The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,91

was ready for the answer. She had asked her mother about love once, and her mother, a practical woman not given to sentiment, had pushed back her long hair, streaked with grey, in both hands and said that love was like a storm in the night. “You wake up in the morning to find that the world has changed. There’s a new landscape beyond the doors of your tent, everything familiar yet different.” Yaz had wondered about that. With Quell there had been no storm. They had grown together, comfortable in each other’s company.

“We can’t stay here.” Quell took a last look at the wealth of metal scattered on the rocky slope below the hole.

“It might be better to stay,” Yaz said. “I’m not sure I remember the way back to the settlement. But the Broken come here every day, I think.”

“Yes, but we don’t want them to find us.” Quell flexed his hands as if missing his spear.

“We don’t?”

“No.”

“The Broken are our future now.” Immediately Yaz felt guilty. Quell had come for her, thrown away the life he loved. And for what? She was broken, there was no life on the ice for her. Maybe it was the star setting the point of its wedge to her mind but two voices spoke to her, equally loud. One told her she was a burden on the Ictha, her sacrifice necessary for the survival of the whole. Her weakness hadn’t only dragged her down but had now brought Quell low too. She didn’t deserve happiness. She could not be saved. It was her own voice and she believed it. The other voice was also hers and it told her that a whole that survived at the expense of its children did not deserve to continue. This voice told her that maybe, just maybe, she could be saved but that she could not be saved alone. If she deserved more than this then so did every child cast into the pit. She drew a deep breath. “The Broken are our future. There aren’t any other choices down here.”

“Well, we can escape. That’s a choice.”

“You think you can climb back out of the pit.” It wasn’t a question. Nobody could climb that. Not even Thurin with his ice-working. Not even Tarko, though their leader would be the least inclined to try.

Quell’s old smile returned. He nodded at the hole beside them. “I think it’s pretty clear now that the priests don’t mine their iron from the roots of the Black Rock. And we both know that if you consider all the clans the priests trade a lot of metal over the year.”

Yaz nodded.

“So they must have a way of hauling it from these caverns to the surface, and it won’t be up that twisting slanting shaft from the pit. The loads would snag and get caught. And it’s too exposed—half a dozen local clans come to pray there at different times across the year. The secret would never have kept so long. All we have to do is find out where and when the next load goes up, and we go up with it!”

Yaz’s eyes widened. She had only been away from the surface for a few days but already it felt like a lifetime. The idea that she might return was a dream. Part of her didn’t even want to step back out into the wind. That part of her had kept quiet until this moment, but it spoke now, surprising her. “I can’t go back.”

“Of course you can. The regulator passed you. You weren’t pushed into the pit, you . . . fell.”

“I can’t go back without Zeen.” It wasn’t just about Zeen, not now, maybe not even when she jumped. Something was wrong with the world, with everything, when being less than perfect, less than the tribes’ idea of perfect, just meant giving up on people, throwing children into a hole in the ice. Yaz knew that in her core, felt it blood to bone. Bringing Zeen back with her would mean something larger than just saving one child. Like a crack spreading across a cliff face it would be the start of something. The start of something larger beginning to fall. “He’s my brother.”

Quell