The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,111

tickled at Yaz’s ear, making her shiver. “Pass it on.”

The space felt like many they had passed through, open and cold, with ice-scraped rock beneath her feet.

She felt behind her and patted her way up Quell’s bare arm to find his head. “We’re here.” She felt him nod. Solid, dependable.

The faint whisper travelled down the crouching line.

Thurin’s hand discovered Yaz’s in the blind darkness, his fingertips stroking between her fingers from knuckle to knuckle where her fist was knotted in his skins. A complicated shiver ran along her arm and into the core of her. Bare hands had been a revelation for her. The intimacy of this touch was too much. Almost. And here, in this place, with evil on every side and Quell at her back. She didn’t understand.

Thurin did it again, more slowly this time, more intimate. Her grip loosened. Part of her wanted to hit him, strike him to the floor for being so forward, for presuming. The rest of her didn’t know what she wanted. His palm brushed her wrist, pushing back her sleeve. She bit her lip against any sound she might make and pulled away.

In that instant he was gone. The faint sound of skins brushing skins and he left, moving away as he rose to his feet.

“. . .” Yaz opened her mouth but made no sound. She daren’t hiss after him.

Without warning, cries rang out. Quell twisted and lost his grip on her. Iron clattered across rock. More shouts and cursing, real terror in the mix.

A voice rang from the blackness of the cave, not close at hand but not too distant. “You can bring that star out again, Yaz of the Ictha.”

Yaz had already been fumbling for it among her furs, hunting for the right pocket. Whoever had spoken, it was not one of those who had entered with her. Her hand trembled around the star’s blue glow. She opened her fingers and bid the light pour out.

Through slitted eyes she saw that Quell and the other four members of their group were crouched on the open floor, Quell with a bloody nose and without his iron spear. At the outer limits of the star’s illumination well over a dozen figures stood in a loose circle around them, at least three of them gerant, many almost naked. Fear flooded through Yaz so swiftly it threatened to drown her. The Tainted watched with broad grins full of malice, just as her imagination had painted it.

“Zeen!” She saw her brother beside a barrel-chested gerant. Zeen wore only leggings, reduced to tatters below the knees, and across his neck and ribs black stains spread. She wanted to believe them bruises, but no bruises ever looked like these and his grin was as hate-filled as the rest. He stared at her with no sign of recognition.

Thurin stood just a few yards from her. A black stain covered much of his face and filled his eyes. The stain returned no light, so that against the background of darkness and black ice it looked almost as if that part of him had been bloodlessly taken, sliced away by some great knife.

Of all of them Thurin was the only one not to smile. He opened his mouth, white teeth framing a black tongue, and spoke again with a stranger’s voice. “You may call me Theus. I command here and have done so since long before your kind began to arrive beneath the ice.”

23

YAZ STARED IN horror, unable to find words. Thurin had betrayed her. Her hand tingled where the monster had so recently stroked her flesh.

“Were you always in him?” It was Petrick who spoke, bleak-eyed, rising to his feet. One of the gerants had wrenched his sword from him in the dark, but he had his knife in hand now and pointed at Theus with it. “Or did you catch him while he led us?”

Now Theus did smile. “Oh, I never left the boy. I wrapped myself around his bones and came to have a look-see around your settlement.”

“Did he . . . did he know?” Yaz asked. A calm had descended on her. She would die before she let any demon enter