The Girl and the Stars

Yaz crouches to touch the bedrock. Once a rich dark soil blanketed this place, deep enough for the roots of trees, warm enough for flowers. Around her fingers grass grows, tickling against her palm, ghostly green, many-bladed, struggling for the sun. She looks and all about her a memory of pine and oak is building, a memory of beech and elm, rising high above, up into the ice as though it were the phantom and the trees simple fact, here and now and always true.

“How do I know your names?” Yaz stands and the wood has become the world, a blueness waits high above, glimpsed in whispers through myriad leaves and reaching arms.

She walks with the warmth and complication of twigs and leaves and fallen acorns beneath her feet. “I’m dreaming.” But the bark beneath her hands feels rough and gnarled, detailed beyond her ability to imagine, too solid for any dream where sleeping hands might close on air.

In a glade a fallen tree several seasons down lies reaching for the sky, branches stark against puffy clouds. On the far side in the treeline’s shade a doe nibbles fresh shoots.

Yaz stares at the doe, amazed at its strangeness and just as amazed that it is somehow familiar to her. As if the time that escaped her in the void were not truly lost but had been filled with experience and somehow that knowledge, those memories, have begun to bleed into her dream.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Erris stands beside her. Across the glade the doe looks up with liquid eyes and darts off among the trees, so fleet of foot that Yaz’s heart almost chases it.

“I don’t have words for what I’ve seen here.” Yaz’s gaze remains captured by the space where the doe had stood. She has lived a life in the jaws of the wind, her eyes trained to find meaning within a hundred shades of white and grey. She has lived as a singular mote of warmth upon a vast and lifeless wilderness. “It’s too much. There’s too much . . . of it.”

Erris’s hand is on her shoulder. How so light a contact can be so heavy with meaning she has no idea.

“Are there no other people here?” Yaz asks.

“None that the void remembers.”

“So . . . we’re like Zin and Mokka.” She feels the blood in her cheeks.

“Who?”

“Zin and Mokka.” Yaz blinks at him. “The first man and woman.”

Erris grins. “Not all myth is true.”

She scowls at him, suddenly conscious of his weight of years, more than all the elders she has known put together. “Next you will tell me that the Gods in the Sea are a lie, and the Gods in the Sky.”

He laughs now, a thing as warm as the forest about them. “No, Yaz, there are definitely gods in the sea, and if so small a thing can hold gods then the sky must also.”

Yaz gazes at the sky. It is not her sky, neither the star-scattered ceilings of caverns nor the merciless vault above the ice, scarred at its utmost heights with ribbons of frost. It is not her sky and she is not here.

Somewhere her body is lying on a cold stone floor in a cave. When she wakes it will be to a war she wants no part of, murder in closed spaces, friend against friend. And her escape, her impossible escape, would take her into the black ice then up through untold miles to the white hostility of a land that wants to kill all of them, clanless, tentless, and even if they had both tent and clan . . . hopeless.

“You could stay here with me,” Erris says, and Yaz doesn’t know if she is remembering this, dreaming it, or if the offer is really here and now and that somehow Erris can reclaim her to the void to live a green eternity in the memory of a vanished world.

“When you’re lost on the ice they say that you reach a point where the wind ceases to feel cold. They say a warmth enfolds you, a sleepiness, and that all you want to do is to lie down, just for a bit, to lie down and coil around the wonderful warmness that is your death. And they say what makes the Ictha who we are is that we never do. We never surrender to that illusion. They say that we are found frozen on our feet.” She turns to meet his gaze, his serious eyes. “I don’t know if that’s true or not but the point of the story is true. It’s not in us to give up. And this . . .” She waves her hand at all of it. “This wonderful, miraculous place, and . . .” And you, she wants to say. “All this is the warm death. This is giving up.”

Erris’s smile is a sad one. “I can’t argue with that. Much as I would like to. The void is a miracle. It offers everything. But it is not life. And I could never tell you that it was.” The hand on her shoulder steers her to where he now points, a darker place beneath the arms of a great yew, its boughs laden with dark green needles and berries like drops of pale blood. “The way back, my lady.”

“Thank you.” Yaz begins to walk. She looks only forward, eyes on the blackness amid the tangled bracken. Grim steps, teeth gritted against the need to look around. If she does that, if she looks again . . . how will she leave? Birdsong fills her ears. She knows the skylark dropping its notes in a silver chain, warblers and fifinch peppering the air with heartbreak. Still she walks.

“Be careful of Theus. He is so much more than he seems. And so much less.”

Theus, ruler of the Tainted, and perhaps even of the taint itself. She’s scared of what lies ahead. Scared of finding him in her path. She would be stupid not to be. But if this Theus stands between her and her brother then he should worry too.

“Wait!” Erris calls. Then softer, “Wait?”

Yaz nearly turns but the blackness before her is diminishing, burning away in the day’s heat. Now or never. She has to leave.

She is walking into the dark’s margins now. It rises to greet her. A cold mist promising nothing good. The chill sinks into her bones in nothing flat. Already she’s shivering. The sky above her is a cold whiteness now and a dark stain spreads across it like the claws of a reaching hand. Seus has come bringing another war, a greater one that lies beyond her understanding. But one thing she does know is that she wants no part of it, any more than she wants any part of the Broken’s war.

“Run, Yaz!” Erris’s voice, distant and panicked. “Run and don’t look b—”

But Erris is gone. There is only darkness and freezing air and hard stone biting through the thin furs beneath her cheek.

21

   YAZ! WAKE UP!”

Someone was shaking her. “Thurin?”

“You have to get up now.” Thurin gripped her arm and hauled her to a sitting position. “Pome’s coming.”

“Pome?” Sleep cluttered her mind, fragments of her fading dream still fluttered through. Was this it: the final battle? The cave was small, crowded, lit by a few small stars on high ledges. Everyone else was on their feet, some readying weapons. Others were already leaving, filing out onto the narrow path leading up the side of the ravine. “Pome?” she repeated, still searching for focus.