that I share my charges’ possible fate.”

  Damaya is so curious, so full of questions, that she doesn’t know which to ask first. “D
o you have—” She stumbles over the concept, the words, the acceptance of herself. “Others, l-like me, I,” and she runs out of words.

  Schaffa laughs, as if he senses her eagerness and it pleases him. “I am Guardian to six right now,” he says, inclining his head to let Damaya know that this is the right way to say it, to think it. “Including you.”

  “And you brought them all to Yumenes? You found them like this, like me—”

  “Not exactly. Some were given into my care, born within the Fulcrum or inherited from other Guardians. Some I have found since being assigned to ride circuit in this part of the Nomidlats.” He spreads his hands. “When your parents reported their orogenic child to Palela’s headman, he telegraphed word to Brevard, which sent it to Geddo, which sent it to Yumenes—and they in turn telegraphed word to me.” He sighs. “It’s only luck that I checked in at the node station near Brevard the day after the message arrived. Otherwise I wouldn’t have seen it for another two weeks.”

  Damaya knows Brevard, though Yumenes is only legend to her, and the rest of the places Schaffa has mentioned are just words in a creche textbook. Brevard is the town closest to Palela, and it’s much bigger. It’s where Father and Chaga go to sell farmshares at the beginning of every growing season. Then she registers his words. Two more weeks in this barn, freezing and pooping in a corner. She’s glad he got the message in Brevard, too.

  “You’re very lucky,” he says, perhaps reading her expression. His own has grown sober. “Not all parents do the right thing. Sometimes they don’t keep their child isolated, as the Fulcrum and we Guardians recommend. Sometimes they do, but we get the message too late, and by the time a Guardian arrives a mob has carried the child off and beaten her to death. Don’t think unkindly of your parents, Dama. You’re alive and well, and that is no small thing.”

  Damaya squirms a little, unwilling to accept this. He sighs. “And sometimes,” he continues, “the parents of an orogene will try to hide the child. To keep her, untrained and without a Guardian. That always goes badly.”