The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,156

could. Within a few heartbeats he began to quiet, and shortly after, the stains left him, moving down his neck. She waited a moment, ignoring the boy’s plaintive questions. Where was he? Was that Yaz? Had they escaped? She had no answers for him and only one hope. When she was sure that the demons had had sufficient time to reach his heart and coil there, hiding from the star’s glare, she raised it overhead and focused all of its light, and song, and anger into a tight core at its centre.

With a scream that contained all her fears she brought the star slamming down onto Kao’s muscular chest right over his heart and released all that she had stored within the star in a single hammer blow.

There was a crack as though she had split the world and the star vibrated in her hand like a ringing bell, hurting her fingers. Kao convulsed with such force that Erris was thrown back. Silence followed that one moment of violence. Kao lay limp, a small blackened circle burned into his furs, smoking gently where the star had struck.

“Kao?” Yaz asked, her voice shaking. “Kao?”

Nothing.

She dropped to her knees and grabbed his shoulders.

“Careful!” Erris warned. “He could be shamming.”

Yaz ignored Erris and shook Kao. “Wake up! Wake up, you big idiot!” He felt lifeless in her grip, a deadweight.

“Is he dead?” Thurin asked.

Erris looked grim. An acid guilt ran through Yaz. She had experimented with a child’s life at stake, and her skills had failed her. A tear rolled across her cheek.

“I . . .” Kao opened one eye.

“Kao!” Yaz seized him.

“I’m so hungry.” The boy’s stomach gurgled.

Yaz snorted in relief. “Get him out of the way,” she told Erris, and moved beside her brother. She shone the starlight into his face, still turned away from the glare of her working on Kao. The star’s heart buzzed, its song sounded cracked, but she drove it hard and the demons slowly leached from Zeen’s head, flowing down his neck and into the narrow confines of his bony chest. She squeezed the star, compacting its energies deep within it, and raised it on high. Part of her flinched from striking Zeen. Kao looked so robust that no matter how hard she pounded the star onto his chest she had had no worries about injuring him with the force of the blow. But her skinny brother seemed so vulnerable on the ground before her. She thought of Azad, the brother who her weakness had let die. Would her strength be the death of her remaining brother?

The same scream tore from her mouth as she swung to slam the star onto Zeen’s chest. Again the world-splitting crack, though this time it sounded more like the fracturing of sternum and ribs. Again the pain in her fingers. And Zeen convulsing like a fish landed on the ice, Thurin struggling to keep his head from the rock.

Something changed in the quality of the light, but Yaz only had eyes for her brother. Thurin released him and let him lie limp between them.

“Zeen?” Yaz asked.

In answer Zeen sucked in a great gasp of air, his arms and legs rising as he did it, as if he had been as close to drowning as you can get without staying drowned. He choked and gasped and turned his head, fixing her with pale Ictha eyes full of tears. “Yaz?” Another gulped breath. “I had a terrible dream.”

Emotions Yaz had no name for reached up from the depths of her, squeezing the air from her lungs, taking the words from her tongue, filling her eyes with answering tears. And as she raised her hands to her face the fragments of her broken star spilled between her fingers to go bouncing across the rock, a dozen and more smaller stars, all perfect spheres, a rainbow of glowing colour shading stronger around the red.

32

NONE OF THEM spoke much as Yaz led the way back through the Broken’s territory, aiming for the city. Thurin knew the way best of course but like Kao and Zeen he still seemed too shaken to do much more than follow. Yaz had