The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,159

its wound. “No . . .” He fought his way back to Exxar’s side. Another broken denial escaped him though it came sorrow-laden and lacking conviction. “Not Exxar. Not him . . .” His grief found echoes in all of them, and Yaz struggled to contain her own, finding her breath catching in her throat. She hadn’t the time to mourn the lost, not while she had others still to save.

“How did it happen?” Thurin crouched beside the smith. He put an arm about his shoulders. Kaylal tried to shake him off but Thurin wouldn’t allow it. “Kaylal.”

The rest stood and watched Kaylal hug Exxar’s corpse. Yaz found her eyes misting though she had met Exxar only twice and then briefly. Thurin on the other hand had grown up with both men and had known them all his life. They were family. The sort that wouldn’t throw each other away over some imperfection. Yaz caught herself in the lie. The Broken might not have a pit but they killed each other even so. The evidence of it smeared the tunnel behind her.

“It was Bexen.”

The words took Yaz by surprise. It had been so long since Thurin asked his question she had forgotten it had been spoken, but Kaylal hadn’t. Bexen, the cruel-faced gerant with the milky eye, Pome’s enforcer and right-hand man.

“We escaped Pome’s raiding party when some of Arka’s scouts counterattacked.” The words fell lifeless from his lips, his voice hollow. “Me, Jonna, and Exxar slipped away in the confusion. But Bexen and Tylar caught us out by the Green Cave. Exxar got me away while Jonna fought them. He carried me. I didn’t even know he’d been cut until we got to the outer chambers. Bexen had sliced him on the leg and Tylar got him in the back. I gave her that knife two drops after she joined us, and now she’s stabbed me in the heart with it.”

Thurin shook his head and stood slowly, trailing his hand across Kaylal’s shoulder. “You’ll come with us.”

Yaz beckoned Thurin to her. Kaylal wouldn’t last a day on the ice. Thurin must know it. She steered him into the largest tunnel that led from the chamber and spoke in a low voice. She wanted to protest that they couldn’t take the smith, that it would be kinder to leave him for Pome. But even as the thoughts formed she knew them for her own version of whatever it was that let the Ictha toss their children into the Pit of the Missing. Mother Mazai had among the treasures that she showed the children during the long night an image scraped onto the hide of a parchment-fish, whose layered skin allows images of several shades to be made simply by varying the depth the stylus scrapes. The image was of an old woman’s face, her folds sculpted by the wind. But if you changed the way you looked at it then the image miraculously became a picture of a beautiful young woman, a whole-body image of her stretching.

What the Ictha did at the pit was the same. If you looked at it one way it was a necessary compromise to the harshness of life spent on the ice. Change how you looked at it and in one sudden step it was a horror wrought upon their own children who they should love more than life, an unspeakable crime by a society that would be judged on how they treated their most vulnerable members. A cancer at the heart of every good thing in the lives of all the tribes.

So instead of saying how impossible it would be to take Kaylal with them she said, “There are parts of who I am that I wish I could split off like the Missing did, and lose them in the ice. Life would be much simpler if I could only see things like this one way.”

Thurin shook his head. “When Theus got that last part of himself back it didn’t feel like he was adding new badness to the mix, or at least not just more badness. Even though the Missing only cut away what they thought lessened them it felt like he was becoming more whole and somehow that it was better that way.”

Yaz had expected Thurin to be confused