Read The Fifth Season for Free Online

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. “Do 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 hishead 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.”
    This is the thing that’s been in her mind for the past two weeks, ever since that day at school. If her parents loved her, they would not have locked her in the barn. They would not have called this man. Mother would not have said those terrible things.
    “Why can’t they—” she blurts, before she realizes he has said this on purpose. To see if why can’t they just hide me and keep me here is something she’s been thinking—and now he knows the truth. Damaya’s hands clench on the cape where she’s holding it closed around herself, but Schaffa merely nods.
    “First because they have another child, and anyone caught harboring an unregistered orogene is ejected from