The Girl and the Stars

Erris laid him on the icy stone, quickly checking his pulse and other vital signs. “I’m sorry.” He turned his dark eyes on Kaylal, voice gentle. “He has been dead some while now.”

“No!” Anger clouded Kaylal’s beauty, mixed with disbelief, and incomprehension. Some hurts are too large for our thoughts to span. They have to enter by degrees, like a knife into its wound. “No . . .” He fought his way back to Exxar’s side. Another broken denial escaped him though it came sorrow-laden and lacking conviction. “Not Exxar. Not him . . .” His grief found echoes in all of them, and Yaz struggled to contain her own, finding her breath catching in her throat. She hadn’t the time to mourn the lost, not while she had others still to save.

“How did it happen?” Thurin crouched beside the smith. He put an arm about his shoulders. Kaylal tried to shake him off but Thurin wouldn’t allow it. “Kaylal.”

The rest stood and watched Kaylal hug Exxar’s corpse. Yaz found her eyes misting though she had met Exxar only twice and then briefly. Thurin on the other hand had grown up with both men and had known them all his life. They were family. The sort that wouldn’t throw each other away over some imperfection. Yaz caught herself in the lie. The Broken might not have a pit but they killed each other even so. The evidence of it smeared the tunnel behind her.

“It was Bexen.”

The words took Yaz by surprise. It had been so long since Thurin asked his question she had forgotten it had been spoken, but Kaylal hadn’t. Bexen, the cruel-faced gerant with the milky eye, Pome’s enforcer and right-hand man.

“We escaped Pome’s raiding party when some of Arka’s scouts counterattacked.” The words fell lifeless from his lips, his voice hollow. “Me, Jonna, and Exxar slipped away in the confusion. But Bexen and Tylar caught us out by the Green Cave. Exxar got me away while Jonna fought them. He carried me. I didn’t even know he’d been cut until we got to the outer chambers. Bexen had sliced him on the leg and Tylar got him in the back. I gave her that knife two drops after she joined us, and now she’s stabbed me in the heart with it.”

Thurin shook his head and stood slowly, trailing his hand across Kaylal’s shoulder. “You’ll come with us.”

Yaz beckoned Thurin to her. Kaylal wouldn’t last a day on the ice. Thurin must know it. She steered him into the largest tunnel that led from the chamber and spoke in a low voice. She wanted to protest that they couldn’t take the smith, that it would be kinder to leave him for Pome. But even as the thoughts formed she knew them for her own version of whatever it was that let the Ictha toss their children into the Pit of the Missing. Mother Mazai had among the treasures that she showed the children during the long night an image scraped onto the hide of a parchment-fish, whose layered skin allows images of several shades to be made simply by varying the depth the stylus scrapes. The image was of an old woman’s face, her folds sculpted by the wind. But if you changed the way you looked at it then the image miraculously became a picture of a beautiful young woman, a whole-body image of her stretching.

What the Ictha did at the pit was the same. If you looked at it one way it was a necessary compromise to the harshness of life spent on the ice. Change how you looked at it and in one sudden step it was a horror wrought upon their own children who they should love more than life, an unspeakable crime by a society that would be judged on how they treated their most vulnerable members. A cancer at the heart of every good thing in the lives of all the tribes.

So instead of saying how impossible it would be to take Kaylal with them she said, “There are parts of who I am that I wish I could split off like the Missing did, and lose them in the ice. Life would be much simpler if I could only see things like this one way.”

Thurin shook his head. “When Theus got that last part of himself back it didn’t feel like he was adding new badness to the mix, or at least not just more badness. Even though the Missing only cut away what they thought lessened them it felt like he was becoming more whole and somehow that it was better that way.”

Yaz had expected Thurin to be confused by what she was saying, or perhaps offended given the horrors he’d so recently experienced, but instead he’d surprised her. “You sound like you agree with that monster rather than with the Missing.”

“Theus spoke to me before he left. I think he knew I’d tell it to you though, so perhaps it was a message for you.” Thurin stared into the tunnel as if trying to recover the words, as if he were hearing them again. “He said we’re all of us falling through our lives. It didn’t start when you jumped or end when you hit the water. Each of us plunges through our own existence, punching me-shaped holes through days, through weeks, through conversations. We’re none of us one thing or the other; we’re legion; there’s a different Yaz inside your skull for every day of your life. We deceive others, we deceive ourselves, we keep secrets that even we don’t know and hold beliefs we don’t understand. And in that state of profound, fundamental, primal ignorance we still think we can sculpt the clay of our own selves, we think we know what to cut away, that we understand the consequences of excising greed. Are we so sure we don’t need it? Might we not be creating new and different demons whose most frightening trait is that they truly believe themselves to be angels? Do you say everything you think? Do you do everything you feel? Any divinity we might lay claim to is in the restraint we exercise against our nature. Every one of us is bound by our own constraints. To call them all fears makes us sound cowards. Many are judgments. Balancing harm against benefit, hurt against pleasure, our feelings against another’s, the now against the maybe . . .” Thurin trailed off, coming back to himself. He spat, perhaps trying to rid himself of the taste of Theus’s words. “Theus is a monster, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. It’s a dangerous game to try to rid yourself of weakness. You never know what else you might be losing in the deal.” He shook his head and forced a grin. “We’re talking about Kaylal, aren’t we? You don’t want to take him.”

Yaz shook her head. “We’re talking about me. And we are taking him. I’d rather die trying to carry him than live with myself having left him behind.”

Thurin’s grin broadened into something natural. He nodded. Then, as if to lighten the load of Theus’s observations and the weight of Exxar’s death: “So, you don’t want to leave him behind. I can understand why you’d feel that way. He is very good-looking.”

Yaz punched his arm, snorting.

“You do know he only likes boys?”

Yaz stifled a laugh. Her nerves were frayed. Both of them were on the edge of hysteria. She composed herself and turned back into the cave. The sight of Exxar’s body blew away any further inclination to smile.

“Time to go. Erris can carry Kaylal.”

Kaylal shook his head. “I can make my own way.” The stumps where his thighs should have been were bound thick with iron and hide so that he could drag himself without damage, and his arms were equal to the task.