The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,93

her hands free.

“The man I took this star from might want it back. He doesn’t like me very much. He could be trouble if we meet him out here.” Yaz remembered the look on Pome’s face when her light had found him, stalking Arka’s band in the shadows, others with him. Pome hated her, she was sure of that. How much danger that might put her in she was less sure of. “We’ll be fine once we’re with the others back at the settlement.”

They moved on together, the star winding its way about her and lighting their surroundings where the ice grew dark. Even there, though, she kept the star dim, not wanting to draw unfriendly eyes their way. They drank from standing pools, the water delicious after their long dry time in the city. Yaz tried raw fungi, choosing only those she remembered as safe. They tasted better cooked but her stomach was too hungry to care about her mouth’s opinions. She felt she was already losing weight, as if the bulk that sustained the Ictha on the ice were deserting her as other changes came fast and furious. Soon she would be a skinny wretch, too narrow to withstand the wind. She chomped at another tough fungus cap with focused dedication. Quell waited impatiently and hurried her on at the first opportunity.

Quell crossed each cavern as if he were still stalking the Broken, moving around the edge in a crouch, pausing frequently to listen, staying out of the light. Yaz followed in his footsteps, aiming for stealth. None among the ice tribes were hunters though. Nothing lived on the ice save the rare predators that, like the humans, moved from one temporary sea to the next. Should even one of the main seas stay closed for a season people would start to die. If it remained closed for two seasons whole clans might vanish.

Quell paused at a turning in a coal-worm tunnel, listening. “I miss my spear.”

“They’re good people, Quell. They’re just children from the tribes.”

“I saw one of your ‘children’ who must have been ten feet tall and looked like he could wrestle a hoola.” He moved on.

“Well, some of them are grown-up children. The Broken have been living down here for generations.”

“Some of them didn’t know when to stop growing up,” Quell murmured. He raised a hand to halt her and caution silence.

“What is it?” Yaz tried to whisper but the tunnel made hissing echoes of it.

Quell said nothing, only sniffed.

Yaz breathed in deeply through her nose. There it was, a familiar scent reminding her of her arrival on the Broken’s shores. Blood.

18

THE BODY LAY sprawled in a grove of blue-grey fungi, broken stalks and crowns scattered all around it. Somehow it was this desecration, this waste of something edible in a land of hunger, that drew Yaz’s eye first. The anger and horror about that she could fit inside her mind. A dead person though, someone she had spoken to not long before, that was something more difficult to wrap her thoughts around. She had seen the dagger-fish take her youngest brother, Azad. She had fought to keep him in the boat, and had lost, but she had not seen him die—his body never came back from the sea. She had yet to come to terms with the image of Jaysin’s head swinging from Hetta’s belt. And now this.

“He’s huge . . .” Quell walked around the gerant, trampling more fungi.

The spear that had killed him remained, the haft jutting from his back. Yaz imagined that whoever had driven it through him had lacked the courage to recover it before the man was truly dead, and lacked the time to wait for it to happen. Jerrig was dead now though. The harvester lay in a pool of his own blood, half across the sack he had been filling. His massive ten-foot frame curled around his wound.

Quell set a hand to the iron spear.

“Quell!”

“What? You don’t think we’ll need it?”

“I think some of the Broken are warriors who’ve trained with weapons for years. They’re less likely to stick something sharp through us if we seem unthreatening.” Her voice carried less conviction than