The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,99

you’re not here you cause change, Yaz.” Eular sounded neither sad nor happy, as though what had happened were as inevitable as the ice.

This was all on her? Blood and death and friend against friend? The sudden weight of events left Yaz staggering beneath the burden of weariness she already carried, almost unable to keep her eyes from closing. She looked from Quell to Thurin, both of them drawn to their full height, facing each other like boys playing at warriors. Quell stood shorter, broader, the strength of him in his face, his pale eyes normally so calm now tinged with something more fierce. Thurin, taller, thinner, more delicate. As ever, Thurin looked haunted, carrying his tragedy like a wound, dark eyes narrow above sharp cheekbones, his hair as black as Quell’s though wild, a standing shock where Quell’s fell long and even. She let herself stumble to distract them from releasing whatever pointed exchanges queued behind their lips.

“Yaz!” They both came to her. She mumbled that she just needed sleep and together they helped her from the cave. Maya guided them further down the ravine to a place she might rest.

Yaz hardly saw the chamber that Maya led her into or the faces of those already there. Instead she sank onto the thin pile of hides they set for her and plunged into sleep.

The dreams that rose to catch her were green and growing, and somewhere in them a dead boy waited for her.

20

I’M DREAMING.” YAZ stops her wandering and stands, barefooted, on the cold stone. The ice sky arches above, no more than a spear’s length beyond the reach of her fingers. The chambers of the Broken, like bubbles beneath sea ice, open on every side from this one, stretching all the way from the Missing’s city to the pit.

All around her the space reverberates with the same glacial song that has been sung since long before the gods of sky and sea made the first man and the first woman. Yaz wonders if the great whales, those behemoths who swim to unknowable depths and know the secrets of the ocean, learned their own songs from that of the eternal ice, for both have much in common. A refrain of old sorrow, immeasurable memory, a language of loss in which the true names of all things are known and spoken.

Yaz crouches to touch the bedrock. Once a rich dark soil blanketed this place, deep enough for the roots of trees, warm enough for flowers. Around her fingers grass grows, tickling against her palm, ghostly green, many-bladed, struggling for the sun. She looks and all about her a memory of pine and oak is building, a memory of beech and elm, rising high above, up into the ice as though it were the phantom and the trees simple fact, here and now and always true.

“How do I know your names?” Yaz stands and the wood has become the world, a blueness waits high above, glimpsed in whispers through myriad leaves and reaching arms.

She walks with the warmth and complication of twigs and leaves and fallen acorns beneath her feet. “I’m dreaming.” But the bark beneath her hands feels rough and gnarled, detailed beyond her ability to imagine, too solid for any dream where sleeping hands might close on air.

In a glade a fallen tree several seasons down lies reaching for the sky, branches stark against puffy clouds. On the far side in the treeline’s shade a doe nibbles fresh shoots.

Yaz stares at the doe, amazed at its strangeness and just as amazed that it is somehow familiar to her. As if the time that escaped her in the void were not truly lost but had been filled with experience and somehow that knowledge, those memories, have begun to bleed into her dream.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Erris stands beside her. Across the glade the doe looks up with liquid eyes and darts off among the trees, so fleet of foot that Yaz’s heart almost chases it.

“I don’t have words for what I’ve seen here.” Yaz’s gaze remains captured by the space where the doe had stood. She has lived a life in the jaws of the wind, her eyes trained to find meaning within a hundred shades of white and grey.