The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,9

the regulator’s thin lips: a smile. “Too good for the pit.” He nodded to the other side of him. “You stand over there. You’ll come with me to the Black Rock.” Excitement tinged his voice. He had thrown children to their death without affording them the respect of caring. But now he cared.

So, numb and trembling, with her wrist still pale where the regulator had gripped her, Yaz moved on. She stood on the flat ice of the tier watching without seeing while the others shuffled forward one place. She had survived. She was grown and equal to any in the clan. But still she stood here, forbidden to return to where her parents waited. To where Quell waited. Her gaze tracked back up the stepped ice, across the sea of faces, toward the heights where the Ictha families stood.

“No.” The regulator’s quiet announcement drew Yaz’s attention back to the line. His skinny old hand was clamped over Zeen’s face, fingers spread across the boy’s forehead and cheekbones. “Not you.” And with the slightest shove he sent Zeen stumbling back. For a moment Yaz’s brother stood, caught on the edge of balance, his arms pinwheeling, and in the next he was gone, sliding down the steep slope of the gullet then pitched into the near-vertical darkness of the ice hole. He fell with a single short cry of despair.

Silence.

Yaz’s face had frozen in shock, her voice gone. The thousands stood without sound. Even the wind stilled its tongue.

It should have been me. It should have been me.

Still no one spoke. And then a single high keening broke the silence. A mother’s cry from somewhere far up near the crater’s rim.

It should have been me.

The Ictha endure. They act only when they must. They guard their strength because the ice does not forgive failure.

It should have been me.

Yaz glanced at the blue sky, and in the next moment she threw herself after her brother.

2

AT FIRST YAZ slid, then the black throat of the pit was before her and in the next moment she was falling, all the air escaping her lungs in a hopeless scream. The blind rush of dropping through empty space stole all her thoughts. Her body contracted against the inevitable impact. She grazed a wall, grazed another, continued hurtling down with the ice scraping at her all the way. She was sliding again, moving at impossible speed, every part of her clenched in terror. When she hit bottom all her bones would shatter.

The ice wall pressed on Yaz, and in doing so made her still more aware of her awful velocity. Suddenly the pressure increased, everything spun, and somewhere in the spinning she lost herself.

There are stars in every darkness.

They are the mercy of the Gods in the Sky.

* * *

YAZ JERKED IN shock, crying out and thrashing her limbs. She was lying in water deep enough to reach her mouth. Coughing and spluttering she tried to orient herself, slipped, and went face-first into the pool. A moment later she was on all fours, choking. The water seemed to be about four inches deep and she was soaked. To be wet on the ice without a tent and dry clothes to hand was a death sentence. A hysterical laugh burst from her. She shook the water from her hair and looked for the light. There was no light, no distant circle of sky above her, just a velvet darkness filled with the constant sound of dripping.

Yaz got to her knees, trying not to slip. She patted herself. All of her hurt a little, none of her hurt a lot. It seemed impossible that she could fall so far and break no bones.

“Hello?” She whispered it and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. “Zeen!” Loud enough to be heard over all the dripping.

Nothing.

Yaz knelt and blinked at the darkness. “Zeen . . .”

It wasn’t cold. Even wet she could feel the warmth rising around her. Enough warmth to melt this great pit and to keep it open despite the relentless flow of the ice. “Hello?”

Darkness didn’t scare her, not in