The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “Kao!” Yaz seized him.

  “I’m so hungry.” The boy’s stomach gurgled.

  Yaz snorted in relief. “Get him out of the way,” she told Erris, and moved beside her brother. She shone the starlight into his face, still turned away from the glare of her working on Kao. The star’s heart buzzed, its song sounded cracked, but she drove it hard and the demons slowly leached from Zeen’s head, flowing down his neck and into the narrow confines of his bony chest. She squeezed the star, compacting its energies deep within it, and raised it on high. Part of her flinched from striking Zeen. Kao looked so robust that no matter how hard she pounded the star onto his chest she had had no worries about injuring him with the force of the blow. But her skinny brother seemed so vulnerable on the ground before her. She thought of Azad, the brother who her weakness had let die. Would her strength be the death of her remaining brother?

  The same scream tore from her mouth as she swung to slam the star onto Zeen’s chest. Again the world-splitting crack, though this time it sounded more like the fracturing of sternum and ribs. Again the pain in her fingers. And Zeen convulsing like a fish landed on the ice, Thurin struggling to keep his head from the rock.

  Something changed in the quality of the light, but Yaz only had eyes for her brother. Thurin released him and let him lie limp between them.

  “Zeen?” Yaz asked.

  In answer Zeen sucked in a great gasp of air, his arms and legs rising as he did it, as if he had been as close to drowning as you can get without staying drowned. He choked and gasped and turned his head, fixing her with pale Ictha eyes full of tears. “Yaz?” Another gulped breath. “I had a terrible dream.”

  Emotions Yaz had no name for reached up from the depths of her, squeezing the air from her lungs, taking the words from her tongue, filling her eyes with answering tears. And as she raised her hands to her face the fragments of her broken star spilled between her fingers to go bouncing across the rock, a dozen and more smaller stars, all perfect spheres, a rainbow of glowing colour shading stronger around the red.

  32

  NONE OF THEM spoke much as Yaz led the way back through the Broken’s territory, aiming for the city. Thurin knew the way best of course but like Kao and Zeen he still seemed too shaken to do much more than follow. Yaz had surrounded herself with the fragments of the hunter’s star, a dozen or so, none of them larger than her thumbnail. Each followed its own slow orbit about her, collectively weaving a glowing cocoon, their light sending myriad faint shadows sliding across rock and ice. As she led them further from the Tainted’s ground and the caverns grew lighter she directed the stars into her pocket, not wanting to signal her approach to any of Pome’s faction.

  Zeen followed close on her heels. After his purging he had hugged her like a much younger child and had not wanted to let go. Yaz had held him just as tight as though he were an anchor to her old life and somehow together they might follow the chain back to better days. At last she had had to pull away from him and explain that they needed to hurry and to keep silent.

  Yaz took them through the outer fringes of the Broken’s caverns where the air grew colder, the ceilings lower, and the stars fewer in number. She wasn’t sure how much Zeen remembered or if he fully understood where they were. She hoped that his experiences remained a bad dream and that his youth would help him shrug them off. But Mother Mazai had always said that the hurts done to us as children cast shadows as long as our lives.

  The outer chambers proved echoingly empty—no distant sounds of combat, no bodies, blood, or discarded weapons. Moving through them Yaz could imagine that she was the first to have ever come here, and that when she had moved on it would be as if she had never been. An unearthly beauty haunted these places, these dark, star-speckled voids miles deep beneath the ice. On their own slow timescale they were as fleeting as bubbles in water. Something about the majesty of them encouraged silence.

  “Where are we going?” Thurin asked.

  “To the city.” Yaz smiled. It was the first bit of curiosity he’d shown since they set off. She’d wondered if he were too afraid to ask about their friends in case she told him they were dead. No doubt the vision of Petrick falling from the bridge still haunted him. “We’re going to escape with the iron collection. Quell and Maya are gathering what we’ll need for our journey on the ice.”

  Thurin stayed silent at that. He’d never been out in the wind before, up there, beneath the open sky, never seen the sun or the true stars. Yaz supposed that in its way the prospect was as daunting to him as being thrown into the Pit of the Missing had been to her. Part of her wanted him to ask about Quina but he didn’t.

  “Maya?” Kao rumbled. They had crossed a wide chamber in the time it had taken the name to sink through whatever introspection was tying up his thoughts. “Maya, trying to scavenge while there’s a war going on down here? She’s too little. She’s just a—”

  “She’s deadly,” Yaz said. “An Axit spy here to steal the priests’ secrets. She was the one that rescued me and the others from the black ice. Worry about yourself. That one will outlast all of us down here.”

  She led them on through the frozen chambers and they asked no more questions.

  * * *

  “STOP.” ERRIS CAUGHT her shoulder. They weren’t far from the city now, crossing a freezing, low-roofed chamber reachable only through worm tunnels twisted and squeezed by the flow of the ice. A handful of small stars and a band of glowing dust provided faint illumination. Close at hand a small clutch of red-ball fungi clung to the rock, where they looked to be losing the struggle to prove that life will find a way.

  “What is it?” Yaz asked.

  “Listen.”

  She heard it then, in between the creaking of the ice. A faint noise, hard to make out, attenuated as if it were reaching them from some distance.

  Zeen showed his first interest in proceedings, pointing at one of the tunnel mouths. “It’s coming from there.”

  “Sounds like sobbing,” Kao said.

  Yaz pursed her lips. She wanted to get to the city. She didn’t know how long they had before the collection was due but knew that it couldn’t be too long. She couldn’t carry the whole world on her shoulders. She took a step forward in the direction she’d been going, then stopped. It could be Quina. “Let’s find out.”

  She led the way, letting her stars range ahead of her in the blackness of the tunnel. The passage had been squeezed to a concave shape and at the turns it grew tight enough that Kao had to struggle. If they were attacked in here there would be no running away. Even turning around would be difficult.

  “Definitely crying,” Thurin said behind her.

  Yaz made no reply. Here and there the ice bore long smears of blood.

  At each turn the sounds became clearer. Not a child, or a woman. A man’s grief. Yaz scrambled up an incline, slipping on the ice and only just able to make progress. The sound ahead stopped abruptly.

  “They’ve seen the light,” Kao hissed unnecessarily from behind Thurin and Zeen.

  The next turn revealed their quarry. Two of the Broken, both black-haired, one collapsed in the lap of the other, a young man, his handsome face deathly pale. The other hunched about him, shivering violently. Blood had run across the ice, more of it than anyone could endure losing. There was something familiar about the dying man.

  “We’re here to help.” Yaz summoned her stars back to her hand.

  The one cradling the bleeding man raised his face, framed by a tangle of red-black hair. Where the other had been handsome this one was beautiful in a way that stopped the breath in Yaz’s lungs. “Kaylal!”

  “Exxar.” He tried to lift his friend. “It’s Yaz.”

  Exxar’s head flopped to the side, his gaze fixed. Yaz crawled forward and set her hand to Kaylal’s arm, corded with muscle from his work at the smithy. “What are you doing here?” She wanted to ask how he had got
so far from the ravine where they’d last seen him in Arka’s band. Kaylal’s parents had thrown him into the pit as a baby because he’d been born without legs. They must have thought that the longest journey he would make unaided in his life was the vertical one they set him on.

  “Pome’s side caught us. They wanted us to work the armoury again. We escaped on the way to the forge pool.” Kaylal moved Exxar toward her. “Can you help him?”

  “Kaylal, it’s Thurin.” Thurin squeezed forward, his head now at Yaz’s shoulder. “Who did this?”

  “We need to get out of this tunnel first.” Yaz pushed against him. “Everybody back to the cave.” She took Exxar’s feet. “Can you guide his head, Kaylal?”

  The smith nodded. He kept Exxar’s head in his lap and put on barbed metal gauntlets that he had beside him, lined with fur to keep his fingers unfrozen. With the traction provided he scooted himself along after Yaz.

  Yaz maintained the fiction that Exxar might still be alive, fearing that it was the only thing that could draw Kaylal from his hideaway. The hope in his face hurt her, but its inevitable death would hurt her more. She wondered how she would feel in his place with Quell in her lap. Would she burn as fiercely? Would the quality of her grief differ? What if it were Thurin’s or Erris’s body she clung to in the dark, long after whatever had made them them had departed?

  The rest of the group had to back awkwardly out of the tunnel until they reached a wider section, all save Zeen, who was able to squirm around where he stood. It took them a while to reach the cave where others were able to help with Exxar. Kaylal flinched when he saw Erris reaching for his friend; the Broken knew all the adults under the ice, so a stranger was a big shock. Even so, with Yaz’s reassurance he let Erris take Exxar.

  Erris laid him on the icy stone, quickly checking his pulse and other vital signs. “I’m sorry.” He turned his dark eyes on Kaylal, voice gentle. “He has been dead some while now.”

  “No!” Anger clouded Kaylal’s beauty, mixed with disbelief, and incomprehension. Some hurts are too large for our thoughts to span. They have to enter by degrees, like a knife into its wound. “No . . .” He fought his way back to Exxar’s side. Another broken denial escaped him though it came sorrow-laden and lacking conviction. “Not Exxar. Not him . . .” His grief found echoes in all of them, and Yaz struggled to contain her own, finding her breath catching in her throat. She hadn’t the time to mourn the lost, not while she had others still to save.

  “How did it happen?” Thurin crouched beside the smith. He put an arm about his shoulders. Kaylal tried to shake him off but Thurin wouldn’t allow it. “Kaylal.”

  The rest stood and watched Kaylal hug Exxar’s corpse. Yaz found her eyes misting though she had met Exxar only twice and then briefly. Thurin on the other hand had grown up with both men and had known them all his life. They were family. The sort that wouldn’t throw each other away over some imperfection. Yaz caught herself in the lie. The Broken might not have a pit but they killed each other even so. The evidence of it smeared the tunnel behind her.

  “It was Bexen.”

  The words took Yaz by surprise. It had been so long since Thurin asked his question she had forgotten it had been spoken, but Kaylal hadn’t. Bexen, the cruel-faced gerant with the milky eye, Pome’s enforcer and right-hand man.

  “We escaped Pome’s raiding party when some of Arka’s scouts counterattacked.” The words fell lifeless from his lips, his voice hollow. “Me, Jonna, and Exxar slipped away in the confusion. But Bexen and Tylar caught us out by the Green Cave. Exxar got me away while Jonna fought them. He carried me. I didn’t even know he’d been cut until we got to the outer chambers. Bexen had sliced him on the leg and Tylar got him in the back. I gave her that knife two drops after she joined us, and now she’s stabbed me in the heart with it.”

  Thurin shook his head and stood slowly, trailing his hand across Kaylal’s shoulder. “You’ll come with us.”

  Yaz beckoned Thurin to her. Kaylal wouldn’t last a day on the ice. Thurin must know it. She steered him into the largest tunnel that led from the chamber and spoke in a low voice. She wanted to protest that they couldn’t take the smith, that it would be kinder to leave him for Pome. But even as the thoughts formed she knew them for her own version of whatever it was that let the Ictha toss their children into the Pit of the Missing. Mother Mazai had among the treasures that she showed the children during the long night an image scraped onto the hide of a parchment-fish, whose layered skin allows images of several shades to be made simply by varying the depth the stylus scrapes. The image was of an old woman’s face, her folds sculpted by the wind. But if you changed the way you looked at it then the image miraculously became a picture of a beautiful young woman, a whole-body image of her stretching.

  What the Ictha did at the pit was the same. If you looked at it one way it was a necessary compromise to the harshness of life spent on the ice. Change how you looked at it and in one sudden step it was a horror wrought upon their own children who they should love more than life, an unspeakable crime by a society that would be judged on how they treated their most vulnerable members. A cancer at the heart of every good thing in the lives of all the tribes.

  So instead of saying how impossible it would be to take Kaylal with them she said, “There are parts of who I am that I wish I could split off like the Missing did, and lose them in the ice. Life would be much simpler if I could only see things like this one way.”

  Thurin shook his head. “When Theus got that last part of himself back it didn’t feel like he was adding new badness to the mix, or at least not just more badness. Even though the Missing only cut away what they thought lessened them it felt like he was becoming more whole and somehow that it was better that way.”

  Yaz had expected Thurin to be confused by what she was saying, or perhaps offended given the horrors he’d so recently experienced, but instead he’d surprised her. “You sound like you agree with that monster rather than with the Missing.”

  “Theus spoke to me before he left. I think he knew I’d tell it to you though, so perhaps it was a message for you.” Thurin stared into the tunnel as if trying to recover the words, as if he were hearing them again. “He said we’re all of us falling through our lives. It didn’t start when you jumped or end when you hit the water. Each of us plunges through our own existence, punching me-shaped holes through days, through weeks, through conversations. We’re none of us one thing or the other; we’re legion; there’s a different Yaz inside your skull for every day of your life. We deceive others, we deceive ourselves, we keep secrets that even we don’t know and hold beliefs we don’t understand. And in that state of profound, fundamental, primal ignorance we still think we can sculpt the clay of our own selves, we think we know what to cut away, that we understand the consequences of excising greed. Are we so sure we don’t need it? Might we not be creating new and different demons whose most frightening trait is that they truly believe themselves to be angels? Do you say everything you think? Do you do everything you feel? Any divinity we might lay claim to is in the restraint we exercise against our nature. Every one of us is bound by our own constraints. To call them all fears makes us sound cowards. Many are judgments. Balancing harm against benefit, hurt against pleasure, our feelings against another’s, the now against the maybe . . .” Thurin trailed off, coming back to himself. He spat, perhaps trying to rid himself of the taste of Theus’s words. “Theus is a monster, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. It’s a dangerous game to try to rid yourself of weakness. You never know what else you might be losing in the deal.” He shook his head and forced a grin. “We’re talking about Kaylal, aren’t we? You don’t want to take him.”

  Yaz shook her head. “We’re talking about me. And we are taking him. I’d rather die trying to carry him than live with myself having left him behind.”

  Thurin’s grin broadened into something natural. He nodded. Then, as if to ligh
ten the load of Theus’s observations and the weight of Exxar’s death: “So, you don’t want to leave him behind. I can understand why you’d feel that way. He is very good-looking.”

  Yaz punched his arm, snorting.

  “You do know he only likes boys?”

  Yaz stifled a laugh. Her nerves were frayed. Both of them were on the edge of hysteria. She composed herself and turned back into the cave. The sight of Exxar’s body blew away any further inclination to smile.

  “Time to go. Erris can carry Kaylal.”

  Kaylal shook his head. “I can make my own way.” The stumps where his thighs should have been were bound thick with iron and hide so that he could drag himself without damage, and his arms were equal to the task.

  “Alright then. But if we need to run or to move quietly then Erris or Kao will carry you.”

  Kaylal nodded.

  “What will we do with Exxar?” Thurin asked gently.

  Kaylal lowered his gaze. He had pulled the body beside the small patch of red-ball fungi. “The gods have the best of him now. Let the ice take what’s left.”

  33

  YOU DID A remarkable thing, Yaz.” Erris came to walk beside her as they trekked through the ice caves of the Broken, bound for the city.

  “I did?” She gave him a doubtful glance.

  “All of you look defeated!” Erris shook his head. “But you have your brother back, and your two friends. Three people freed from the taint. Didn’t you say Thurin was the only one rescued in an age, and that even that wasn’t successful? And now here you are, walking away with all three, thumbing your nose at the odds.”

  Yaz managed a smile. It was true, all of it. She had pulled off a great and unexpected victory. The Ictha said people divided into those who, at the middle of the long night, would sigh and say forty days of darkness remained, and those who would smile and say that already forty dark days lay behind them. Yaz had always thought she belonged in the half-finished camp rather than with those counting the days remaining.