The Girl and the Stars

“The cage . . .”

The cage hadn’t stopped. They were still hauling it back. Slowly but without pause.

“They’re not supposed to do that!” Thurin hobbled toward her, holding his arm.

“We should hurry then.” Erris had already collected several boards, still wired together at the edges. His white tunic, now smeared with dirt and blood, had been half torn from him, revealing the musculature of his chest and belly. He strode urgently toward the rising cage, now hip height above the ground.

Yaz’s sense of success turned to panic. Zeen was still out there! “You three do it. I’m going to look for—” Yaz broke off, remembering Quell. Somehow the vast energies she had employed had temporarily wiped from her memory the horror that had driven her through whatever barriers she had overcome in order to call on them. She spotted Quell as one of the Tainted who had been attacking him, the same child who drove the knife home, now moved aside from trying to tend his injuries.

“I’m so sorry.” Jerra wiped at her grimy tears.

Yaz shouldered her aside. It was as if the idea that Quell might die had been too big to fit in her head, blasted from it by the very plunge into the river that it had precipitated. The knife was still buried to the hilt in his side, no part of the blade showing. She took Quell’s hands, their eyes meeting again. There were no words to say. The Ictha had no healing save for minor cuts. To become injured on the ice was to die. Living without injury was struggle enough. It was the same hard fact and same cruel logic that saw children thrown into the Pit of the Missing.

Yaz reached to pull the knife out.

“Don’t.” Jerra caught her arm. Her hair was still dark with the flood and guilt haunted her eyes. “He’ll bleed to death.”

“Take it out.” Quell gasped through gritted teeth. “Going . . . to . . . die anyway.”

Another of the Tainted, blinking, still disoriented, reached to stay Yaz’s hand. “It’s a bad wound, but if we stitch it and bind it”—she tilted her head as if trying to judge what the knife might have reached—“and keep it clean . . . he stands a chance. A good chance maybe.”

A dark shape loomed over them. “She’s correct.” Erris knelt beside Yaz. “We don’t want to remove the blade until we are ready to deal with the wound. I suggest your new friend helps you move Quell to the cage.” He softened his voice and added, “Quickly.”

Erris hurried back to the business of loading food and equipment. He and Thurin pushed through the wandering crowd, made rough by fear of the cage leaving them behind, seemingly the only ones there with any purpose. The rest of the Broken were too overwhelmed to notice what Yaz’s friends were about. They were busy tending to their wounded, weeping over their dead, and discovering those who they thought lost forever months or years before.

Members of Arka’s and Pome’s factions were scattered and intermingled but their fight seemed forgotten, washed away by a flood of water and the falling of stars. The Tainted, returned to their senses when Yaz’s last effort burned the devils out of them, were now the glue that joined the two pieces of the Broken together, the joy of their reunion stronger than recent disputes of which they knew nothing. Yaz had no idea how long it would last. Long enough, she hoped.

Yaz, with help from Jerra and the woman, bent to carry Quell by his arms and legs but as she began to pull Yaz saw the pain it would cause. She set the woman to watch while she and Jerra got boards onto which they could roll Quell and then drag him to the cage. She wanted to stay with him, to talk, to tell him he was going to survive, but there wasn’t any time, the cage was leaving. Before long it would be shoulder high from the ground and for all Yaz knew the priests might soon start to haul it up at speed.

“Let’s do this.” Yaz had found the boards. With the woman’s help she’d slid them under Quell.

The strain required to move the solid Ictha proved too much for Yaz, burned out by her miracle with the stars, and for the woman, starved and weakened during her time in service to Theus. Jerra was stronger than both but too small to make the difference. Yaz’s fingers slipped from the board beneath Quell’s shoulders and she fell back cursing, weeping with effort.

As she sat up Yaz found a hulking shape coming toward her, unrecognisable in the dimmed glow from the ice ceiling high above them.

“I’ll do it.” Kao bent to take hold. His thick arms bore a dozen bleeding bite marks and cruel nail furrows. His hair stood at odd angles, some having been torn out in clumps, and his hides were ripped in several places. But he still had his strength and soon had Quell scraping across the rocks, gasping at the jolts.

At the cage Thurin was already inside, receiving fungi, boards, and other equipment as Erris brought it. A dozen or so former Tainted stood watching in confusion, their minds perhaps unsure of reality after the sudden departure of the devils that had ruled them for so long. An emaciated fair-haired young woman approached the cage as Kao reached it dragging Quell.

“Thurin?”

Thurin positioned the hot pot Erris had given him, setting it on a stack of boards. He turned to the woman. “Klendra?” A smile of astonishment cracked his bloody face. Seeing Yaz he pointed to the blond girl. “She’s cave-born. We grew up together.” He rubbed his eyes as if to clear his vision and looked at Klendra again. “Is it really you? They took you so long ago! You were six? Everyone thought you must be dead ages ago.”

Yaz wanted to shout that there wasn’t time for reunions. Part of her wanted to shove the girl aside. And other voices within her skull cried out to shame that first voice. Exhaustion was showing her what the stars did. She understood that she wasn’t the selfish voice, or the kind one—she was the sum of a multitude, normally joined so close that the seams didn’t show, but liable to fall apart under stress. Everyone was. A mix, a recipe, the sum of their parts and more.

Erris had swarmed up the outside of the cage and now motioned that he was going to drop the load of boards he’d brought across. “Sorry to be insensitive but we’re on a clock here.”

Thurin looked up. “A what?”

“In a hurry.” He dropped the boards for Thurin to catch.

Yaz called out to him. “Erris! Help me with Quell. I can’t lift him like this.”

Erris landed beside them, making the fifteen-foot drop from the side of the cage seem nothing. The bottom of the cage was already approaching shoulder height above the ground.

“Do you know what to do for Quell?” Yaz asked, thinking that in the warm years into which Erris had been born there might have been time to heal the sick rather than discard them.

“I’ll have a look at it on the way up,” he said. “How long was the blade?”

Quell shook his head. “Feels like it’s long enough to poke out the other side.”