The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,21

turned her back on them, bending to retrieve something from the floor. When she turned to face them again she seemed surprised that none of them had moved. In a silence broken only by the chattering of teeth she lifted the object she’d retrieved. A clan’s wealth in iron, a squat, heavy cylinder of the stuff, thick-walled and gripped by two bone handles. Deeply etched symbols covered the outside. Yaz knew that the priesthood had a writing that they used to put words on hides. That had always fascinated her. The idea that words, such fleeting things, gone almost as they left your lips, could be trapped and lie there bound in black lines inked into permanence such that they could outlive the one who gave them life. But these symbols were something else again. Like the ice stars they seemed both more real and more distant than the world around them. Complex as the many-legged spider-fish that crawl beneath the sea ice, each was different from its neighbour and yet the same. Each tangled her eye, trying to draw her through . . . to somewhere.

“If you don’t warm up soon you may well never warm up.” Arka frowned at them. “What? It’s a pot. You’ve seen a pot before, surely?”

Yaz hadn’t.

Arka set the iron tube on the floor and using a long metal rod she took one of the glass bowls from its niche in the wall, putting it on the floor. With a small scoop at the end of the rod she removed the star from the bowl and dropped it into the iron pot. Immediately the symbols carved into the metal began to glow. The heat radiating from them made Yaz’s face burn. It was as if she held her hand just an inch from a lamp flame. “Hang those clothes up! Now!” Arka barked the order like a woman used to being obeyed. “You stay there, Thurin.” She raised a hand to the black-haired boy as he moved forward with the others.

Yaz stayed with Thurin, though she backed away from the heat. Even Arka seemed surprised by its fierceness, raising an arm to shield her face. “I must have used too large a stone . . . ah . . . there, it’s easing off.” She relaxed, then lifted her voice to address them all, falling into her role as their teacher. “The sigils set into the iron convert the energy the stone gives off into heat.”

“I call them stars,” Yaz said. She tried to look anywhere but at the naked flesh being exposed. The Ictha generally only took something off in order to replace it with something warmer. They would shed layers in their tents but never retain fewer than three. Only in the Hot Sea would they strip, and there the mists shrouded everything, hiding one end of a small boat from the other. The drying, when the Hot Sea closed, was a time of great hardship and more died in that handful of days than in the rest of the year together. “Stars. Not stones . . .” She faltered under Arka’s hard stare.

“Some do call them that. Heart-stones, core-stones, ice stars, it’s all the same. Strip.”

Yaz hesitated. With the exception of Thurin the others had moved among the hanging skins, seeking privacy.

“Why isn’t he wet?” She pointed an accusing finger at Thurin, who frowned, almost in pain.

“Because he didn’t drop today. He’s here for . . . other reasons.” Arka folded her arms and looked Yaz up then down. “Do the Ictha have something under their hides that the rest of us don’t?”

Yaz scowled. If she protested further they would all be watching her as Arka wrestled her out of her wet skins. With a snarl Yaz walked into the area where the clothing already strung up offered the most shelter. She stripped off her outer skins, struggling with tight knots. Her innermost layer was sewn on, requiring a knife to remove and a needle to replace. She would not need it down here out of the wind. The wind was the true killer. It amazed her not to hear it. Its absence was a silence battering at her ears. Once when Yaz was little the wind had stopped. Not dropped or weakened, but stopped. It was a thing that even