The Girl and the Stars
25
THEY COULDN’T FIND Quina. For Yaz that was the last load that made the ice break beneath her. Something snapped deep in her chest, the loss of Thurin and Kao and Petrick hit her like a hammer and sobs broke from her. She found herself calling for Quina, careless of who or what else might hear. Quell had to wrestle her to the floor and all the walls pulsed and blazed as the stars echoed with her grief.
Maya spoke into the silence that followed. “We need to get to the city.”
Yaz allowed herself to be led. Quell at her side, Maya ahead, scouting for danger. Maya seemed to be a new person, as though the timid child had been shrugged away like a cloak to reveal something hard and full of purpose.
They saw no one, heard nothing save the groan and drip of the ice. Yaz’s resolve returned by degrees. The magnitude of her failure had frozen her thoughts but a slow thaw was setting in. She felt ashamed. She was Ictha and the Ictha endure no matter what is heaped upon them. The world above had been taken away from her, and now piece by piece the world below was being stolen too. Yaz knew she had been foolish to try to dream new dreams. She didn’t deserve happiness. But even so, she would fight to the end, just as all her clan did, even if their eyes were no longer turned her way, even if none of them ever knew what end she fell to. She would not surrender, not go gentle into her fate.
In one of the brighter chambers Yaz turned and went to the wall while Quell watched, keeping any questions to himself. She reached into the ice with her mind, listening to the song of the stars, filtering through the beats of their many tiny hearts. Then with both palms to the cold surface she sent out a slow rhythm, the heartbeat of a star as large as the ones inside hunters. She sped the beat, sped it again, and once more, until finally she found an answering resonance. Deep within the ice one star now burned far brighter than all the rest, the largest within many yards of her. She spoke to it, trying to picture the complex sigil set into the iron of the forging pot. The star dimmed, and almost imperceptibly it began to sink as the extra heat it now radiated melted a path through the ice. Yaz drew it to her. It took time and the blades of a headache began to cut their way inwards from behind her eyes, but before too very long the star popped from the ice wall and dropped into her hand amid a rush of lukewarm water. A greenish star about half the size of Pome’s. It reminded her of Erris among the trees, and for a moment she stood staring at it in her palm, lost in its song.
“Yaz.” Quell set a hand to her shoulder.
“We can go now,” she said, and let the star slip from her fingers into a slow orbit around her head and shoulders.
* * *
“WHAT WAS THURIN saying, before they left us, about searching for himself?” Quell asked. “It made no sense. Is he just mad?” Maya had gone ahead again to scout the way and they crouched together in a dim cavern.
“That wasn’t Thurin. The monster in him—”
“A man is what he has inside him,” Quell said, brooking no argument.
Yaz made no reply. She was thinking about Elias and the needle that he told her would show the way to another part of him. She wasn’t sure what Elias was but he seemed a very different creature from Theus. He’d seemed whole and balanced, just weak, where Theus was strong but clearly the collection of fractured pieces that he claimed to be. And Theus lived out here in the muck and blood of the real world whereas Elias dwelt in the strange dreamworld that Erris had shown her.
Yaz shook her head and took hold of her new star again. She was just a girl from the ice. The wars of gods and demons lay beyond her understanding. “All I know is that we need a star. One much bigger than this one.”
* * *
IN ONE OF the harvest caves they found bloodstains and trampled fungi, and further on an encroaching tendril of black ice, killing all the fungi around it, leaving just grey husks. Once Quell knelt to examine strange scratches on the rock. “Pome’s hunter has been here.”
“Or some other.” Yaz kept her eyes on the cavern’s exits.
It wasn’t until they finally reached the long slope and reunited with Maya that Yaz dug her heels in and stopped allowing herself to be led.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“We’re going to escape,” Quell said.
“How do you propose that we do that?”
“You were the one convincing us all that we could survive on the ice, head south, find the green land,” Maya said. “You must have an idea.” The look on Maya’s face suggested she already suspected that Yaz didn’t.
“Well . . .” Yaz felt fresh guilt at the reminder of her role in taking their friends to the taint. Now that she had to say it out loud her plan sounded too thin to have ever rested their hopes on. “All this iron the scavengers collect and the forgers work. It has to go to the priests. So someone must know when—”
“The next collection is soon, a day or two at most. Maybe less than that,” Quell said with confidence.
“No,” Maya said. “The next collection is in twenty-three days.”
Quell snorted. “You’re wrong.” He set a hand to Yaz’s shoulder. “Wait here with me. The collection will be soon. We can escape with—”
“Twenty-three days.” Maya narrowed her eyes at Quell. “I know this one is your clan, Yaz, but he has been here less time than us and alone for most of it. How would he know?”
“How would you know, child?” Quell retorted, an unusual anger flaring in him.
Confused as to how everyone seemed to know more than her, Yaz turned to face Maya. “Back there in the black ice. You said something about a mission.”
“She said she needed you to complete her mission.” Quell frowned and looked uncomfortable. Most un-Quell-like.
“Iron is power.” Maya met Yaz’s eyes with a bold stare. The soft lines of her face had hardened into something fierce over the days since her drop. “The priesthood use that power to dominate the tribes. The Axit do not live that way. We fight for our freedom!”
“But you need iron like the rest of us,” Yaz said. “So you accept their laws.”
“No. We fight.” Anger flashed in brown eyes. “But the first part of any fight is to understand the enemy. The priests say they mine and smelt iron from the heart of the Black Rock. They say there is coal and ore to be had. But the Axit have long watched them and the smokes that escape that mountain are not sufficient. For days to either side of the gathering the Black Rock pours smoke but in the months when the priests believe the clans are chasing seas the chimneys barely trickle.”
Quell smiled. “And yet there is a great pit melted through the thickness of the ice just a few miles from their mountain.”