enough.’ Yaz thought of Zeen. Her brother made her seem slow. In the hand-slap game there was no beating him, and although his eyes weren’t the night black of some southerners like Quina, they were the darkest she knew among the Ictha.
‘Not gerant huge or hunska fast, and yet thrown down here with the rest of us. You’re a marjal, Yaz.’
She hadn’t been sure Thurin had even registered her name. It sounded strange in his mouth, the southern tribes blunted the edges of their words.
‘Will I be able to do … that … then?’ She nodded at the rippling puddle.
Thurin pursed his lips. ‘We marjals have many tricks; the gods reach into their bag of marvels and scatter us with this gift or that, but never too many. The most common are skills to work with shadow or air. My talent is the most prized of the basic skills down here. We can influence the ice, even in its molten form.’ He waved a hand at the puddle and the ripples vanished. ‘I can also work with fire, that’s a rarer skill than ice-work but useless. There’s nothing to burn here.’ He shook his head, smiling ruefully at the gods’ joke. ‘The rarest elemental skill is rock-work. But there’s no rock on the ice and no fire beneath it.’
‘How do you even know you can work flame if there’s no fire down here?’ Yaz asked.
Thurin smiled. ‘At the forge they melt iron down. I can understand the heat, move it around. It feels the same as when I manipulate the ice. I think my flame-work might actually be stronger than my ice-work.’ He shook his head again at the irony.
‘Are there other magics?’ Yaz asked. None of this sounded like the river that runs through all things, the source of her strangeness.
‘Some. Oddities that crop up now and then. Welaz could make things float in the air. Anything. Even people. But he’s dead now. Old Gella can make a wound heal faster than it should. Dekkan can find things that are lost.’ He shrugged and pulled his coat around him. ‘How can you not be cold?’ he asked.
‘Why did you come out here?’ Yaz tried to turn the conversation in a new direction.
‘Maybe I wanted to spy on someone.’ Thurin met her eyes with a frank smile and Yaz turned away. ‘Or maybe I needed to check I still had value.’
‘Do the marjals lose their powers then?’ Yaz asked. ‘I know the Tainted had you. Is that why they let you go? Your power got weak?’
‘We don’t lose our skills, no. If anything they get stronger. Once ice-sworn, always ice-sworn. But I’m exhausted and underfed.’ He looked down at his own thinness. ‘And the Tainted don’t let anyone go. Ever. Arka led a raid to get me back. A woman died. Another man lost his eye. They should have left me.’ He stared out into the darkness, bleak and silent for a moment. ‘Tarko wouldn’t have let them risk it if I weren’t valuable to the Broken.’
‘But why? The trick with the water is pretty but—’
‘They need me to dig through ice. I can dig faster than three gerants put together. For a tenth of the food ration.’ Thurin forced a smile and patted his narrow stomach. ‘I like the digging too. If I don’t use my ice-work regularly then the energy builds up inside me and when I do eventually use it … well, it can be dramatic.’
Yaz looked around at the echoingly large space about them. ‘These caverns are huge. Why is it so important to dig new ones?’
‘For these.’ Thurin turned back towards the wall, thrusting his hand out. High up the ice shattered and the brilliant star fell within a cloud of glowing fragments to strike the rock beneath.
‘Should you have done that?’ Yaz glanced back towards the settlement, alarmed. For all that she wanted to find Zeen she knew she needed help from the Broken. Getting banished on her first night would cap off, with one stupid move, a day’s journey that had started with another very stupid move.
‘Relax. It’s us ice-workers who put the things up there in the first place and they’re always being re-sunk. All of the stars generate a very small amount of heat even without sigils around them. They sink through the ice very slowly. The tiny ones, little more than dust really, sink so slowly that the current of the ice can lift them. The big ones all end up on the bedrock given time.’ He advanced on the star as he spoke until he was reduced to a silhouette with the light streaming all around him.
Thurin’s steps grew slower and closer together as he approached the star, almost as though he were fighting to make progress against a great wind. Yaz could hear the strain in his voice when he spoke. ‘This is the largest of the stars we use as lights. People don’t like to get near them, especially the bigger ones, so we use smaller ones in town.’
‘You … you’re not worried someone will steal it?’ Yaz wondered if that might be exactly what he was doing right now.
‘The Tainted? No, the Taints can’t abide them. Won’t go near one if they have a choice.’ There was real pain in Thurin’s voice now, and still he had a yard to go if he were to pick the stone up.
‘What are you doing?’ Yaz called, squinting into the light. ‘Why are you doing it?’
‘Proving … something … to … myself.’ Thurin took another step then fell back with a cry.
‘Thurin!’ Yaz ran to help him as he crawled away, the light flaring behind him.
‘I’m all right.’ Thurin pushed her hand from his arm and staggered up.
‘You don’t look all right.’ He looked like a rag that’s too worn to be used as anything but stuffing. She glanced towards the star, still blazing on the rock. ‘How can you put it back if you can’t even touch it?’
Thurin waved a tired hand at the star and the water rushed from the puddle to set it rolling back against the ice wall. He made a fist and twisted it. Somehow the ice drew the star half into it and began to lift it. Fascinated, Yaz edged closer while Thurin continued the slow upward flow of the ice, raising the star above her head towards its former position. Creaks, groans, and small splintering noises accompanied the star’s gradual ascent, the ice protesting just as it did on a larger scale as the great sheets moved across the rock.
Glancing back Yaz could see the effort it was costing Thurin. In the twilight she could almost see the threads of magic connecting Thurin to the wall. Suddenly he faltered, the gossamer network of his magic fell apart, and with a sharp retort something high above Yaz snapped.
The star fell, hit the rock, and rolled, coming to a halt by the side of Yaz’s foot. She heard Thurin cry out in shock then find his words ‘Get away! Quick!’
The star blazed so bright Yaz could see nothing but its brilliance. The power and nearness of it sang in her bones, a wordless roaring, beautiful but wild enough to drown in. Despite its smallness and outpouring of light the star seemed a wider and deeper hole than that into which she had thrown herself only hours before. Unable to stop herself Yaz crouched and reached to pick the thing from the floor. The light made black lines of her finger bones and a rosy haze of the flesh around them. Her whole hand tingled, then burned, then closed around the star, so small that she could almost hide it within her grasp.
‘Be still,’ she told it for it seemed to her that the star was a racing heart, beating beyond its limits. And suddenly the blaze vanished, replaced by a molten reddish glow like that of the setting sun. There was a silence too. She had barely heard the star’s
