The Girl and the Stars
She returned the needle to its place and set her hand to the dark grey stone beside her. Her fingers traced the scrapes and grooves left by the endless flow of ice. For a moment she saw trees about her, grass beneath her fingers, warm and springy, the chatter of birds in her ears, so different from gull cry. A gentle breeze that caressed rather than bit.
“Yaz?” Quell tilted his head in question, then helped her up. “She’s back.”
Maya stood a short way off in the tunnel’s gloom. She waved them on. “The guards know we’re coming now.”
Yaz saw nobody watching for them on their approach to the ravine. It unsettled her to think she had missed them even knowing that they were there.
Along the near side of the ravine half a dozen cave mouths glowed with starlight, isolated islands of illumination below which the rock face steepened toward vertical and plunged away to the hidden torrent roaring in the distance. Yaz still felt unsafe on the narrow path down, really just a series of grit-strewn ledges crudely joined together.
Not far from the top they appoached a cave mouth that Yaz hadn’t noticed on her earlier visits, now lit from within and crowded with Arka’s faction. The handsome, legless smith, Kaylal, sat near the entrance and waved a greeting. “Yaz! They found you!”
Yaz smiled back. Beauty aside, something good shone out of Kaylal; she saw it the first time she laid eyes on him. The other young smith, Exxar, moved up behind the smith and set both hands to his shoulders, arms sliding out from the thickness of his rat-skin cloak. His was a different kind of handsome, solid and clear-cut, but lacking the unearthly quality Kaylal possessed. And his gaze was less friendly. This is mine, it told her, keep walking. Kaylal grinned at her and lifted a tolerant hand to cover one of Exxar’s.
“Arka’s in here.” Maya led them on past the cave, down to the door of the drying hut. She knocked twice then stood aside for them to enter.
* * *
THIS TIME YAZ found the warmth of the drying hut a welcome change from the cold outside. Whatever had broken inside her when she’d torn that hunter apart, it had left her still less of an Ictha than she had been before. Behind her Quell muttered an oath as he entered. He would have never felt such heat before.
“Yaz.” Arka spoke from a chair toward the rear of the cave. She was flanked by Ixen from the forge and Madeen the cook on one side, on the other an older gerant, one thick arm heavily bandaged with bloodstained furs, and an armoured man with a shaved head, a sword ready in his hand. Eular stood closer at hand beside the wall with Thurin next to him, perhaps as his guide. Thurin gave her a smile but he looked troubled. The old man favoured Yaz with his eyeless regard. “Remarkable,” he said. “The hunters didn’t get you after all.”
Arka beckoned them closer. “We thought we’d lost you down in the city. But you found your way out and found a friend. This would be the elusive spearman who knocked down Goxx in the Pillar Cavern?”
Yaz glanced back at Quell in surprise.
“I did knock someone down.” Quell came to stand beside her. “They were in my way and others were chasing me.”
“You seem to have exchanged spears too. Where did you get that one?” Arka eyed the bloodstained iron.
“We found it with Jerrig’s body.” Yaz spoke before Quell could answer.
“Jerrig!” That brought Arka out of her chair. They all asked their questions at once, shock on every face. Were there others with him? Had he fought? Which cavern? How long ago?
Arka and the four around her soon fell to arguing loudly among themselves. Even Ixen found his voice.
“You said they would leave the others alone. My mother is still in the settlement!”
Yaz led Quell across to Thurin and Eular. Small as it might be, Arka’s faction were clearly not of a single mind. On the ice the Ictha had no problem choosing their direction in a featureless waste. Down here many directions beckoned, every mouth held a new opinion.
“Yaz.” Thurin stepped toward her as if he were going to take her hands, then faltered. “We thought you were dead! We thought the hunters had you!”
“It takes more than one of those to stop an Ictha!” Quell moved forward, almost between them. “We dealt with—”
“Are Quina and Kao alright?” Yaz interrupted. She didn’t want everyone there to know about the hunter she had undone. Not yet. Not before she had a better understanding of what was going on. Also she was worried about Quina. And Kao.
Thurin nodded. “A lot of others aren’t though. Enza and Herro were killed. Jecca and her brother badly hurt.”
Yaz couldn’t put faces to those names. It reminded her though that Thurin had been born here. This conflict meant far more to him than to the rest of the drop-group. She reached out a hand to his arm, midway between shoulder and elbow, the way the Ictha offered sympathy.
“Even when you’re not here you cause change, Yaz.” Eular sounded neither sad nor happy, as though what had happened were as inevitable as the ice.
This was all on her? Blood and death and friend against friend? The sudden weight of events left Yaz staggering beneath the burden of weariness she already carried, almost unable to keep her eyes from closing. She looked from Quell to Thurin, both of them drawn to their full height, facing each other like boys playing at warriors. Quell stood shorter, broader, the strength of him in his face, his pale eyes normally so calm now tinged with something more fierce. Thurin, taller, thinner, more delicate. As ever, Thurin looked haunted, carrying his tragedy like a wound, dark eyes narrow above sharp cheekbones, his hair as black as Quell’s though wild, a standing shock where Quell’s fell long and even. She let herself stumble to distract them from releasing whatever pointed exchanges queued behind their lips.
“Yaz!” They both came to her. She mumbled that she just needed sleep and together they helped her from the cave. Maya guided them further down the ravine to a place she might rest.
Yaz hardly saw the chamber that Maya led her into or the faces of those already there. Instead she sank onto the thin pile of hides they set for her and plunged into sleep.
The dreams that rose to catch her were green and growing, and somewhere in them a dead boy waited for her.
20
I’M DREAMING.” YAZ stops her wandering and stands, barefooted, on the cold stone. The ice sky arches above, no more than a spear’s length beyond the reach of her fingers. The chambers of the Broken, like bubbles beneath sea ice, open on every side from this one, stretching all the way from the Missing’s city to the pit.
All around her the space reverberates with the same glacial song that has been sung since long before the gods of sky and sea made the first man and the first woman. Yaz wonders if the great whales, those behemoths who swim to unknowable depths and know the secrets of the ocean, learned their own songs from that of the eternal ice, for both have much in common. A refrain of old sorrow, immeasurable memory, a language of loss in which the true names of all things are known and spoken.