‘Afterwards.’ She placed a hand against his chest. ‘Ask me when it’s done.’
‘I love you.’ He bit down as the words escaped him. His eyes searched hers, lips pressed tight against further emotion.
And there it was, out in the open, delicate hope trembling in a cruel wind.
Quell was good, kind, brave, handsome. Her friend. All an Ictha girl could dream of. Yaz thought that maybe the first sign that she was broken wasn’t the weakness but that she had always wanted more. She had seen the life that her mother lived, the same lived by her mother’s mother in turn and on and on back along the path of years. She had seen that this life of trekking the ice between closing sea and opening sea was all that the world had to offer. In all the vastness of the ice, with small variations, this was life. And yet some broken thing inside her cried out for more. Though she stamped upon that reckless, selfish, whining voice, pushed it down, shut it out, its whispers still reached her.
I love you.
She didn’t deserve such love. She didn’t deserve it for many reasons, not least that the broken thing within her called it burden rather than blessing.
I love you. Quell watched her, hungry for an answer, and behind her the last of the Ictha shuffled past.
The Ictha knew themselves each as part of the body, and they knew that the body must be kept alive, not its parts. Sacrifice and duty. Play your part in the survival engine. As long as the flame is kept alight, as long as the boats remain unholed, as long as the Ictha endure, then the needs and pain and dreams of any one piece of that body are of no concern.
‘I …’ Yaz knew that if she somehow walked away from the pit this time then she was more than lucky to have Quell waiting for her; she would be more than lucky to resume her trek along the life that had always stretched before her across the ice.
Her heart hurt, she wanted to vanish, for the wind to carry her away. She did want Quell, but also … she wanted more, a different world, a different life.
‘I … Ask me at the gathering. Ask me when this is done.’ She took her hand from his chest, still worried for the heart beneath it.
She turned and followed the others, hating herself for the look in Quell’s eyes, hating the broken voice that gave her no peace, that left her dissatisfied with the good things, the voice that told her she might look the same but that she was different.
Quell followed at her heels and Yaz walked on, unseeing, understanding a new truth on her last day: Abeth’s ice might stretch for untold miles, but there was, in all that emptiness, no room for an individual.
The ceremony was already in progress as Yaz caught up with her brother. On the lowest tier, with only the dark maw of the hole below them, the children of seven clans belonging to three tribes queued in a great circle. Every few moments the line shuffled forward as each boy or girl presented themselves to the regulator in turn.
The old priest stood cloaked in an inky black hide that belonged to nothing that Yaz had ever seen hauled from the sea. Hoola claws reached across his shoulders and fanned out across his chest, threaded on a cord around his neck. His head was bare and bald, marked like his hands with a confusion of burn scars, symbols perhaps but complex and overlapping.
The Ictha said that Regulator Kazik had overseen the gathering for generations. While the other priests came and went with time’s tide, growing old, retiring to the Black Rock, Kazik it was said remained immune to the years. A constant, like the wind.
Today he was the regulator, merciless in judgement. Tomorrow he would be Priest Kazik and he would bless marriages, and laugh, and mix with the clans, and become drunk on ferment with the rest of the grown.
Yaz and Zeen joined the rear of the queue with a score of other Ictha children. One more came up behind, delayed by his mother’s arms. At the front, around a third of the crater’s circumference from them, another child escaped the regulator’s scrutiny. She scrambled away to join her parents watching from some higher tier.
Yaz shuffled forward with the line. The climb still burned in her legs and her chest felt sore from panting.
‘That was tough!’ Zeen smiled up at her. ‘But we made it.’ He stood close to the edge where the ice sloped sharply away towards the hole.
‘Ssshhh.’ Yaz shook her head. It was best to avoid any thoughts of weakness. They said the regulator could read a child’s mind just by staring into their eyes.
‘Has anyone been thrown in?’ That was Jaysin behind them, just nine, as young as any Ictha were tested. The younger children remained at the north camp with the old mothers. ‘Has anyone gone down yet?’
‘How would we know, stupid?’ Zeen rolled his eyes. ‘We just got here too.’ He moved behind Yaz to stand with Jaysin.
Yaz glanced at the hole and shuddered. Even here in the south the ice lay miles deep. She wondered how far she would fall before she hit something.
‘Are they down there?’ Zeen kept glancing at the pit. The closer they got to the regulator the further Zeen positioned himself from the edge. ‘Are the Missing watching us from down there?’
‘No.’ Yaz shook her head. Most likely all the pit held was a sad pile of frozen corpses, the broken children properly broken at last and removed from the bloodline. Some of the southern tribes spoke of the Ancestor’s Tree and of pruning it, but Yaz didn’t know what a tree was and her father, who had spoken to southerners at gatherings across the years, had never met any who had seen such a thing.
‘But they call it the Pit of the Missing,’ Zeen said.
‘It’s the children who are thrown down there who are missing.’ Little Jaysin spoke up again from behind Yaz. It seemed fear had made the boy brave. He rarely had the courage to speak outside his own tent.
‘It’s a different sort of … Oh, never mind.’ Yaz would let someone else explain it to him after she’d gone. Instead she looked up at the sky, pale and clear above her, laced with strips of very high cloud, their edges tinged with the blood of the setting sun. The Missing had lived on Abeth an age before the tribes of man beached their ships upon its shores, but they were all long gone by the time men navigated the black seas between the stars and came to this world. Many southerners treated them as if they were gods, though the Ictha knew that the only gods were those in the sea and those in the sky, with the ice to keep them from warring upon each other.
‘I’d rather just be left out of the tent,’ Zeen said. ‘If I was broken I’d rather just be left out.’
Yaz shrugged. A quick death beat a slow death, and at least this way you gave honour to your tribe. Also there was the issue of metal. Clan-Mother Mazai said that the priesthood was the only source of metal in a thousand miles, and not just pieces of it as might sometimes be traded between the tribes, but worked metal, fashioned to meet demand, be it knife or chain. The ceremony honoured the god of the Black Rock and that in turn earned the clan favour with the regulator. Dying here would help the clan.
A sudden cry jerked Yaz from her thoughts. The regulator was standing alone, the wind tugging at the tattered strips of his cloak. There was no sign of the child that had failed his inspection, just the faint and diminishing echoes of their screaming that still escaped the hole. A stillness pervaded the watching crowd, and they had already been still.
With
