The Girl and the Stars
“Thurin?” Quell asked.
“The others,” Yaz said. “Are they all safe?”
“Nobody is safe!” Maya suddenly spun around, checking the entrances. “It’s too bright here. We have to go.”
Yaz dimmed the stardust, returning the chamber to its previous gloom, mottled with the faint, coloured glow of the dust bands. “Not until I know what’s happening. Where is everyone?”
Maya drew a deep breath. “It’s war. They’re fighting among themselves. Pome and his people are based around the forge pool. Arka and Eular are holding out against them at the ravine where the drying cave is.”
“That’s not very big! How many of them are there? And what about the settlement?”
“There’s about thirty of us. The settlement is empty except for maybe some old folk and sick. There was a lot of fighting there.”
Quell stepped up beside Yaz. “And what were you doing out here, child?” He frowned, studying Maya closely. “Clan Axit, aren’t you?”
The bands tattooed on the outer edge of her left ear gave it away. Yaz had always thought it funny that this timid girl belonged to the famously warlike Axit. Perhaps among their tents being kind and gentle was all it took to count as broken.
“I was spying,” Maya said. “Arka needs to know the disposition of the enemy.”
Quell blinked. “The what?”
“What Pome is up to,” Maya explained. It seemed that even the Axit children knew more of the language of war than Ictha men.
“We should go to Arka,” Yaz said. “Will you take us?”
“I know the way.” Quell gestured back the way they had come.
“But Maya knows the way and how to stop us getting filled with spears by some overexcited guards before we can explain ourselves.”
Maya seemed doubtful for a moment, looking Quell up and down with mistrustful eyes. She was still a few years shy of the time when she might be swayed by handsome young men.
“He’s my friend,” Yaz said. “He came down the pit on a rope. To save me.”
Maya’s doubt seemed to deepen still further, but at last she nodded. “Follow me then. But be quiet. I heard you two coming from a mile off.”
* * *
MAYA LED THEM through a series of narrow tunnels made by coal-worms and squeezed by glacial flow over the intervening years. No gerant could have used them. At several points Quell struggled to fit through. He made no complaint but Yaz could see her own fear echoed on his face. They had both lived a life on the vast open of the ice and tight confines held a horror all their own.
As she followed, Yaz found herself wondering about the time she had spent in the city. Days? How long had she been in the void, dreaming strange dreams? Erris had spent a hundred lifetimes and more in its dark heart. Just a little longer in his green world and Yaz might have woken like Jekka Ixo from the old tales, emerging from his nap in the witch’s cave to find the world had moved on without him, his people changed, his children forgotten, and like Jekka she would have walked the ice beneath a burden of years that had imparted only age and no wisdom.
Crossing a wider chamber Quell drew level with Yaz. “If these people are fighting a war among themselves they aren’t going to be interested in helping rescue your brother.”
Yaz had been thinking the same thing herself. “There are other kinds of help. We have no idea what we’re up against with the Tainted. Arka knows things we need to know. And Thurin was living among them until recently.”
“Thurin? You mentioned him before. He was tainted?”
“Yes.”
Quell shuddered. “I’ve seen them, you know. Not just the giant woman—”
“Gerant.”
“I’ve seen others wandering outside the changed ice. Especially by the big pool. I thought they were sick, or driven mad by being down here too long, but those must have been taints too. I knew there was something wrong as soon as I saw the first one. I’m no coward, you know that, but I just turned and ran the other way first chance I got. I—”
“Quiet!” Maya hissed. She motioned for them to stay and moved on alone. As she went the shadows dragged around her like a cloak. A moment later she was gone, hidden by the curve of the wall and by gathering darkness.
“Can you trust her?” Quell asked.
“Yes.” With the word out of her mouth Yaz wondered where that judgment came from.
They waited and the silence built around the creak of the ice and the drip of meltwater. Quell began to shuffle that way he did when he wanted to ask something. He had shuffled just the same for two days before he first asked to kiss her when she was eleven and he was twelve. Now Yaz found herself on the point of telling him to spit it out when he finally spoke.
“I don’t know why just saying a handful of words is harder than letting myself down into an endless hole on fifty thin ropes knotted together . . . I want you, Yaz. I want us to share a tent, raise children. One day you’ll be clan mother. Everyone knew that. Come back to us, yes, but come back to me. I came here for you.”
“And Zeen.” Yaz’s cheeks burned and she couldn’t meet Quell’s eyes.
“For you. You weren’t pushed. You jumped. And it made me think you were running from something. There’s no curse on your blood . . . But Zeen too. I said I’d get him back and I will if that’s what it takes.”
Yaz nodded. He hadn’t said he loved her again. Maybe that was too hard a word to repeat. Or maybe he only needed her, like a piece of his life that left its own hole when taken. She tried to find an answer, but Quell was right, words can be hard to say. And there was a curse on her blood. The regulator hadn’t meant her for the pit but he did mean her for the Black Rock. He’d decided for her. Decided on a life spent in mountain caves praying to the Hidden God that only the priests knew. A few brief excursions to the clans maybe, but as a stranger, an outsider to all she knew, dispensing law and cheating precious food from them in exchange for what must be a tiny fraction of the iron they took from the Broken.
They waited, the silence still thick about, aching for an answer but now at least free of Quell’s shuffling. Yaz grew tired and she crouched. She took Elias’s needle from her collar and studied it. In tales the gods gave more impressive gifts. With difficulty she tied a hair about it and let it hang from thumb and forefinger. She could feel Quell’s gaze on her. Mother Mazai had an iron needle that would always point to the north. As Yaz had half expected Elias’s needle turned slowly then stopped.
“Is that north?” Quell asked.
“I don’t know.” At least that was now an acceptable answer. “This place has me all turned around.” This was also the answer she had been unable to give to what he had said before.