The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,158

be too long. She couldn’t carry the whole world on her shoulders. She took a step forward in the direction she’d been going, then stopped. It could be Quina. “Let’s find out.”

She led the way, letting her stars range ahead of her in the blackness of the tunnel. The passage had been squeezed to a concave shape and at the turns it grew tight enough that Kao had to struggle. If they were attacked in here there would be no running away. Even turning around would be difficult.

“Definitely crying,” Thurin said behind her.

Yaz made no reply. Here and there the ice bore long smears of blood.

At each turn the sounds became clearer. Not a child, or a woman. A man’s grief. Yaz scrambled up an incline, slipping on the ice and only just able to make progress. The sound ahead stopped abruptly.

“They’ve seen the light,” Kao hissed unnecessarily from behind Thurin and Zeen.

The next turn revealed their quarry. Two of the Broken, both black-haired, one collapsed in the lap of the other, a young man, his handsome face deathly pale. The other hunched about him, shivering violently. Blood had run across the ice, more of it than anyone could endure losing. There was something familiar about the dying man.

“We’re here to help.” Yaz summoned her stars back to her hand.

The one cradling the bleeding man raised his face, framed by a tangle of red-black hair. Where the other had been handsome this one was beautiful in a way that stopped the breath in Yaz’s lungs. “Kaylal!”

“Exxar.” He tried to lift his friend. “It’s Yaz.”

Exxar’s head flopped to the side, his gaze fixed. Yaz crawled forward and set her hand to Kaylal’s arm, corded with muscle from his work at the smithy. “What are you doing here?” She wanted to ask how he had got so far from the ravine where they’d last seen him in Arka’s band. Kaylal’s parents had thrown him into the pit as a baby because he’d been born without legs. They must have thought that the longest journey he would make unaided in his life was the vertical one they set him on.

“Pome’s side caught us. They wanted us to work the armoury again. We escaped on the way to the forge pool.” Kaylal moved Exxar toward her. “Can you help him?”

“Kaylal, it’s Thurin.” Thurin squeezed forward, his head now at Yaz’s shoulder. “Who did this?”

“We need to get out of this tunnel first.” Yaz pushed against him. “Everybody back to the cave.” She took Exxar’s feet. “Can you guide his head, Kaylal?”

The smith nodded. He kept Exxar’s head in his lap and put on barbed metal gauntlets that he had beside him, lined with fur to keep his fingers unfrozen. With the traction provided he scooted himself along after Yaz.

Yaz maintained the fiction that Exxar might still be alive, fearing that it was the only thing that could draw Kaylal from his hideaway. The hope in his face hurt her, but its inevitable death would hurt her more. She wondered how she would feel in his place with Quell in her lap. Would she burn as fiercely? Would the quality of her grief differ? What if it were Thurin’s or Erris’s body she clung to in the dark, long after whatever had made them them had departed?

The rest of the group had to back awkwardly out of the tunnel until they reached a wider section, all save Zeen, who was able to squirm around where he stood. It took them a while to reach the cave where others were able to help with Exxar. Kaylal flinched when he saw Erris reaching for his friend; the Broken knew all the adults under the ice, so a stranger was a big shock. Even so, with Yaz’s reassurance he let Erris take Exxar.

Erris laid him on the icy stone, quickly checking his pulse and other vital signs. “I’m sorry.” He turned his dark eyes on Kaylal, voice gentle. “He has been dead some while now.”

“No!” Anger clouded Kaylal’s beauty, mixed with disbelief, and incomprehension. Some hurts are too large for our thoughts to span. They have to enter by degrees, like a knife into