The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,79

wall?”

“Yes.”

“Yesterday I was on the ice, where I had always lived. And now I’m miles below the rocks that are miles below the ice in a city built by the Missing, and I am being instructed on walking through walls by a man who might have died thousands of years ago and is talking to me from inside a body made of metal and . . . and I don’t know what else. All of which is to say: give me a gods-damned moment here.”

Erris had the wisdom to say nothing.

Yaz returned her attention to the wall. She could feel the pressure of the void star, feel it eroding who she was, prying apart the constituents of her mind. She leaned in and set her forehead to the stone. “How dangerous is this?”

“Less dangerous than staying here.”

“Will I get stuck? Lost in the rock?” When someone became separated from their clan the wind would lay them down in time. The snow would cover them. The ice would take them into itself, locked forever in its depth. “Will I die?”

Erris’s voice came soft now, almost free of distortion, almost how he had sounded under the warmth of the sun, standing with the grass waving around his feet. “I don’t know.”

“Thank you for showing me the trees,” Yaz said, a bittersweet pain around her heart as she remembered how they had looked. “At the end of the long night the Ictha take any oil that remains and melt ice. We build a windbreak and our elders dribble the water out . . . It freezes at once, but the skill is to build sculptures as it flows and freezes. They call it the garden.” The shapes had always reminded Yaz of veins, spreading and branching. They were tall and fragile and beautiful, built only for the wind to tear down. A rare Icthan extravagance. But for a while they lasted, and overhead the dragons’ tails lashed in the last of the night sky, the aurora, shifting, ghostly veils of colour. And when the light grew green and echoed within the branches of the ice garden the elders would sing a song without words, holding only loss. The burning of the oil was the only time, save for leaving the dead to the wind, that any Ictha ever wasted anything. Yaz had never understood it, nor known what lay behind the sorrow in the garden-song. “If I die here . . . well . . . I still will have seen trees. You taught me something. And for that I am grateful.” Perhaps it was the void star’s song eroding her barriers, or the accumulation of two long days since dropping into the pit, or just the fear that she would die, but Yaz found herself trembling, her eyes prickling, the breath threatening to catch in her throat. “Thank you for the flutterby too. And the grass.”

“Butterfly.” Erris bowed his head. “I’m sorry this has happened to you. You were thrown from the only life you knew. Maybe the only life you could imagine.” His metal hand rested beside hers against the wall. “I fell and lost my future too. The things I had wanted and hoped for. Small things maybe, foolish things, but they were mine and it still burns me even though all those times are gone and forgotten. It still hurts. Both of us . . . we’ve fallen into lives we don’t understand and didn’t ask for.”

Erris’s ancient pain echoed in Yaz, bringing with it an image of aurora light shivering through ice trees before the dawn. Her face twitched, eyes stung. Her fingers moved to touch Erris’s without instruction and in that moment, without any sense of movement, she stood once more before the timeless peace of the forest, caressed by a warm breeze, her hand in his, flesh and blood once more, black fingers laced with copper fingers.

“There was a girl I loved. But I fell into the void and never went back to her. I never knew how long she waited for me, what became of her life, or how she died. But I loved her and I was loved, and I keep that with me. It makes me think that I must still be alive . . . some kind of alive