The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,97

one. I’m no coward, you know that, but I just turned and ran the other way first chance I got. I—”

“Quiet!” Maya hissed. She motioned for them to stay and moved on alone. As she went the shadows dragged around her like a cloak. A moment later she was gone, hidden by the curve of the wall and by gathering darkness.

“Can you trust her?” Quell asked.

“Yes.” With the word out of her mouth Yaz wondered where that judgment came from.

They waited and the silence built around the creak of the ice and the drip of meltwater. Quell began to shuffle that way he did when he wanted to ask something. He had shuffled just the same for two days before he first asked to kiss her when she was eleven and he was twelve. Now Yaz found herself on the point of telling him to spit it out when he finally spoke.

“I don’t know why just saying a handful of words is harder than letting myself down into an endless hole on fifty thin ropes knotted together . . . I want you, Yaz. I want us to share a tent, raise children. One day you’ll be clan mother. Everyone knew that. Come back to us, yes, but come back to me. I came here for you.”

“And Zeen.” Yaz’s cheeks burned and she couldn’t meet Quell’s eyes.

“For you. You weren’t pushed. You jumped. And it made me think you were running from something. There’s no curse on your blood . . . But Zeen too. I said I’d get him back and I will if that’s what it takes.”

Yaz nodded. He hadn’t said he loved her again. Maybe that was too hard a word to repeat. Or maybe he only needed her, like a piece of his life that left its own hole when taken. She tried to find an answer, but Quell was right, words can be hard to say. And there was a curse on her blood. The regulator hadn’t meant her for the pit but he did mean her for the Black Rock. He’d decided for her. Decided on a life spent in mountain caves praying to the Hidden God that only the priests knew. A few brief excursions to the clans maybe, but as a stranger, an outsider to all she knew, dispensing law and cheating precious food from them in exchange for what must be a tiny fraction of the iron they took from the Broken.

They waited, the silence still thick about, aching for an answer but now at least free of Quell’s shuffling. Yaz grew tired and she crouched. She took Elias’s needle from her collar and studied it. In tales the gods gave more impressive gifts. With difficulty she tied a hair about it and let it hang from thumb and forefinger. She could feel Quell’s gaze on her. Mother Mazai had an iron needle that would always point to the north. As Yaz had half expected Elias’s needle turned slowly then stopped.

“Is that north?” Quell asked.

“I don’t know.” At least that was now an acceptable answer. “This place has me all turned around.” This was also the answer she had been unable to give to what he had said before.

She returned the needle to its place and set her hand to the dark grey stone beside her. Her fingers traced the scrapes and grooves left by the endless flow of ice. For a moment she saw trees about her, grass beneath her fingers, warm and springy, the chatter of birds in her ears, so different from gull cry. A gentle breeze that caressed rather than bit.

“Yaz?” Quell tilted his head in question, then helped her up. “She’s back.”

Maya stood a short way off in the tunnel’s gloom. She waved them on. “The guards know we’re coming now.”

Yaz saw nobody watching for them on their approach to the ravine. It unsettled her to think she had missed them even knowing that they were there.

Along the near side of the ravine half a dozen cave mouths glowed with starlight, isolated islands of illumination below which the rock face steepened toward vertical and plunged away to the hidden torrent roaring in the distance. Yaz still felt unsafe