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?’ An eyebrow arched. ‘You wouldn’t have lasted many more. You don’t strike me as a hunska even though you have the black hair. Your eyes are too pale. Are you quick?’
‘Quick 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