The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “Inspection time.” Pome strode in between them. “Let’s see what sorry excuses we’ve been given this time.”

  Maya shrank away from the star as Pome waved it past her on the end of its iron rod. Pome swung back to Kao by the doorway. “Big fellow, eh? Golin?”

  Kao nodded.

  “I should have been leader of this drop-group,” Pome said. “But Tarko has his politics to play. In the end, though, drop-groups aren’t here or there. You come sit with us sometime, down at the Green Shack, and I’ll tell you how things are under the ice. The Broken are listening to me these days and they like what I’m saying. Tarko has me marked for great things.”

  Kao nodded and Yaz found herself starting to nod too. She stopped. There was nothing she liked about this young man, not his attitude, the things he said, or the way his gaze slid over her, and yet somehow his words had been carrying her along with them.

  “Get out, Pome.” Thurin spat. “Take your pretty lies with you.”

  Pome curled his lip in annoyance and strode toward Thurin, thrusting his star before him. “Was that you talking, Taint? Or did you let a demon take your tongue again?”

  Thurin backed from the starlight, shielding his face as if it were a fierce heat.

  “See?” Pome looked back at the rest of them. “The Tainted can’t stand the stars. The light is what keeps us safe.” He glanced at Kao. “Never go where it’s dark, boy. Not down here. They’ll have you in a moment.”

  “Yessir.” Kao gulped and nodded.

  Pome turned and jabbed his star at Thurin, who was pressed to the back wall now. The light made him gasp as if in pain, forcing him to slide into the corner on his rear.

  “Stop that!” Yaz found herself moving forward. However convincing Pome’s words felt, she didn’t like what he was doing one bit.

  “Or you’ll stop me?” Pome swung round, thrusting his star at her chest.

  Yaz squinted down to where the star blazed against her mole-fish skins, brighter even than before. It was just light though, no heat, no pain. The star gave off a faint sound, like the strains of a distant song, with a rapid beat beneath it. “You should leave.”

  Pome frowned and jabbed the star against her. He looked puzzled.

  “Pome!” It was Arka at the doorway. “Get out here.”

  Pome’s face tightened. He forced a smile over gritted teeth and left without saying anything more.

  “Are you alright?” Yaz tilted her head, not sure if she should offer Thurin her hand to help him rise. Outside Arka and Pome’s raised voices diminished into the distance.

  “Fine.” Thurin got to his feet, not looking at Yaz or her half-offered hand. He brushed himself down and went to his bed.

  Thurin didn’t speak again until they were all settling to sleep. “People think Pome’s special because he can withstand the stars, but that’s not why he’s dangerous. He’s dangerous because his words get under your skin. Listen to him too long and you start believing what he says. And if he doesn’t manage to hook you that way then watch out for the ones he does hook.”

  * * *

  SLEEP TOOK AN age to find Yaz. Imagination chased her through her exhaustion. Strangers’ eyes watched her from tainted faces, laden with malice. At last she turned her thoughts from Thurin’s words only to rediscover the unsettling warmth, the dampness in the air—something she knew only from the Hot Sea, the irregular splat of meltwater drops falling upon the roof, the distant groaning of the ice always on the move. All of it conspired to keep her dreams away and instead her mind replayed the events of the pit and the screaming rush of her fall, over and over.

  Yaz lay in the gloom staring at the roof above her. In her whole life this was the first time she had tried to sleep anywhere but within her family tent. She needed the constant complaint of the wind against the hides. She needed her father’s growling snore building to the familiar snort then temporary silence. She needed the cold and the knowledge that Zeen and her mother pressed her, hide wrapped, to either side. Yaz thought of her mother then and a tear ran from the corner of her eye. What must it be like in the tent now with just the two of them in all that space? Father, grim-faced, hands in fists upon his lap, knuckles white. Mother, proud, her face carved by the endless wind, iron in her long dark hair, eyes as pale as the wastes. Four years ago she had two sons and a daughter. Now they were gone. Would her pride still carry her over the ruin of her family? A second tear rolled after the first.

  Finally Yaz dozed, woken periodically by a gnawing hunger, not helped by regular gurgles from Kao’s stomach. Hunger reminded her that however suicidal her mind might have been in throwing her down the Pit of the Missing, her body intended to live and was demanding that she look after its needs or things would go hard on her.

  When a dark shape crept past her Yaz imagined that whoever it was was heading for the distant hut Arka had pointed out. But the figure, too slim to be Kao and too tall for Maya, left the door ajar and turned the wrong way. Curious, Yaz slipped from her covers and moved to follow.

  She saw now as she left the barracks that it could only be Thurin ahead of her. On the ice he wouldn’t last long, too thin to resist the wind’s assault. Yaz herself lacked the full solidity of the Ictha but Thurin looked as though he might be blown away before the wind froze him.

  The gritty rock felt curious underfoot, sticking to her damp feet. To leave a shelter without boots and liners was to lose toes to the frost, but here a lifetime’s learning could be undone in one drop. Yaz stumbled as she followed Thurin away from the settlement, stubbing her big toe on a fold in the rock. She cursed as quietly as she could, hobbling along a good thirty yards behind her quarry.

  Thurin crossed the length of the cavern, jumping two small streams, and came to an archway that led to some new chamber, darker than the one they occupied. Near the entrance a single light burned, a star-stone larger than any of those Yaz had yet seen, bedded in the ice at a level she might reach if she were to stand on Thurin’s shoulders and stretch.

  Thurin came to a halt near the arch. “You’re not doing a very good job of spying on me, you know.” He didn’t turn toward her.

  Yaz froze and said nothing.

  “Stealth isn’t really a skill you need on the ice. I’m told the wind hides every other noise and that there’s nothing to hunt.”

  Still Yaz remained motionless, the air trapped in her lungs.

  “You should have told me that you weren’t trying to be quiet.” Thurin at last turned to face Yaz and she released her breath. “But I have heard that the Ictha can’t lie.” He cocked his head. “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” Yaz lied, and they both smiled.

  “You can’t sleep. Most can’t on the first night. Maybe the others are just faking it. The big lad, Wayo?”

  “Kao.”

  “Kao, then. He can’t really snore like that? I’m sure it must be some kind of a joke . . .”

  Yaz found herself chuckling and made herself stop, suddenly stern. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Answering questions.”

  Yaz didn’t smile this time. “I have more. I want to know—”

  “Aren’t you cold?” Thurin asked.

  “I—” Yaz looked down, mortified at the reminder she had nothing on but the mole-fish skins she’d been sewn into. She should have stolen Kao’s cape but it was so warm she hadn’t noticed her state of undress. Now beneath the brightness of the nearby star she felt next to naked. “No!” She had hoped the word would come out defiantly but it ended up as more of a squeak. “Too hot if anything.” Not a lie. Under Thurin’s amused gaze every inch of exposed skin felt as if it were burning.

  “It’s a breath away from freezing.” Thurin shook his head. “The stories about the Ictha appear to be true. Are you all as strong as bears too?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a bear, let alone wrestled o
ne.”

  Thurin smiled, though there was a sadness in it, the same sorrow that had been haunting him when they first met and ran beneath his laughter. He turned back toward the ice again.

  “I have more questions.” Yaz moved closer.

  “I didn’t come here to answer your questions,” he said.

  “But, you said—”

  “I have questions of my own.” He crossed to where the rock held a puddle and crouched before it.

  Yaz bit back on her impatience and went to stand behind him. Shouting at Thurin was unlikely to get her the answers she needed. Though she was prepared to knock his head against the rock as a last resort if that was what it took. “Well?”

  Thurin reached out to the water, putting his hand into it, flat against the rock at the bottom, long fingers splayed.

  “Ah . . .” Something twisted inside Yaz, a curious sensation, as if she were a pool into which a ball of ice had fallen, sending out ripples. Only she was the ice and the ripples as well as being the pool.

  Thurin let out a small gasp, pain perhaps, and raised his hand. Somehow the water rose with his hand, a slowly undulating glove, inches thick on every side, beautiful where the light came through to project moving lines of light and shadow across Yaz’s stomach and thighs.

  “You’re a witch-child!”

  Thurin laughed and the water fell away in sparkling drops. “I’m not a child. And it’s an old blood that runs through us. Older than the Ictha or any other tribe. Marjal blood.”

  “Us?” Yaz wasn’t sure she wanted this strange young man as her kin.

  “Well, you’re too small for a gerant, unless you’re twelve . . . and you don’t look twelve.” For a moment Thurin’s gaze ran the length of her.

  Yaz let anger burn away any sense of shame at her state of undress. “I’ve seen the long night sixteen times. None but the Ictha can endure it.”

  “Ah, but that’s why the regulator threw you down, is it not?” An eyebrow arched. “You wouldn’t have lasted many more. You don’t strike me as a hunska even though you have the black hair but your eyes are too pale. Are you quick?”

  “Quick enough.” Yaz thought of Zeen. Her brother made her seem slow. In the hand-slap game there was no beating him, and although his eyes weren’t the night black of some southerners like Quina, they were the darkest she knew among the Ictha.

  “Not gerant huge or hunska fast, and yet thrown down here with the rest of us. You’re a marjal, Yaz.”

  She hadn’t been sure Thurin had even registered her name. It sounded strange in his mouth, the southern tribes blunted the edges of their words.

  “Will I be able to do . . . that . . . then?” She nodded at the rippling puddle.

  Thurin pursed his lips. “We marjals have many tricks; the gods reach into their bag of marvels and scatter us with this gift or that, but never too many. The most common are skills to work with shadow or air. My talent is the most prized of the basic skills down here. We can influence the ice, even in its molten form.” He waved a hand at the puddle and the ripples vanished. “I can also work with fire. That’s a rarer skill than ice-work but useless. There’s nothing to burn here.” He shook his head, smiling ruefully at the gods’ joke. “The rarest elemental skill is rock-work. But there’s no rock on the ice and no fire beneath it.”

  “How do you even know you can work flame if there’s no fire down here?” Yaz asked.

  Thurin smiled. “At the forge they melt iron down. I can understand the heat, move it around. It feels the same as when I manipulate the ice. I think my flame-work might actually be stronger than my ice-work.” He shook his head again at the irony.

  “Are there other magics?” Yaz asked. None of this sounded like the river that runs through all things, the source of her strangeness.

  “Some. Oddities that crop up now and then. Welaz could make things float in the air. Anything. Even people. But he’s dead now. Old Gella can make a wound heal faster than it should. Dekkan can find things that are lost.” He shrugged and pulled his coat around him. “How can you not be cold?” he asked.

  “Why did you come out here?” Yaz tried to turn the conversation in a new direction.

  “Maybe I wanted to spy on someone.” Thurin met her eyes with a frank smile and Yaz turned away. “Or maybe I needed to check I still had value.”

  “Do the marjals lose their powers then?” Yaz asked. “I know the Tainted had you. Is that why they let you go? Your power got weak?”

  “We don’t lose our skills, no. If anything they get stronger. Once ice-sworn, always ice-sworn. But I’m exhausted and underfed.” He looked down at his own thinness. “And the Tainted don’t let anyone go. Ever. Arka led a raid to get me back. A woman died. Another man lost his eye. They should have left me.” He stared out into the darkness, bleak and silent for a moment. “Tarko wouldn’t have let them risk it if I weren’t valuable to the Broken.”

  “But why? The trick with the water is pretty but—”

  “They need me to dig through ice. I can dig faster than three gerants put together. For a tenth of the food ration.” Thurin forced a smile and patted his narrow stomach. “I like the digging too. If I don’t use my ice-work regularly then the energy builds up inside me and when I do eventually use it . . . well, it can be dramatic.”

  Yaz looked around at the echoingly large space about them. “These caverns are huge. Why is it so important to dig new ones?”

  “For these.” Thurin turned back toward the wall, thrusting his hand out. High up the ice shattered and the brilliant star fell within a cloud of glowing fragments to strike the rock beneath.

  “Should you have done that?” Yaz glanced back toward the settlement, alarmed. For all that she wanted to find Zeen she knew she needed help from the Broken. Getting banished on her first night would cap off, with one stupid move, a day’s journey that had started with another very stupid move.

  “Relax. It’s us ice-workers who put the things up there in the first place and they’re always being resunk. All of the stars generate a very small amount of heat even without sigils around them. They sink through the ice very slowly. The tiny ones, little more than dust really, sink so slowly that the current of the ice can lift them. The big ones all end up on the bedrock given time.” He advanced on the star as he spoke until he was reduced to a silhouette with the light streaming all around him.

  Thurin’s steps grew slower and closer together as he approached the star, almost as though he were fighting to make progress against a great wind. Yaz could hear the strain in his voice when he spoke. “This is the largest of the stars we use as lights. People don’t like to get near them, especially the bigger ones, so we use smaller ones in town.”

  “You . . . you’re not worried someone will steal it?” Yaz wondered if that might be exactly what he was doing right now.

  “The Tainted? No, the taints can’t abide them. Won’t go near one if they have a choice.” There was real pain in Thurin’s voice now, and still he had a yard to go if he were to pick the stone up.

  “What are you doing?” Yaz called, squinting into the light. “Why are you doing it?”

  “Proving . . . something . . . to . . . myself.” Thurin took another step then fell back with a cry.

  “Thurin!” Yaz ran to help him as he crawled away, the light flaring behind him.

  “I’m alright.” Thurin pushed her hand from his arm and staggered up.

  “You don’t look alright.” He looked like a rag that’s too worn to be used as anything but stuffing. She glanced toward the star, still blazing on the rock. “How can you put it back if you can’t even touch it?”

  Thurin waved a tired hand at the star and the water rushed from the puddle to set it rolling back against the ice wall. He made a fist and twisted it. Somehow the ice drew the star half into it and began to lift it. Fascinated, Yaz edged closer while Thurin con
tinued the slow upward flow of the ice, raising the star above her head toward its former position. Creaks, groans, and small splintering noises accompanied the star’s gradual ascent, the ice protesting just as it did on a larger scale as the great sheets moved across the rock.

  Glancing back Yaz could see the effort it was costing Thurin. In the twilight she could almost see the threads of magic connecting Thurin to the wall. Suddenly he faltered, the gossamer network of his magic fell apart, and with a sharp retort something high above Yaz snapped.

  The star fell, hit the rock, and rolled, coming to a halt by the side of Yaz’s foot. She heard Thurin cry out in shock then find his words. “Get away! Quick!”

  The star blazed so bright Yaz could see nothing but its brilliance. The power and nearness of it sang in her bones, a wordless roaring, beautiful but wild enough to drown in. Despite its smallness and outpouring of light the star seemed a wider and deeper hole than that into which she had thrown herself only hours before. Unable to stop herself Yaz crouched and reached to pick the thing from the floor. The light made black lines of her finger bones and a rosy haze of the flesh around them. Her whole hand tingled, then burned, then closed around the star, so small that she could almost hide it within her grasp.

  “Be still,” she told it for it seemed to her that the star was a racing heart, beating beyond its limits. And suddenly the blaze vanished, replaced by a molten reddish glow like that of the setting sun. There was a silence too. She had barely heard the star’s song before, but now that it was gone the air seemed to ache for its return. Yaz looked for Thurin and saw nothing but blackness swimming with afterimages.

  “What have you done?” Thurin, aghast, speaking from her blindness.

  “I asked it to be quiet.” Yaz blinked and was relieved to see Thurin as a dark shape moving against a less dark background.

  “You shouldn’t be able to do that!” He sounded scared. Amazed, but scared. “Make it work again.”

  Yaz went right up to the wall and held the star above her at arm’s length, stretching. She pressed it to the ice. “Make it go in.”