Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Release Date: April 21, 2020
Publisher: ACE
Source: Publisher
Genre: Fantasy / Epic
"In the ice, east of the Black Rock, there is a hole into which broken children are thrown"
The Girl and The Stars is the first installment in author Mark Lawrence's Book of the Ice series. This is a spin-off of the authors Book of the Ancestor trilogy. This is an entirely different cast of characters from the authors previous series. Since this is a spin-off, the world is the same as the Book of the Ancestor. In the beginning, 4 tribes of men traveled the universe looking for a home. The tribes were Gerant, Hunska, Marjal, and Quantals. They found the planet of Abeth. As we learned from Nona, the planet is dying.
The protagonist of the series is Yaz. Yaz belongs to the Ictha tribe/clan. We meet Yaz as the clans, who live in a
brutal cold ice-covered world, have traveled to attend a
gathering run by the priest regulator. Yaz has always known about the hole. Her people
called it the Pit of the Missing and she had carried the knowledge of it
with her like a midnight eye watching from the back of her mind. It
seemed that her entire life had been spent circling that pit in the ice
and that now it was drawing her in as she had always known it would.
To
progress from being a child and ascending to adulthood the younger
members of all the tribes have to be judged by regulator/priests. Yaz fears that she will die, as
the priests will push away the children who they consider broken (no
ability, disabled, too small or big, etc) into a large hole in the ice (Pit of the Missing)
never to be seen again. To Yaz’s shock, the priest keeps her because of her abilities and pushes
her younger brother Zeen down the black hole. Instead of letting Zeen go to his fate, she throws herself down the
gap to try and to attempt to save him. Yaz is different from others. She sees the River that runs through all things.
Think the Path from the previous series. This helps her gain extra strength, resistance and power. She also has the unusual ability of making stars brighter when she's around them which keeps the Tainted away. In the below, there are two groups of people. The Broken who are called the unwanted, and the Tainted who have fallen victim to their own devils and are itching closer and closer to taking over. All of the younger kids end up with the Tainted. Yaz soon finds herself divided between Broken factions. One that wants to go an entirely different way, and one that has been around for several decades.
Yaz, who is often reckless, joins with Arka (who has lived here for 20 years) and her team (Thurin, Maya, Petrick, Tarko, Kao, Quina),
who have to survive the dangers, such as Gerant (large beings),
Tainted, and Hunters (vicious creatures). Yaz is determined to find her brother at any cost. She is pulled away
from her group many times along the way, and in doing so, learns about
the powers she has with the stars, that will help her and her friends
survive. Yaz counters a slew of curious characters from Theus, to Eular, to Erris. But, who is really who they say they are and what are their agendas? Eventually, Yaz learns that the boy she has feelings for, Quell, has somehow managed to find himself below. No spoilers since it ties into what happens during the cliffhanger ending.
Yes, you can read this without knowledge from the previous trilogy. As I mentioned, the
finale has an intense and shocking cliffhanger. I'm looking forward to finding out what happens next.
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1
In
the ice, east of the Black Rock, there is a hole into which broken
children are thrown. Yaz had always known about the hole. Her people
called it the Pit of the Missing and she had carried the knowledge of it
with her like a midnight eye watching from the back of her mind. It
seemed that her entire life had been spent circling that pit in the ice
and that now it was drawing her in as she had always known it would.
“Hey!” Zeen pointed. “The mountain!”
Yaz
squinted in the direction her younger brother indicated. On the
horizon, barely visible, a black spot, stark against all the white. A
month had passed since the landscape had offered anything but white and
now that she saw the dark peak she couldn’t understand how it had taken
Zeen’s eyes to find it for her.
“I know why it’s black,” Zeen said.
Everyone knew but Yaz let him tell her-at twelve he thought himself a man, but he still boasted like a child.
“It’s black because the rocks are hot and the ice melts.”
Zeen
lowered his hand. It seemed strange to see his fingers. In the north
where the Ictha normally roamed the whole clan went so heaped in hide
and skins that they barely looked human. Even in their tents they wore
mittens anytime that fine tasks were not required. It was easy to forget
that people even had fingers. But here, as far south as her people ever
travelled, the Ictha could almost walk bare chested.
“Well
remembered.” Yaz would miss her little brother when they threw her into
the pit. He was bright and fierce and her parents’ joy.
“You’ve
spotted it then?” Quell came alongside them. He had no sled to drag and
could move up and down the line checking on the thirty families. He
nodded toward the Black Rock. “I remember how big it is, but still, it
always surprises me when we get close.”
Yaz forced a smile. She would miss Quell too, even though at seventeen he boasted nearly as much as Zeen.
“Always?” she asked. Quell had been to the gathering twice. Once more than her.
“Always.”
Quell nodded, almost concealing his grin. He held her for a moment with
pale eyes then moved on up the column. He passed Yaz’s parents and
uncle, who between them pulled the boat-sled, pausing to swap a comment
with her father. One day soon he would have to ask her parents for
permission to share Yaz’s tent. Or so he thought. Yaz worried what Quell
might do when the regulator picked her out. She hoped he would prove
himself grown enough to embrace this fate and not shame the Ictha before
the southern tribes.
“Tell me about the testing,” Zeen said.
Yaz
sighed and leaned into the sled traces. She had of course told Zeen
everything a hundred times over but she had been the same herself before
her first visit to the hole.
“You’ll
be fine.” Zeen’s worries were nothing, it was just the mind turning on
itself when there wasn’t anything to do but pull a load mile upon mile,
day upon day. The journey had proved difficult, the ice rucking up
before them in pressure ridges as if seeking to impede their progress.
For the last week the pace had been gruelling as the clan mother sought
to make up lost time. Still, they would arrive a day before the
ceremony. “Don’t worry about it, Zeen.”
On
Yaz’s first trip south she had been sure the regulator would sniff out
her wrongness. Somehow she had passed inspection. But that had been four
years ago, and what had been starting to break within her back then was
now fully broken. “You’ll be fine.”
“But what if I’m not?” The sight of the Black Rock seemed to have opened the gates to her brother’s fear.
“The
southern tribes are not like the Ictha, Zeen. They have many that are
born wrong. We have to be pure. Weakness was bred out of us long ago,”
she lied. “When you walk the polar ice you are either pure or dead.”
“Strangers!” Quell came hurrying back down the column, excited. “We’re getting close!”
Yaz
looked to where her parents had turned their heads. Faint in the
distance a grey line could be seen, another clan trekking in from the
east. And between the two columns, a single sled closing on the Ictha at
remarkable speed.
Zeen stopped to stare in amazement. “How can-”
“Dogs,”
Yaz said. “You’ll get to see your first dogs!” Even now, as the
distance narrowed, the hounds pulling the sled resolved into dots in a
line before it. Soon she could make them out against the snow, heavy
beasts, silver-white fur bulking them up still further, their breath
steaming before them. In the far north the cold would kill them, but
south of the Keller Ridges all the tribes used dogs. The Ictha said that
a true man pulls his own sled. The southerners laughed at that and
called it something that only a man with no dogs would say. Even so,
everyone gave the Ictha respect. Anyone who has known cold understands
that only a different breed can dare the polar ice.
“Get
along!” Behind them the Jex twins shouted. Zeen started forward again
just in time to avoid having them drag their boat-sled over him. Yaz
kept level with her brother, watching the strangers approach.
Within
a few minutes the whole column came to a halt while at the front Mother
Mazai greeted the men dismounting from their sled. Yaz could smell the
dogs on the wind, a musky scent. Their yapping rang in ears unfamiliar
with anything but the voices of men, of the ice, and of the wind. The
sound had a strangeness to it and a beauty, and she found herself
wanting to go closer, wanting to meet with one of these alien creatures,
bound just like her to a sled by strips of hide.
“They’re
so different!” Zeen struggled out of his harness and broke from the
line to get a better view. He meant the people not the dogs.
“I
know.” It had been the first thing to strike Yaz at her previous
gathering. It wasn’t so much the difference of the southern tribes from
the Ictha, it was that even among themselves they were varied, some with
the copper skin of an Ictha, some redder, so dark as to almost defy
colour, and some much paler, almost pink. Their hair varied too, from
Ictha black to shades of brown. Even their eyes were not all the white
on white that Yaz saw at almost every turn but a bewildering range. Many
had eyes almost as dark as the mountain behind them where the rock won
clear of the ice. “Don’t stare!”
Zeen
waved her off and edged up the column for a closer look. She understood
his fascination. Mazai said that where there are many tasks, many kinds
of tools are needed. The Ictha, she said, had a single task. To endure.
To survive. And to survive a polar night required a singular strength,
one recipe. The clan mother spoke of metals and of how one might be
mixed with others to gain particular qualities. There was, she said, a
single alloy fit for the purpose of the north, and that was why all who
dwelt there held so much in common.
Yaz
edged out to join her brother, ignoring her mother’s hiss. Soon they
would cast her down the Pit of the Missing into a darkness from which
there was no return. She might as well see as much of what the world had
to offer as she could before they took it away from her.
“That
one’s the leader.” Zeen pointed to a man who stood taller than any
Ictha and thin, too thin for the north. In places strands of grey shot
through the blackness of his hair.
In
the months-long polar night the breath you exhaled through your muffler
formed two types of frost, the normal southern one, and a finer ice
that would smoke away into nothingness within the tent’s warmth. The
Ictha called it the dry ice for it never melted only smoked away. In
places, in the depth of the long night, dry ice would drift above the
water ice and, when the sun’s red eye returned, a great cold fog would
rise in clouds miles high. The storyteller had it that dry ice formed
when part of the air itself froze.
Yaz
knew that if the thin grey-haired southerner were to draw breath on a
polar night the cold would sear his lungs and he would die.
“Back
in line, you two.” Quell came up behind them, the gentleness of his
voice taking the sting from the reprimand. He steered Zeen back into
place with a hand on his shoulder. Yaz wished that Quell would lay his
hand upon her shoulder as well. The sight of naked fingers still amazed
her. If she were going to die then she should experience a man’s touch
too.
She
had thought many times about pitching her own tent and inviting Quell
in. Of course she had. Too many times and for too long. But in the end
two things had always stopped her, sometimes one, sometimes the other,
sometimes both. Firstly something in her rebelled at the idea that fear
should force her hand before she was properly ready. It was not the
Ictha way. And secondly there was the pain that Quell would feel when
they took her from him. It would not be fair, to use him like that.
Three
things. Something else had held her back too. And might have been
enough on its own even without the other two. A rebellion against a
choice that seemed already to have been decided for her.
But
Quell and Yaz had walked the ice together since the days when they
could first stand on their two feet, and many of her dreams were filled
with thoughts of the bold lines of his face, the strength of his hands,
and the mix of kindness and bravery with which he tackled the world. She
did not want to leave him. When the regulator cast her down, her heart
would at last be broken like the rest of her, though at least the pain
would not continue long, and in death she would join the spirits of the
wind.
Yaz
returned to the line and watched Quell go forward. Like Zeen he wanted
to listen to the southerners. She found a smile on her lips. The
regulator might declare a man grown, but they were still just taller
boys.
Perhaps
she should have set her tent for him. But in any case she was still
counted a child and properly they could not be bound until she had
endured the regulator for a second time. Almost every broken child was
culled from their clan at their first gathering, but even though it was
as rare as melting, sometimes it took a second, and no child was truly
counted as grown until their second gathering. So in many ways Quell had
been a true member of the clan since he was thirteen whereas Yaz at
sixteen was still seen as a child and would be until tomorrow when the
regulator turned his pale eyes her way.
Her
mother offered Yaz a knowing smile then looked away as the wind picked
up, laden with stinging ice crystals. There had been sadness in that
smile too.
Yaz
looked down at her hands. Fear prickled across her. It seemed cruel
that just one sleepless night away the hole waited for her, an open
mouth that would devour all the days she had thought she owned. A future
taken. No tent of her own, no boat to set upon the Great Sea, no lover
taken to the furs. Maybe there would have been children. At least now
Yaz would not have to harden her heart and watch while they in turn
stood beneath the regulator’s gaze.
The
clan mother said it wasn’t cruelty. All the tribes knew that a child
born broken would die on the ice. Their bodies lacked what was needed to
survive. As they grew, the weakness in them would grow too. Some needed
too much food to keep warm and would starve. Some would lose their
resilience to the wind’s bite and the cold would eat at them, taking
first the tips of fingers, nibbling at the nose and ears, later taking
the toes. Flesh would turn white, then black, then fall away. In time
the fingers and face would be eaten, dying then rotting. It was an ugly
death, and painful. But the worst was that the weakness in that adult
would pass into their children, and their children’s children, and the
clan itself would rot and die.
There
was a wisdom to the pit. A harsh wisdom, but wisdom even so. The burden
that Yaz had carried with her out of the north, which had hung from her
shoulders each and every mile, was the same weight that set sorrow
along the edges of all her mother’s smiles. Years had not blunted the
sharpness of Azad’s death. Yaz should be leaving her parents with two
sons to support them, but when the dagger-fish broke the waters her
strength had not been sufficient to hold her youngest brother, and in
what now seemed one long moment of horror he had gone, leaving her alone
in the boat. If the regulator had seen at the first gathering that she
was broken, Azad would have known his eighth year, and would have many
more to come.
A muttering ran down the column, one passing the news to the next, with a rumble of discontent echoing in its wake.
“What? What is it?”
Yaz’s
father ignored Zeen and told her instead while the Jex twins leaned in
to hear. “The Quinx clan father says our count is out. The ceremony is
today.”
“Why
aren’t they there then?” Yaz’s hands began to tremble, a sweat
prickling her skin despite the freezing wind. In the months of polar
night it was difficult to keep track of days, but she had never heard of
the count being out. “Was their count out too?”
“A
hoola attacked their column. They had to observe the rites for the
dead. They’re force marching to get to the ceremony in time.”
The
Jexes were already passing the news back. As the sun began to set, the
regulator would commence his inspection. He would be finished by full
dark. If they missed it Yaz would have four more years, albeit forced to
remain as a child. From where she stood four years looked like a
lifetime. “What will we do?”
“We’ll march too,” her father said.
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