Read Online The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin - Free Book Online

by this point it’s too late.
    Karra frowns, looking at the ground beneath his feet. Crossbow Woman pauses in the middle of loading another bolt, eyes widening as she stares at the shivering string of her weapon.
    You stand surrounded by swirling flecks of snow and disintegrated crossbow bolt. Around your feet, there is a two-foot circle of frost riming the packed earth. Your locks waft gently in the rising breeze.
    “You can’t.” Rask whispers the words, his eyes widening atthe look on your face. (You don’t know what you look like right now, but it must be bad.) He shakes his head as if denial will stop this, taking a step back and then another. “Essun.”
    “You killed him,” you say to Rask. This is not a rational thing. You mean you-plural, even though you’re speaking to you-specific. Rask didn’t try to kill you, had nothing to do with Uche, but the attempt on your life has triggered something raw and furious and cold. You cowards. You animals, who look at a child and see prey. Jija’s the one to blame for Uche, some part of you knows that—but Jija grew up here in Tirimo. The kind of hate that can make a man murder his own son? It came from everyone around you.
    Rask inhales. “Essun—”
    And then the valley floor splits open.
    The initial jolt of this is violent enough to knock everyone standing to the ground and sway every house in Tirimo. Then those houses judder and rattle as the jolt smooths into a steady, ongoing vibration. Saider’s Cart-Repair Shop is the first to collapse, the old wooden frame of the building sliding sideways off its foundation. There are screams from inside, and one woman manages to run out before the door frame crumples inward. On the eastern edge of town, closest to the mountain ridges that frame the valley, a rockslide begins. A portion of the eastern comm wall and three houses are buried beneath a sudden grinding slurry of mud and trees and rocks. Far below the ground, where no one but you can detect, the clay walls of the underground aquifer that supplies the village wells are breached. The aquifer begins to drain. They will not realize for weeks that you killed the town in this moment, but they will remember when the wells run dry.
    Those who survive the next few moments will, anyhow. From your feet, the circle of frost and swirling snow begins to expand. Rapidly.
    It catches Rask first. He tries to run as the edge of your torus rolls toward him, but he’s simply too close. It catches him in mid-lunge, glazing his feet and solidifying his legs and eating its way up his spine until, in the span of a breath, he falls to the ground stone-stiff, his flesh turning as gray as his hair. The next to be consumed by the circle is Karra, who’s still screaming for someone to kill you. The shout dies in his throat as he falls, flash-frozen, the last of his warm breath hissing out through clenched teeth and frosting the ground as you steal the heat from it.
    You aren’t just inflicting death on your fellow villagers, of course. A bird perched on a nearby fence falls over frozen, too. The grass crisps, the ground grows hard, and the air hisses and howls as moisture and density is snatched from its substance… but no one has ever mourned earthworms.
    Fast. The air swirls briskly all down Seven Seasons now, making the trees rustle and anyone nearby cry out in alarm as they realize what’s happening. The ground hasn’t stopped moving. You sway with the ground, but because you know its rhythms, it is easy for you to shift your balance with it. You do this without thinking, because there is only room left in you for one thought.
    These people killed Uche. Their hate, their fear, their unprovoked violence. They.
    (He.)
    Killed your son.
    (Jija killed your son.)
    People run out into the streets, screaming and wondering why there was no warning, and you kill any of them who are stupid or panicked enough to come near.
    Jija. They are Jija. The whole rusting town is Jija .
    Two things