The Girl and the Stars
Yaz bit her lip, pondering. “Where do the demons like to stay?”
“In the head.” Thurin furrowed his brow, remembering the invasion.
Yaz knew what damage even a small star could do to someone’s soul. Pome had some resistance to them and yet a star considerably smaller than the one in her hand had broken his mind, splitting away some of his darker side into a demon not so different from the ones haunting the black ice. “And if not in the head?”
“The heart,” Thurin said without hesitation. “Sometimes they go there to let you understand your plight. They return your senses to you and let you think clearly, while they sit in your heart to savour your despair. If you try to run or to destroy yourself they do . . . something . . . to your heart, and all you can do is lie there in agony gasping for breath. And sometimes even that’s better than standing thinking about what they’ve made you do.”
“The heart. That could work . . .” Yaz tried not to think about Thurin’s suffering. She hoped Zeen’s demons had been less interested in torturing him. Either way she would take pleasure in their annihilation.
“I don’t know anything else,” Thurin cautioned. “It’s probably a lot harder than it sounds. And if you damage the heart . . .”
“I’ll try it on Kao first.”
Thurin glanced at her, a hint of reproach in those dark, haunted eyes of his.
“What?” Yaz felt instantly guilty. “He obviously has the strongest heart. If it doesn’t work on Zeen I won’t know if it will work on Kao. But if I start with Kao and he doesn’t survive I’ll know there is no point trying that approach with Zeen.”
Thurin raised his brows a fraction but said nothing. Instead he gestured back at the cavern where Kao lay bound. He nodded toward Erris. “You’ll have to tell me later who that man is and how he seems so much stronger than an Ictha.”
* * *
AT YAZ’S REQUEST Erris laid Kao on the rock beside Zeen and held him steady. Thurin knelt beside Erris, holding Zeen’s head to keep him from dashing it on the ground.
Yaz approached Kao, who twisted and turned in Erris’s grip, roaring threats. Thurin shrank back as the blazing star came nearer to him, as if the thing were as hot as it looked, but he kept hold of Zeen.
Yaz focused as much of the light as she dared onto Kao’s face. He screwed his eyes tight shut and turned his head as far away as he could. Within a few heartbeats he began to quiet, and shortly after, the stains left him, moving down his neck. She waited a moment, ignoring the boy’s plaintive questions. Where was he? Was that Yaz? Had they escaped? She had no answers for him and only one hope. When she was sure that the demons had had sufficient time to reach his heart and coil there, hiding from the star’s glare, she raised it overhead and focused all of its light, and song, and anger into a tight core at its centre.
With a scream that contained all her fears she brought the star slamming down onto Kao’s muscular chest right over his heart and released all that she had stored within the star in a single hammer blow.
There was a crack as though she had split the world and the star vibrated in her hand like a ringing bell, hurting her fingers. Kao convulsed with such force that Erris was thrown back. Silence followed that one moment of violence. Kao lay limp, a small blackened circle burned into his furs, smoking gently where the star had struck.
“Kao?” Yaz asked, her voice shaking. “Kao?”
Nothing.
She dropped to her knees and grabbed his shoulders.
“Careful!” Erris warned. “He could be shamming.”
Yaz ignored Erris and shook Kao. “Wake up! Wake up, you big idiot!” He felt lifeless in her grip, a deadweight.
“Is he dead?” Thurin asked.
Erris looked grim. An acid guilt ran through Yaz. She had experimented with a child’s life at stake, and her skills had failed her. A tear rolled across her cheek.
“I . . .” Kao opened one eye.
“Kao!” Yaz seized him.
“I’m so hungry.” The boy’s stomach gurgled.
Yaz snorted in relief. “Get him out of the way,” she told Erris, and moved beside her brother. She shone the starlight into his face, still turned away from the glare of her working on Kao. The star’s heart buzzed, its song sounded cracked, but she drove it hard and the demons slowly leached from Zeen’s head, flowing down his neck and into the narrow confines of his bony chest. She squeezed the star, compacting its energies deep within it, and raised it on high. Part of her flinched from striking Zeen. Kao looked so robust that no matter how hard she pounded the star onto his chest she had had no worries about injuring him with the force of the blow. But her skinny brother seemed so vulnerable on the ground before her. She thought of Azad, the brother who her weakness had let die. Would her strength be the death of her remaining brother?
The same scream tore from her mouth as she swung to slam the star onto Zeen’s chest. Again the world-splitting crack, though this time it sounded more like the fracturing of sternum and ribs. Again the pain in her fingers. And Zeen convulsing like a fish landed on the ice, Thurin struggling to keep his head from the rock.
Something changed in the quality of the light, but Yaz only had eyes for her brother. Thurin released him and let him lie limp between them.
“Zeen?” Yaz asked.
In answer Zeen sucked in a great gasp of air, his arms and legs rising as he did it, as if he had been as close to drowning as you can get without staying drowned. He choked and gasped and turned his head, fixing her with pale Ictha eyes full of tears. “Yaz?” Another gulped breath. “I had a terrible dream.”
Emotions Yaz had no name for reached up from the depths of her, squeezing the air from her lungs, taking the words from her tongue, filling her eyes with answering tears. And as she raised her hands to her face the fragments of her broken star spilled between her fingers to go bouncing across the rock, a dozen and more smaller stars, all perfect spheres, a rainbow of glowing colour shading stronger around the red.
32
NONE OF THEM spoke much as Yaz led the way back through the Broken’s territory, aiming for the city. Thurin knew the way best of course but like Kao and Zeen he still seemed too shaken to do much more than follow. Yaz had surrounded herself with the fragments of the hunter’s star, a dozen or so, none of them larger than her thumbnail. Each followed its own slow orbit about her, collectively weaving a glowing cocoon, their light sending myriad faint shadows sliding across rock and ice. As she led them further from the Tainted’s ground and the caverns grew lighter she directed the stars into her pocket, not wanting to signal her approach to any of Pome’s faction.