his words get under your skin. Listen to him too long and you start believing what he says. And if he doesn’t manage to hook you that way then watch out for the ones he does hook.’
Sleep took an age to find Yaz. Imagination chased her through her exhaustion. Strangers’ eyes watched her from tainted faces, laden with malice. At last she turned her thoughts from Thurin’s words only to rediscover the unsettling warmth, the dampness in the air – something she knew only from the Hot Sea – the irregular splat of meltwater drops falling upon the roof, the distant groaning of the ice always on the move. All of it conspired to keep her dreams away and instead her mind replayed the events of the pit and the screaming rush of her fall, over and over.
Yaz lay in the gloom staring at the roof above her. In her whole life this was the first time she had tried to sleep anywhere but within her family tent. She needed the constant complaint of the wind against the hides. She needed her father’s growling snore building to the familiar snort then temporary silence. She needed the cold and the knowledge that Zeen and her mother pressed her, hide-wrapped, to either side. Yaz thought of her mother then and a tear ran from the corner of her eye. What must it be like in the tent now with just the two of them in all that space? Father, grim-faced, hands in fists upon his lap, knuckles white. Mother, proud, her face carved by the endless wind, iron in her long dark hair, eyes as pale as the wastes. Four years ago she had two sons and a daughter. Now they were gone. Would her pride still carry her over the ruin of her family? A second tear rolled after the first.
Finally Yaz dozed, woken periodically by a gnawing hunger, not helped by regular gurgles from Kao’s stomach. Hunger reminded her that however suicidal her mind might have been in throwing her down the Pit of the Missing, her body intended to live and was demanding that she look after its needs or things would go hard on her.
When a dark shape crept past her Yaz imagined that whoever it was was heading for the distant hut Arka had pointed out. But the figure, too slim to be Kao and too tall for Maya, left the door ajar and turned the wrong way. Curious, Yaz slipped from her covers and moved to follow.
She saw now as she left the barracks that it could only be Thurin ahead of her. On the ice he wouldn’t last long, too thin to resist the wind’s assault. Yaz herself lacked the full solidity of the Ictha but Thurin looked as though he might be blown away before the wind froze him.
The gritty rock felt curious underfoot, sticking to her damp feet. To leave a shelter without boots and liners was to lose toes to the frost, but here a lifetime’s learning could be undone in one drop. Yaz stumbled as she followed Thurin away from the settlement, stubbing her big toe on a fold in the rock. She cursed as quietly as she could, hobbling along a good thirty yards behind her quarry.
Thurin crossed the length of the cavern, jumping two small streams, and came to an archway that led to some new chamber, darker than the one they occupied. Near the entrance a single light burned, a star-stone larger than any of those Yaz had yet seen, bedded in the ice at a level she might reach if she were to stand on Thurin’s shoulders and stretch.
Thurin came to a halt near the arch. ‘You’re not doing a very good job of spying on me, you know.’ He didn’t turn towards her.
Yaz froze and said nothing.
‘Stealth isn’t really a skill you need on the ice. I’m told the wind hides every other noise and that there’s nothing to hunt.’
Still Yaz remained motionless, the air trapped in her lungs.
‘You should have told me that you weren’t trying to be quiet.’ Thurin at last turned to face Yaz and she released her breath. ‘But I have heard that the Ictha can’t lie.’ He cocked his head. ‘Is that true?’
‘Yes,’ Yaz lied, and they both smiled.
‘You can’t sleep. Most can’t on the first night. Maybe the others are just faking it. The big lad, Wayo?’
‘Kao.’
‘Kao, then. He can’t really snore like that? I’m sure it must be some kind of a joke …’
Yaz found herself chuckling and made herself stop, suddenly stern. ‘What are you doing out here?’
‘Answering questions.’
Yaz didn’t smile this time. ‘I have more. I want to know—’
‘Aren’t you cold?’ Thurin asked.
‘I—’ Yaz looked down, mortified at the reminder she had nothing on but the mole-fish skins she’d been sewn into. She should have stolen Kao’s cape but it was so warm she hadn’t noticed her state of undress. Now beneath the brightness of the nearby star she felt next to naked. ‘No!’ She had hoped the word would come out defiantly but it ended up as more of a squeak. ‘Too hot if anything.’ Not a lie. Under Thurin’s amused gaze every inch of exposed skin felt as if it were burning.
‘It’s a breath away from freezing.’ Thurin shook his head. ‘The stories about the Ictha appear to be true. Are you all as strong as bears too?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen a bear, let alone wrestled one.’
Thurin smiled, though there was a sadness in it, the same sorrow that had been haunting him when they first met and ran beneath his laughter. He turned back towards the ice again.
‘I have more questions.’ Yaz moved closer.
‘I didn’t come here to answer your questions,’ he said.
‘But you said—’
‘I have questions of my own.’ He crossed to where the rock held a puddle and crouched before it.
Yaz bit back on her impatience and went to stand behind him. Shouting at Thurin was unlikely to get her the answers she needed. Though she was prepared to knock his head against the rock as a last resort if that was what it took. ‘Well?’
Thurin reached out to the water, putting his hand into it, flat against the rock at the bottom, long fingers splayed.
‘Ah …’ Something twisted inside Yaz, a curious sensation, as if she were a pool into which a ball of ice had fallen, sending out ripples. Only she was the ice and the ripples as well as being the pool.
Thurin let out a small gasp, pain perhaps, and raised his hand. Somehow the water rose with his hand, a slowly undulating glove, inches thick on every side, beautiful where the light came through to project moving lines of light and shadow across Yaz’s stomach and thighs.
‘You’re a witch-child!’
Thurin laughed and the water fell away in sparkling drops. ‘I’m not a child. And it’s an old blood that runs through us. Older than the Ictha or any other tribe. Marjal blood.’
‘Us?’ Yaz wasn’t sure she wanted this strange young man as her kin.
‘Well, you’re too small for a gerant, unless you’re twelve … and you don’t look twelve.’ For a moment Thurin’s gaze ran the length of her.
Yaz let anger burn away any sense of shame at her state of undress. ‘I’ve seen the long night sixteen times. None but the Ictha can endure it.’
‘Ah, but that’s why the regulator threw you down, is it not?’
