The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,151

show a strained but rapt expression, the tendons in his neck standing out like cables. He began to suck in an enormous breath, accompanied by a disturbing moan, and the veins in his wrists mottled a greenish black, the colour flowing up toward his elbows before being lost beneath his skins. His body shook and it seemed that even the rock beneath him trembled as if in premonition of some seismic shift.

Yaz’s star burned in her hand now, still uncomfortably hot, and for a mad moment she thought of bringing it down on the back of Theus’s head in an overarm swing. But however terrifying the creature before her might be it was also Thurin, and it would be Thurin’s skull that shattered.

Something was coming. Something big. Racing toward them as if the fields that Erris remembered were all that surrounded them. Yaz found herself needing to breathe yet unable to fill her lungs until the tension, building like a storm cloud piled miles high, finally peaked and broke.

Theus leapt to his feet with arms wide and a scream so loud it seemed it must splinter something vital inside his chest. A shock wave threw Yaz off her feet and staggered Erris. All around them the ice shattered and fell, a white rain turned bloody in the starlight. Yaz found herself on her back with chunks of broken ice hammering all around her. For a moment she thought that the cavern had collapsed and she would lie buried beneath an unknown tonnage of glacier. But the deluge stopped, leaving the rock six inches deep. Some part of whatever energies had been released inside Theus during his reunion must have escaped through Thurin’s ice-work. He stood now, frost in the black of his hair, staring at the hands he had raised before him, as if marvelling at himself, or perhaps just at the new perspective offered to him now that he was one piece closer to something whole.

Yaz got to her feet, shedding sheets of ice fractured from the ceiling. “You got what you wanted. Now give me what you promised.”

Theus raised his head to reveal a face the colour of an old bruise with wholly black eyes and a dangerous grin. “Find another piece of me and then I’ll let them go.”

Yaz woke the star in her hand. “Now!”

Theus flinched but didn’t retreat. “You want this boy that much?” he sneered.

“I want my friends. I want my brother. I want to leave this place and go back up to the ice.” With each “I want” she pushed more light from the star until its heart pounded, close to breaking free.

Theus raised an arm to shield his face and backed a few paces. “Life is easier down here. I was on the ice once.” He sounded surprised to hear himself say it.

“You’re lying. This was all fields and forest. I’ve seen it.”

Theus shook his head, continuing to back away from the light. “Each time I add to myself I recover fragments of memory, and some of the things that once seemed nonsense become comprehensible. I’ve been many places. All across this world. But I started my journey in the north. My parents . . . I had parents . . . they were of a sect that turned its back on technology. They lived in the far north. As a baby they took me to see . . .” He paused, fingers moving as if trying to assemble some lost truth from thin air. “. . . a wise woman . . . a witch! As a baby they took me to see a witch!” He shook his head again. “So many broken pieces . . .”

“I don’t care about that. Give me what you promised!” Yaz shouted. She narrowed the star’s light into a single brilliant beam that struck Theus in the chest, driving him back, pinning him to the cavern wall. “Now!”

Theus twisted, trying to struggle free, his breath escaping him in gasps and snarls. They fought, Yaz forcing herself to keep the star working at an intensity that didn’t allow the creature inside Thurin to turn his ice-work against her. At last, sucking his breath over red teeth, Theus raised his face and fixed Yaz with a black stare.