The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,125

And here alone in the empty home of the Missing she could call Quell’s motivation what it was. He loved her and in the name of that love had dared a world unknown and undreamed of and full of danger.

The thought brought a smile to her lips but did not turn her around. It brought a question as well. Did she return that love? Did an answering passion burn inside her too? Did she even know what love was? Once Quell had been everything she wanted. Everything she could imagine. Her everything . . . but that was also the crack through which a cold wind blew. She had known so little. Her options had been so few. The course of her life had run before her with a frightening certainty. The inevitability of her life had appalled her. And yet when anything had happened to threaten that surety—Azad’s death showing how thin the ice beneath your feet can be, her growing strangeness reeling her toward the pit like a fish on a hook of its own making—when those things had challenged her certainty it too had terrified her.

Yaz wondered at her refusal to return to the regulator, a man whose wisdom her clan respected, a man whose judgment held such sway that her own parents had watched him topple their son into the black throat of the pit and had done nothing. Yaz had no regrets at following Zeen, though she didn’t fully understand why. But then does anyone fully understand themselves, or even want to? Wouldn’t that be very dull?

“No,” she breathed, finding herself at a four-way fork with no memory of the choices that brought her there. “No.” She did have a regret about following Zeen. She regretted not hauling the regulator down with her.

“No.” She spoke the word again. Louder this time, marvelling at the roundness of it in her mouth, the taste of its defiance. “No.”

Was she refusing to leave her friends just for that desire to reject . . . everything? Everything from the cruelty of a society that threw their broken children away, to the harshness of existence in the caverns where Broken and Tainted were locked in struggle, battling for different masters. Was she saying no to the inarguable necessities of life in a world of ice and brief seas? But you can’t just say no time and again. You need an alternative. Another answer.

Erris had shown her the green world. She had been the first Ictha to see anything like it; her parents had seen nothing even close, nor theirs, nor any along a long chain extending untold generations into an unchanging past. She had seen it and although she had never imagined such a thing she knew within moments that it was right. It was where she belonged. Where they all belonged. She knew that it was her answer, even though it was an answer that made no sense. It had continued to make no sense right up to the point that Quina had put into her hand a small wooden bead and with it a story of a man travelling an unimaginable distance from the south. The green world stood against the world of ice and all its cruelties, just like she now stood against the options offered to her.

* * *

YAZ FOUND THAT she had come to a halt before a great glowing symbol on the rear lichen-covered wall of an arched hall. The lichen almost obscured the symbol like a thick, rough skin, scaled with disease. The script wall had opposed her on her first journey into the city, its defences becoming ever stronger as she travelled deeper. This time she’d seen only symbols like this one, heavy with lichen, indicating they were part of the city’s normal complement rather than freshly generated to oppose her.

“It’s easier this time.” She wondered if the city had now accepted her, or was perhaps luring her in deep before closing its jaws around her. Either way she needed to be noticed because the Broken had searched the city for generations without uncovering even half of it, and so the chances of her finding Erris were vanishingly small. He would definitely have to find her instead.

Yaz knew that on her previous visit it had been the city’s opposition to her