The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,176

might destroy half of the Tainted but you’d shred your friends too, and maybe yourself.”

Yaz looked out across the meadow. Butterflies were dancing among the flowers, all wings and flutter. Hidden birds sung out their tiny hearts, filling the air with a chaotic beauty. A lone tree stood amid the waving grass, its branches fingering into space, leaf-clad, swaying in a slow dance that struck an echo in her chest, something old and deep, a kind of peace she had never known.

“Do you think the world still has these things in it?”

Erris shrugged. “It’s possible. Near the equator. But if the ice hasn’t advanced from both poles to join hands then it’s only a matter of time. Our star . . . our sun . . . was dying when the tribes first arrived here. They thought we might have a hundred thousand years or longer. But the death throes of a star are hard to predict and it faded faster than they thought. Fewer than a hundred centuries to go from this”—he gestured about them—“to endless ice.”

She took in a deep, slow breath. “Can you show me the battle?”

“I was going to show you the coral reefs off the Kondite Coast. A sea warm enough to swim in, a riot of colour and wonder beneath the waves, and beaches of golden sand. We could take a boat and sail—”

“I need to see the area around where we were standing . . . are still standing.”

Erris furrowed his brow. “You’re just torturing yourself, Yaz.”

“Please.”

He sighed and waved away the world about them, painting in the battle as they had left it but frozen in time. His recollection was remarkable, though in the areas shielded from his vision things grew grey and misty, the figures indistinct with just an impression of numbers.

Erris helped Yaz to stand. “We can walk around. They’re not solid.” He swung a foot through a muscular Tainted wrestling with Kaylal on the ground.

“This isn’t how I look!” Yaz found herself in the act of punching the Tainted who had leapt at her, her fist frozen in the moment it met his cheekbone. She glanced around at Quell with his axe flung back, a spray of blood droplets hanging in the air behind the blade. At Thurin grappled around the knees and falling, his mouth caught in the moment of surprise. They both looked like themselves. But her face . . . was not her own, surely? Not the face she felt beneath her fingers. The fat that the Ictha needed to survive the northern cold had melted from her bones, she looked frail but fierce, the new angularity of her features carried a hardness with them, a threat, and the determination in her white-on-white eyes shocked her. A new person revealed beneath the old as time cut closer to the bone, like the world of the Broken that would be revealed if the ice were pared away. Yaz studied herself a moment longer. If she were one of the Tainted she would think twice about throwing herself at someone with that look.

“Zeen?” Yaz spun around, finding no sign of him in the confusion of bodies.

Erris shook his head. “I didn’t see him. But he’s fast enough to stay out of trouble.”

“He’s a boy with his head full of being a man. He’s stupid enough to get into trouble.” The thought of Zeen lying out there, wrapped around a wound, was a cold wind through her heart. She spun again, noting the occasional outcrops of harder rock, the bent girders, and here and there a gap in the battling crowd where a hole or fissure must lead down into the chambers beneath their feet.

Yaz set off toward the wedge of tainted gerants advancing behind Theus as he led them through the rest of his forces. She felt strange, passing through people, as if she were the ghost not them, as if she were like the first daughter of Zin and Mokka who still haunted the ice, less substantial than the wind.

She reached the red-haired gerant, his face less blood-crazed than the others, a cruel and eager pride on blunt features, green eyes staring out from beneath a heavy brow. She