The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,1

easy to forget that people even had fingers. But here, as far south as her people ever travelled, the Ictha could almost walk bare chested.

“Well remembered.” Yaz would miss her little brother when they threw her into the pit. He was bright and fierce and her parents’ joy.

“You’ve spotted it then?” Quell came alongside them. He had no sled to drag and could move up and down the line checking on the thirty families. He nodded toward the Black Rock. “I remember how big it is, but still, it always surprises me when we get close.”

Yaz forced a smile. She would miss Quell too, even though at seventeen he boasted nearly as much as Zeen.

“Always?” she asked. Quell had been to the gathering twice. Once more than her.

“Always.” Quell nodded, almost concealing his grin. He held her for a moment with pale eyes then moved on up the column. He passed Yaz’s parents and uncle, who between them pulled the boat-sled, pausing to swap a comment with her father. One day soon he would have to ask her parents for permission to share Yaz’s tent. Or so he thought. Yaz worried what Quell might do when the regulator picked her out. She hoped he would prove himself grown enough to embrace this fate and not shame the Ictha before the southern tribes.

“Tell me about the testing,” Zeen said.

Yaz sighed and leaned into the sled traces. She had of course told Zeen everything a hundred times over but she had been the same herself before her first visit to the hole.

“You’ll be fine.” Zeen’s worries were nothing, it was just the mind turning on itself when there wasn’t anything to do but pull a load mile upon mile, day upon day. The journey had proved difficult, the ice rucking up before them in pressure ridges as if seeking to impede their progress. For the last week the pace had been gruelling as the clan mother sought to make up lost time. Still, they would arrive a day before the ceremony. “Don’t worry about it, Zeen.”

On Yaz’s first trip south she had been sure the regulator would sniff out her wrongness. Somehow she had passed inspection. But that had been four years ago, and what had been starting to break within her back then was now fully broken. “You’ll be fine.”

“But what if I’m not?” The sight of the Black Rock seemed to have opened the gates to her brother’s fear.

“The southern tribes are not like the Ictha, Zeen. They have many that are born wrong. We have to be pure. Weakness was bred out of us long ago,” she lied. “When you walk the polar ice you are either pure or dead.”

“Strangers!” Quell came hurrying back down the column, excited. “We’re getting close!”

Yaz looked to where her parents had turned their heads. Faint in the distance a grey line could be seen, another clan trekking in from the east. And between the two columns, a single sled closing on the Ictha at remarkable speed.

Zeen stopped to stare in amazement. “How can—”

“Dogs,” Yaz said. “You’ll get to see your first dogs!” Even now, as the distance narrowed, the hounds pulling the sled resolved into dots in a line before it. Soon she could make them out against the snow, heavy beasts, silver-white fur bulking them up still further, their breath steaming before them. In the far north the cold would kill them, but south of the Keller Ridges all the tribes used dogs. The Ictha said that a true man pulls his own sled. The southerners laughed at that and called it something that only a man with no dogs would say. Even so, everyone gave the Ictha respect. Anyone who has known cold understands that only a different breed can dare the polar ice.

“Get along!” Behind them the Jex twins shouted. Zeen started forward again just in time to avoid having them drag their boat-sled over him. Yaz kept level with her brother, watching the strangers approach.

Within a few minutes the whole column came to a halt while at the front Mother Mazai greeted the men dismounting from their sled. Yaz could smell the dogs on the wind, a musky