CHAPTER FIVE

  -The Hermit, the Spirit, and the Boy

  II. The Second Passage: The Weight of Sin

  “Hunger taught the first sin: brother against brother. For that choice, the Blue Sky answered with forty days of falling stone.”

  –The Song of Creation

  as carved upon the Ulankara Obelisks

  Sleep didn't come easily. His body was exhausted, but every time his eyes closed he saw the inside of the pit again: bones under his back, the jagged rim above, his own blood smeared on the stone, creeping the wrong way up his chest.

  Rolling onto his side, he watched the fire sink. Orange to red to dull. Shadows crept longer across the walls. The man sat with his chair tipped back, boots braced on the hearthstones, eyes half closed. He was his teacher now, whether he trusted him or not. He snored very softly, like a man who hadn't yet given himself permission to fall fully asleep.

  Iye lay curled on the pillow by his head, a small, warm weight within easy reach. She hadn't asked permission. She'd simply climbed there when he lay down and arranged herself like she owned the space.

  "Doesn't it bother you?" he whispered. "Wasting time here with me?"

  Her tail twitched against his cheek. "Why would it?"

  "Because I gave you my word," he said. "I said I'd find you a new jade-moon stone."

  One ear flicked. "And?"

  He stared at the low ceiling. "You saved my life. We should be walking toward the Steppes already. Instead I'm here, carrying buckets for a man I met yesterday."

  "It sounds," Iye said, "like you're not asking me. You're asking yourself.”

  He swallowed. The pillow smelled faintly of smoke and old wool. "If I stay and learn, I break my word. If I leave, I go back weak and die on the road. Either way, I fail someone."

  "If you want to stay and learn, then stay and learn," she said. "If you want to go, then go. That part's yours. Saving your life doesn't make us family. The three of us are still strangers sharing a roof."

  "So why are you here?" he asked. "Why not go and find the stone yourself?"

  She was quiet for a moment. Her gaze slid to the faint outline of the amulet under his shirt.

  "You don't have to know everything," she said at last. "Just this much. I don't stray far from that trinket. I can't carry it. And you let them grind the jade-moon stone to pieces. The cost of that's simple. The next one, you find."

  His chest tightened. "I didn't break the stone," he said. "I couldn't stop them."

  "Intent doesn't change what happened," Iye said. "You should've protected the stone. You didn't. As I said, the cost of failing to protect it is simple: you find the next one."

  She flicked her tail against his cheek.

  He looked at her. "And the time?"

  "What about it?" she asked.

  "It'll take years," he said. "To learn enough. To get strong. To reach the Steppes. To find another jade-moon stone."

  "Years for you," she said. "For me, this'll feel like a short nap. I've watched mountains wear shorter paths through themselves than you'll walk."

  That thought landed in him like a stone in deep water. "How old are you?" he asked.

  She yawned, showing sharp teeth. "Old enough that it wouldn't fit in your head," she said. "Sleep, Chanyu. You won't be much use to either of us if you fall over tomorrow and crack your skull on the woodpile."

  His eyes burned. His body wanted to obey. "You'll stay?" he asked, hating how small the question sounded.

  "For now," she said. "I'll see what you make of this chance. If you turn out dull, I can always nap while you haul buckets."

  She settled her head back on the pillow near his ear. Her weight was a small, steady warmth.

  He lay awake a little longer, listening to the man's slow breathing and the faint scrape of branches against the roof. At some point, the memories in his head blurred. The pit, the fort, the forest cabin all tangled together and slipped into the dark.

  After that, the days settled into a shape.

  Mornings began with cold that bit his face and lungs and fingers. He woke to the sound of metal or wood or the man's voice, dragged himself upright, ate whatever stew or porridge was put in front of him, and went out into the yard.

  He learned the steps first: from door to woodpile, from woodpile to water barrel, from barrel to the narrow place behind the cabin where the snow was tamped down by many passes. He walked each path with empty hands at first, later with logs, later with buckets, and finally with his eyes closed while the man murmured questions.

  "How many steps from the door to the barrel?"

  "Twenty-three."

  "Too slow. Again."

  "What did you hear between here and there?"

  "The wind. Your boots. A crow."

  "Which side did the crow call from?"

  He would think back, trying to remember where the sound had landed in his bones.

  "Left," he would say, sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

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  The man's hand would tap his shoulder. "Listen with more than your ears."

  When his arms grew strong enough that the buckets no longer shook, the man put a length of wood in his hands.

  "Hold this," he said.

  It was just a branch, stripped of bark, cut to the height of the boy's shoulder. The first time he gripped it, his fingers tried to curl around it the way they had curled around chains.

  "Not like that," the man said. He stepped behind him and closed his own hands over the boy's. "Not too tight. Too tight, and your muscles die before you need them. Too loose, and someone takes it from you. Here. Feel."

  He shifted the boy's grip a finger-width at a time.

  The boy could feel the old strength in his hands, the callus on his palms, the subtle twist of his wrist that made the branch into a line between their bodies.

  "That's the line between you and the thing you're trying to keep away," the man said. "Your chest, your throat, your eyes. The point's not to hit hard. The point's to stand where anything that wants to reach you has to cross that line. Then you move so it never does."

  He stepped away, took up another branch, and attacked him. Not with full strength. Not even with speed. Just enough to show how easily the boy's stance broke. The first time, the boy went down in the snow so fast he didn't understand what had happened.

  "You move like a sack," the man said. "Again."

  They did it again, and again, until the boy's knees were wet and cold and his backside ached from falling.

  "You're not here to learn how to win," the man said when he finally let him rest. "Winning comes later, if it comes at all. Right now you're learning how not to die in the first ten heartbeats when someone wants you dead."

  "I already know what it is to almost die," the boy said, panting.

  "The difference between a good fighter and a dead one has little to do with avoiding death," the man said. "What matters is knowing what to do when it gets close."

  Iye watched from a low branch, tail flicking.

  "Your left foot's always behind," she called. "You're slow turning that way. He'll cut you there first."

  The boy scowled at her. "You're not helping."

  "I'm keeping you from being uglier sooner," she said. "You should thank me."

  He didn't, but he did start paying attention to where his left foot landed.

  Afternoons were for things that looked small and didn't feel that way.

  "How do you move through a market without being noticed?" the man asked one day, as they walked the narrow trampled path between the trees. "You've never seen one, so you imagine. There are more people than you have fingers and toes. They're all louder than you. What do you do?"

  "Hide," the boy said.

  "How?" the man pressed. "There are no pits there."

  "In an alley," the boy said. "Behind barrels. In shadows."

  "That's where they look first for rats," the man said. "You're not trying to be a rat. You're trying to be a stone in the road. People see a stone. They step around it and forget it was there."

  He tapped the boy's chest again. "Walk at the pace of the slowest bodies, not the fastest. Don't be the first or the last. Don't stop dead unless they stop. Don't stare at anything. Look like you belong."

  "I don't belong," the boy said.

  "Neither do I," the man said. "That never stopped me from walking anywhere I wished when I had to."

  He didn't say when or where. His eyes turned once, briefly, toward the cabin as they passed, before sliding away again. The boy followed his gaze, knowing what was hidden behind that wall, locked away in a chest.

  Evenings were for words. They sat by the fire, the boy's muscles buzzing with the day's work, and the man spoke in Zhanar while the boy struggled to follow.

  He corrected the boy's tense, his cases, his rolled r's.

  "That word you just used to describe a priest," the man said one night, not looking up from the bit of leather he was mending. "It means bucket for piss, not someone who speaks to the gods."

  Iye snorted from the shelf. "I'm sure the priests wouldn't mind."

  "You taught me that," the boy protested.

  "I taught you that word long before this kingdom had a name," Iye said. "If people twisted it into something rude in their Zhanar tongue, that's your fault, not mine."

  The boy rubbed his face. "There are too many."

  "Good," the man said. "Words are tools. The more you have, the more ways you have to protect yourself without lifting a hand. Sleep now. Tomorrow we use your legs again."

  On a night when the boy's tongue felt as sore as his shoulders, he finally asked the question that had sat in his chest since the first day.

  "What am I supposed to call you?" he said.

  The man sat at the table, backlit by the firelight, mending a glove. He paused with the needle in midair, searching the leather for an answer.

  "You don't need to call me anything," he said. "Listen when I speak and keep your mouth shut the rest of the time. You managed that well enough in the fort."

  The boy frowned. "In the fort they shouted 'Seventeen' when they wanted me," he said. "That wasn't a name. It was just… something to point at. I'd rather not go back to calling someone nothing at all."

  The man's jaw moved once, a short muscle jump near his ear.

  "My name won't help you," he said. "Names cling. Use it enough and it hangs on you like a smell. The people who know me by it aren't the people I want you near. Or the people I want near you."

  "A little respect wouldn't kill you," Iye said. She stretched on the shelf, claws scratching wood. "You could call him master."

  The man made a low sound. "You could call me mast—"

  "No," Iye cut in, sharp. "I've changed my mind. You, a master? Look at you. You live in a hole in the woods, you growl at buckets, and you talk to yourself more than you talk to him. That's not a master. That's a hermit."

  For a breath, nobody said anything.

  The boy tasted it silently. Hermit.

  The man stared at the cat.

  "For a creature that has supposedly seen mountains wear themselves away," he said, "you have the sense of humor of a drunk cat."

  "I'm not drunk," Iye sniffed. "This is my natural charm."

  The boy swallowed a smile. "Hermit," he tried aloud, shaping the foreign word carefully. "If I must call you something."

  A corner of the man's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Not quite a scowl either.

  "If you must," he said. "Don't shout it in your sleep. That's all I ask."

  "I don't talk in my sleep," the boy said.

  "You flail in it," Iye said. "And drool. I'm risking my fur just sharing this bed with you."

  "You're welcome to move," the boy said.

  She yawned instead and settled deeper. The fire popped. The man bent back over his stitching. Something in the room had shifted, very slightly. The boy couldn't have said what. Only that there was a shape now where there had been a blank. Man. Cat. Boy. Hermit. Iye. Chanyu. It felt, for the first time since the fort, a little like something that might hold.

  Winter didn't break overnight. It frayed.

  Branches that had held their burden of snow without moving began to let it slide in slow, dirty sheets. Icicles thinned and fell. The packed yard turned from hard white to a churn of slush and frozen mud that tried to steal his boots.

  By that point, his shoulders no longer screamed at the first bucket. His hands had new calluses that weren't from carrying sacks. He could keep the end of the practice branch between himself and the Hermit's chest for more than three heartbeats before his stance collapsed. He still fell. A lot.

  "Better," the Hermit said once, when the boy caught himself on one knee instead of landing flat. He reached down and rapped the boy lightly on the head with his own stick. "You saw the cut that time. You were just too slow."

  "Then make me faster," the boy said, breath burning in his throat.

  "I am," the Hermit said. "If you haven't noticed, you fall different now."

  He said it like a fact. There was no softness in it, yet the boy's chest warmed anyway. His Zhanar changed, too. The thick, stepped accent thinned. The verbs stopped tripping on his tongue. Once, late in the day, he answered a question without thinking, and only when Iye snickered did he realize he'd done it in the city tongue instead of his own.

  "Look at that," she said. "You're finally saying something useful."

  He shoved her off the end of the bed that night. She landed on her feet, of course, and came back, of course, tail flicking, but she didn't sleep on his chest. She curled instead at the hollow of his knees.

  "You sulk like a child," she said.

  "I'm almost fifteen," he muttered.

  "Not for much longer," the Hermit said from his chair, eyes closed. "Not if you keep getting up every time you fall. Children stay down. You don't."

  The boy lay in the dark, listening to their breathing. He remembered the forest being a cage. He remembered the Hermit's words: I built the bars myself. He thought of the fort, the pit, the chains, the way his life had been nailed into place by other people's hands.

  Here, at least, he'd walked into the bars himself.

  I'm not going back as meat, he thought. If I'm in a cage again, this time I'll be the one who chooses when it opens.

  He closed his eyes. Morning would come soon enough. The bucket, the wood, the sticks, the questions. The ache. The shape of his days had changed. Somewhere inside that shape, if he gritted his teeth and filled it and filled it again, there might be enough strength to walk out of these lands alive.

  To the Steppes.

  Home.