The Girl and the Stars

“Hells . . .” Kao, behind her. Hetta had stopped her hunt and now slowly turned her head in the direction of their approaching group. “She’s . . . huge!”

Hetta reached behind her and drew from her belt an iron blade, a stolen sword as big as any Yaz had seen but seeming a mere dagger in the woman’s fist. Between the wrist and elbow of her other arm the gerant had bound a great thickness of hides secured by an iron bar twisted into a spiral, a shield of some kind to ward off blows. With a scream of rage Hetta came charging and sudden terror turned Yaz’s muscles to water.

Hetta came roaring, a band of scarlet across her eyes filling both with blood, and a jet-black stain reaching out like fingers in all directions around her impossibly wide mouth.

The two hunskas, Petrick and Quina, leapt to either side, Petrick, who hardly reached the woman’s hip, lashing out with his knife. Thurin and Yaz were knocked aside as Hetta seized her largest opponent. She caught Kao around the neck and slammed him down on the rocky floor, water spraying up from the impact. In the next moment she was turning to follow Petrick, her sword swinging low. Swift as the hunska was he couldn’t outrace the leading edge of her sword. Instead, he jumped, clearing the blow by fractions of an inch.

Yaz sat, shaking away the strange lights that filled her vision after Hetta’s rancid bulk had hammered into her. She saw immediately that her plan had been suicide. If Kao had managed to get her down they might have had a chance, but Hetta stood head and shoulders above him.

As the hunskas danced out of reach Hetta turned back toward those on the ground. Thurin had almost got to his feet. Hetta could split him in two with that cleaver of hers but she seemed reluctant to grant a quick death. She reached for him instead, and as she did so Thurin threw out both hands in a gesture of rejection. Somehow Hetta’s lunge slowed to a crawl. Both of them stood as if locked in a contest of strength, though with neither touching the other. Hetta howled and started to advance while Thurin’s legs buckled, losing traction on the small ridge he’d braced them against. She drove him back, still not making contact, as though a thickness of glass were interposed between them.

Quina, seeing her moment, rushed in to pummel Hetta’s exposed side, her fists a blur. Petrick charged in too, launching himself at the gerant’s back, driving his knife in as high as he could and trying to heave himself up with it, or to draw it down, carving a great wound. It seemed though that the blade had lodged tight and he lacked the strength for either.

Ignoring both attacks Hetta drove Thurin toward the edge of the cavern. Thurin seemed to be weakening but as the wall loomed behind him he drew back one arm and thrust again, this time sending forward jets of fractured ice from the wall. The ice blasted around Hetta’s face, blinding her and allowing Thurin to twist away.

“Run! Run, Maya!” Thurin took off back the way they had come, Petrick and Quina at his heels.

Yaz, on her feet now, made to run too. There was still no sign of Maya but the girl had had time to make her escape.

It wasn’t until she passed by Kao, out cold . . . or dead, that Yaz came to a stumbling halt. Behind her Hetta had cleared her eyes, still framed by that band of scarlet skin, and now came forward, howling murder and scything her sword before her.

Yaz turned. Even as she did it she was asking herself why. The boy was immature and too full of himself. And yet the answer came to her even more quickly than Hetta did. Throw any single life away as if it holds no meaning and how will your own life be valued thereafter? Everyone she had ever known had stood and watched her brother be thrown down the Pit of the Missing. Abandoning Kao now would say that they were right.

The river that runs through all things had first revealed itself to Yaz in a moment of great calm when her mind lay serene, clear as slow-ice. She had been watching the new sun rise over the white plains, and the reaching redness of its rays had become a multitude twisting in her mind, flowing and joining, and the river had been before her and in her and through her.

To see the river again so soon after touching its power was not easy. To do it in the grip of terror as death rushes howling upon you, impossible. But Yaz had set aside her fear and stepped forward accepting the likelihood of her own end. She reached out into that calm and found the river, rushing at her more swiftly than her enemy. Where before Yaz had only dared a finger or the palm of her hand, this time she thrust both hands into the flood and immediately the power of the current came roaring into her.

Yaz tried to pull free before the river’s surge carried her away or the force of it swirling through her tore the flesh from her bones. She found herself flying backwards, jolted by the separation, drunk on the strange energies she’d taken, overfull, bursting. The world around her seemed uncertain, fracturing into dozens of possibilities, each drawing Yaz along a different path into the future.

Kao lay helpless before Hetta but she carried on past the boy, aimed squarely at Yaz.

It took the singular threat of Hetta’s continuing charge to nail Yaz to the moment. For several heartbeats it had seemed to Yaz that she would simply fall apart into different fragments of who she might be. Instead she rose, blazing with barely contained power, incandescent in her hands, trails of magic scintillating down past her elbows as if it were a liquid drawn by gravity’s pull.

Yaz raised her arm against the swing of Hetta’s sword and with a bright retort the blade shattered. The other hand, driven flat-palmed at Hetta’s chest, slammed her backwards, both feet leaving the ground. The force of the blow threw the cannibal for yards, sending her hammering into the ridge of rock that she had previously hidden behind. She collapsed against its base in a broken heap, her chest smoking.

“Yaz!” Thurin was the first to reach her. He gazed at the fallen gerant. “What happened?”

Yaz folded her arms under each other, trying and failing to hide the light still shining from her hands and well past her wrists. “Kao didn’t get up. I couldn’t leave him.” She willed the remaining energies she’d taken to sink deeper into her flesh but they were slow to obey.

Thurin knelt beside the boy, checking the back of his head. “I made the water in the puddle cushion his fall. He seems to be in one—”

Kao let out a groan and his eyes fluttered open. Quina and Petrick were approaching Hetta now, Maya with them, trailing at the back, her eyes full of watchfulness rather than fear. All of them glanced Yaz’s way. It’s next to impossible to hide a light source in a dimly lit cavern and although the power in her was fading it was not yet gone.

“We need to tie her,” Yaz called out and moved to join them.

“We need to cut her throat before she wakes up,” Petrick said, knife in hand. Already Hetta’s limbs had begun to twitch and she made a low groan of her own. A purple stain had begun to reach up across her thick neck from beneath her furs.

“No.” Yaz drew level with Petrick. The boy had slowed as the distance between him and Hetta shrank to little more than a yard.