The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,53

you, Pome.” A little firmer this time.

Pome looked at Yaz with murder in his eyes, scowled, then stalked back along the inky tunnel.

Eular waited until Pome had retreated into the distance. “Join me.”

Yaz moved forward, weaving around the icicles, her breath billowing in clouds before her. The star’s light revealed an old man, white-haired and bony, facing away from her, kneeling on a roll of skins just before a perfectly round pool. Yaz was surprised to see the water unfrozen. Eular turned to face her. The star’s stark illumination, slanting upwards, threw his face into a confusion of shadow and light, so much so that it took Yaz a few moments to understand that where his eyes should be Eular had only scarred pits.

“Hello.” Eular smiled.

Yaz found herself shocked once again, just as she had been by Kaylal’s lack of legs. Physical deformity was so rare among the Ictha that just seeing it made her uncomfortable, a twisting in her stomach, followed by guilt and shame, knowing in her bones that such a reaction lessened her.

“It’s alright to stare,” Eular said. “I have been told that I’m quite a sight. Pome should have warned you.”

“You were thrown into the pit as a baby?”

“No. I was a grown man. My clan, the Hjak, tried to hide me. My mother was the Clan Mother.”

“Hjak?” Yaz had thought she knew all the clans who gathered.

“I am the last of them.” Eular bowed his head. “That was the justice of the priests. A lesson for the other clans. Their lives were forfeit.”

Yaz opened her mouth and said nothing. She had heard of the power of the priesthood but not that they slaughtered whole clans.

Eular waved his hand as if dispelling thoughts of the past. “So here I am. None of the old bloods show in these veins. My magical power is . . . that I can’t see.”

“But you knew Pome had dropped his star.”

“I can’t see, but I can listen. What I hear paints a picture. The words, the way they are spoken, what is left unspoken, the sounds of the chamber. And what I have heard about you wraps you in a fire that I could see through the walls long before you arrived here in my little cave.”

“Oh.” Yaz could think of nothing else to say.

“Can you see this pool before me?”

“I can.”

“The Broken made it and several others like it. Long ago. Few remain who remember their making. Each is a basin, polished to a high shine. In such a receptacle water, if it is kept very still, can stay liquid long after we might expect that it would freeze.”

Yaz stepped forward, her shadow swinging across the pool. “It should be frozen.”

“Most of them are. But as the ice ebbs and flows the paths taken by the heat shift, and sometimes, not often, one of the pools reaches this state. It wants to change but every change must start somewhere and in this pool the change has nowhere to start.”

Yaz frowned. “That . . . doesn’t make sense.”

“And yet it is true,” Eular said without offence. He reached out to hand her a small piece of stone, a gritty fragment smaller than a baby’s first tooth. “Touch it to the water. Drop it in.”

Yaz knelt beside the old man, the rock biting into her knees. She reached out with the piece of grit pinched between the tips of finger and thumb. She touched it to the unrippled surface before her, and in an instant, like the opening of a white wing, traceries of frost spread from the point of contact, infinitely complex, breathtaking, an expanding symmetry. With a gasp of surprise she let the fragment drop. The rapid freeze followed in the stone’s wake, penetrating the depth of the water now as well as spreading across the surface. Before her eyes the thickness of the pool became solid, the clarity of new ice becoming filled with ghostly flaws, fractures frozen into the moment. Within a handful of heartbeats half the pool lay solid, creaking as it expanded, the effect still spreading