The Girl and the Stars

“No. I was a grown man. My clan, the Hjak, tried to hide me. My mother was the Clan Mother.”

“Hjak?” Yaz had thought she knew all the clans who gathered.

“I am the last of them.” Eular bowed his head. “That was the justice of the priests. A lesson for the other clans. Their lives were forfeit.”

Yaz opened her mouth and said nothing. She had heard of the power of the priesthood but not that they slaughtered whole clans.

Eular waved his hand as if dispelling thoughts of the past. “So here I am. None of the old bloods show in these veins. My magical power is . . . that I can’t see.”

“But you knew Pome had dropped his star.”

“I can’t see, but I can listen. What I hear paints a picture. The words, the way they are spoken, what is left unspoken, the sounds of the chamber. And what I have heard about you wraps you in a fire that I could see through the walls long before you arrived here in my little cave.”

“Oh.” Yaz could think of nothing else to say.

“Can you see this pool before me?”

“I can.”

“The Broken made it and several others like it. Long ago. Few remain who remember their making. Each is a basin, polished to a high shine. In such a receptacle water, if it is kept very still, can stay liquid long after we might expect that it would freeze.”

Yaz stepped forward, her shadow swinging across the pool. “It should be frozen.”

“Most of them are. But as the ice ebbs and flows the paths taken by the heat shift, and sometimes, not often, one of the pools reaches this state. It wants to change but every change must start somewhere and in this pool the change has nowhere to start.”

Yaz frowned. “That . . . doesn’t make sense.”

“And yet it is true,” Eular said without offence. He reached out to hand her a small piece of stone, a gritty fragment smaller than a baby’s first tooth. “Touch it to the water. Drop it in.”

Yaz knelt beside the old man, the rock biting into her knees. She reached out with the piece of grit pinched between the tips of finger and thumb. She touched it to the unrippled surface before her, and in an instant, like the opening of a white wing, traceries of frost spread from the point of contact, infinitely complex, breathtaking, an expanding symmetry. With a gasp of surprise she let the fragment drop. The rapid freeze followed in the stone’s wake, penetrating the depth of the water now as well as spreading across the surface. Before her eyes the thickness of the pool became solid, the clarity of new ice becoming filled with ghostly flaws, fractures frozen into the moment. Within a handful of heartbeats half the pool lay solid, creaking as it expanded, the effect still spreading toward the far shores. Yaz pulled her hand back to her chest.

“Sometimes the introduction of some new thing can change everything, Yaz.” Eular reached out and rapped his knuckles on the new ice. “Regulator Kazik did not throw you down the Pit of the Missing, I think.”

“Why do you say that?” Yaz wondered at how much this old man with no eyes could see. There had been no time for Hetta’s revelations to reach him even if Petrick or someone in the drop-group had wanted to give her away.

“There are many ways to be broken but only four of them arise from the old bloods showing again in a new child—”

“Thurin said there were three: gerant, hunska, and marjal.”

“Four tribes of men beached their ships on Abeth when this world was still green. The Missing had already left, knowing that the sun would continue to wane, but in those days Abeth was still a kindness after the black seas our ancestors had sailed for so long.

“The tribes mixed their blood to breed a people who would thrive in this new place. The gerants with their size and strength, the hunskas with their swiftness that can stretch a moment into an age, the marjals with their mastery of myriad lesser magics . . . and the quantals who see the one true Path that joins and separates all things, and who may take from it as much power as they are able to own.”

Yaz looked away from Eular’s eyeless face and gazed upon the marbled beauty of the frozen pool. “Why didn’t Thurin mention these quantals then?”

“Because none are cast down among us. The priests of the Black Rock keep them. The quantals are the priesthood. So Kazik would not have thrown you down the pit. Which leaves me to ask were you so clumsy as to slip, so hated as to be pushed or pulled by some other of your clan, or . . . did you cast yourself among us? All would seem remarkably unlikely, but one among them must I think be true.”

“I jumped.” It sounded silly when she said it now.

“After a friend?” Eular asked. “There’s nothing like friendship for pulling someone down a hole. Or out of it.” He smiled and turned his head, and though his sockets held no eyes Yaz could tell that the old man’s gaze was a distant one. “My first friends are dead now, all of them, taken by the years. It’s one of the prices paid in the process of becoming old. But I remember them. Oh yes. Every day. The games we played, the fun we had, tears shed. We are victims of our first friendships. They are the foundations of us. Each anchors us to our past. The blows that drive those nails home are randomly struck, but they echo down all our days even so.”

“It was my brother. I jumped after my brother. To protect him.”

“To protect him? You thought he would survive the fall?”

“I . . .”

“Aim for honesty with others, girl. But never, ever lie to yourself.”

“He did survive. I came to save—”

“Only the truth, child. Your life will run that much smoother if there are no untruths between your heart and your head.” Eular rubbed both hands across his face, slowly, and ran gnarled fingers up among the white tufts of his hair. “I have been young and now I am old and it amazes me how long the journey was and how swift. Everything every elder has ever said to you about getting old is true . . . and none of it will mean anything to you until you have made the journey for yourself.”

“The pit has a pull to it . . .” Yaz remembered the dark gullet, endlessly patient, endlessly deep. A threat, a challenge, an invitation. “When the regulator didn’t push me . . .”

“Part of you felt robbed?”

“Most of me felt relieved.” Yaz shook her head. There had been regret as well as relief, though she could only understand the latter. “But then he pushed Zeen.”

“And your brother is with the Tainted now.”

“Yes.”

“And has Kazik tried to get you back yet?”

“He sent me a message. He told me to come back by myself.”