I.
The Long Night
They walked back to the Twelfth Tower in the dark, and it was the longest six miles of Lyra’s life.
Not because of the snow.
The snow was kind that night: no wind, no blizzard, only the stars and the slow green curtains of the Dragon’s Breath overhead, and the long, gentle slope running down toward the watchfires of the Wall.
It was the people.
A hundred candidates had marched north that morning at an easy, steady pace, in ten neat lances, with their packs on their backs and their weapons at their hips.
What came back was something else.
They came back carrying each other.
The girl from the Third Lance with the black-ice arrowhead in her thigh came back on a litter of two spears and a tent-hide, with Lord Kenneth walking beside it the whole six miles and one hand resting on her forehead.
Her name was Ylva Brenn.
She did not scream.
She had stopped screaming somewhere around the second mile, and that frightened her lancemates more than the screaming had.
Three from the First came back with their arms strapped across their chests.
A boy from the Sixth came back on Lord Roderick’s shoulders, as he had come through the blizzard, although this time Roderick was not telling any stories.
And Emrik Stahl of the Fourth Lance walked the whole way on his own feet, with a bandage wound three times round his head over his left eye, and his lance leader’s hand on his shoulder to guide him, and did not say one word.
The Seventh Lance walked in the middle of the column.
Hakon Aarn had his arm bound tight across his chest in a sling Mira had made from her own scarf, and his sister would not let go of his good hand.
Senna walked stiffly, the way people walk when every breath hurts; the Matriarch’s wards had saved her ribs from breaking, but not from the bruise, which Mira said would be black by morning and the size of a dinner plate.
Isolde walked between Mira and Hilde, and twice on the slope her knees simply stopped holding her, and twice they caught her without a word.
Lyra walked near the back, with her notched sword at her hip and her arms aching to the bone from the mammoth-bone club, and the witch’s core pressed against her skin inside her coat, and said nothing to anyone.
The north gate of the Twelfth Tower was open before they reached it.
Captain Orsa’s soldiers came running out into the snow with lanterns and stretchers and blankets, and more of them came behind, and for a while there was nothing but noise and light and hands: hands lifting litters, hands taking packs, hands on shoulders, steering people in out of the dark.
Lyra saw Oskar Vaar come out of the gate at a dead run, and saw him stop in front of his daughter and look at the way she was holding her side, and saw his face.
“It’s only a bruise,” said Senna, quickly.
“It’s only a bruise.
The coat…”
Her father did not say anything.
He picked her up, very carefully, the way you would pick up something made of glass, and carried her in through the gate, and she let him.
* * *
Lord Kenneth took over the Twelfth Tower’s great hall and turned it into an infirmary in less than a quarter of an hour.
Lyra had seen her uncle work many times.
She had seen him in the Alchemy Tower at three in the morning with a cauldron about to explode, laughing.
She had never seen him like this.
He did not laugh.
He did not hurry.
He moved down the long rows of straw pallets that Captain Orsa’s soldiers had laid out along the hall with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his three satchels open, and he spoke to every wounded candidate by name, quietly, and he touched every one of them, and he did not waste a single movement.
Ylva Brenn went first.
Kenneth had her carried to a table near the great hearth, under every lamp the tower owned, and told her in a perfectly calm voice exactly what he was going to do, and why it would hurt, and roughly for how long.
Then he gave her something to drink that smelled of poppy and snowmelt, and waited until her eyes went heavy, and began.
It took him two hours.
The black-ice arrowhead had shattered inside her thigh, as black-ice arrowheads did, into forty or fifty splinters.
Each one had to be found and drawn out before it melted, because melting black ice poisoned the blood.
Kenneth found them one at a time, by feel and by some sense Lyra could only guess at, and drew them out with a pair of long silver tweezers, and dropped each one into a copper bowl with a small, sharp tink.
Mira stood at his elbow the whole time, handing him things before he asked for them.
Lyra stood on his other side and held the lamp.
When the last splinter came out and he began to close the wound with a paste of dragon’s-blood orchid and silk thread, Ylva’s lancemates, who had been standing in a silent knot at the end of the hall for two hours, sat down on the floor all at once, as if their strings had been cut.
Emrik Stahl was harder.
Kenneth unwound the bandage from his head, and looked for a long time, and did not say anything.
Then he put the bandage back, very gently, and sat down on the edge of Emrik’s pallet.
“I can save the eye,” he said.
“The eye itself.
It won’t look very different, in a year or two, if you’re lucky with the scarring.” He paused.
“But the nerve behind it is cut, Emrik.
Not torn.
Cut.
By the edge of an ice-axe, very cleanly.
I can’t mend that.
Nobody alive can, except perhaps the Headmaster at Aethelgard, and even he might not.”
Emrik was quiet for a moment.
“So I’ll be blind,” he said.
“On that side.”
“Yes.”
“Can I still fight?”
Kenneth looked at him steadily.
“Do you want to?”
The boy did not answer at once.
He was sixteen, broad and fair and freckled, a smith’s son from the southern valleys who had carried a hammer before he had carried an axe.
His one good eye went round the long hall: the lamps and the pallets, the wounded and the unwounded, his own lancemates standing at the foot of his bed, not looking at him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Then you can,” said Kenneth.
“You’ll have to learn to turn your head.
You’ll have to learn to trust whoever stands on your left.
It will be harder than anything you’ve done so far.
But you can.”
He stood up.
Then, before he went on to the next pallet, he laid his hand for a moment on top of the boy’s head, the way he laid it on Lyra’s when she was small.
“You were very brave today, Emrik Stahl,” he said.
“I watched you.
Everybody on that ridge watched you.”
Lyra saw the boy’s jaw tighten.
She saw him turn his face toward the wall.
She looked away, so that he could do whatever he needed to do without anyone watching.
The Archduke came into the hall after midnight.
He had not come back to the tower with them.
He had stayed at the Rimefang with Lucian until every last goblin body in the warren had been counted and burned, and the caves had been searched, and the smoke from the pyre could be seen from the Wall.
Now he walked into the great hall in his grey coat with soot on his face and his hands, and stood at the end of the long rows of pallets, and looked.
He did not make a speech.
He walked down the rows the way Kenneth had.
He stopped at every pallet.
He said a few words to every wounded candidate, too quiet for anyone else to hear.
He sat for a long time on the edge of Ylva Brenn’s pallet while she slept.
He sat for even longer with Emrik Stahl, and whatever he said, when he stood up to go, the boy’s good eye was wet and his chin was up.
At the end of the row, Alaric stopped beside his daughter.
Lyra was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, still holding the lamp, although nobody needed it anymore.
Her arms had stopped shaking some time ago.
They had simply gone numb, which was worse.
Her father crouched down in front of her.
He took the lamp out of her hands and set it on the floor.
Then he took both of her hands in his, and turned them over, and looked at the bruises that were coming up along her wrists and forearms, dark and ugly in the lamplight, where the mammoth-bone had come down on her sword.
He did not say anything for a long time.
“I know,” said Lyra at last, very quietly.
“I know.
I shouldn’t have caught it.”
Her father’s thumbs moved over the bruises, once.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said.
“Sleep now.”
He let go of her hands, and stood, and went out.
And Lyra sat against the wall in the long hall full of lamplight and wounded children, and understood that tomorrow was going to be very hard.
II.
What We Carry
The Archduke gave them three days.
Three days inside the walls of the Twelfth Tower, to heal and to rest and to eat Captain Orsa’s plain, heavy Wall food, which after Master Emberly’s kitchens tasted like boiled boots and which nobody complained about.
Three days with no running and no marching and nothing that anybody had to do.
It turned out that was the hardest thing of all.
On the ice, there had been no time to feel anything.
There had been the next step, the next ridge, the next goblin coming up the gully.
Now there was time.
And everything that had been waiting came up, all at once, in a hundred different ways.
Some of them could not stop talking.
They told the story of the Rimefang over and over, in the mess hall and the barracks and on the Wall-top, each time a little louder, each time with a little more of themselves in it, as though if they told it often enough it would turn into a story that had happened to someone else.
Some of them could not talk at all.
A boy from the Second Lance sat on the edge of his bunk for most of the first day, staring at his hands, and when his lancemates spoke to him he answered and then went back to staring.
A girl from the Ninth woke screaming on the first night, and then on the second, and her whole lance took to sleeping in a ring around her bunk.
And some of them were angry.
At the goblins.
At the witch.
At themselves, most of all.
* * *
Hilde Aarn did not leave her brother’s side for the whole of the first day.
Hakon was in the great hall, on a pallet near the hearth, with his arm stitched and splinted and bound.
Kenneth had said he would keep it, and that it would work again, and that it would ache in the cold for the rest of his life, which in the North meant most of the year.
Hakon had taken this news with the same wry calm he took most things, and had asked if it meant he could get out of the Thousand Steps.
It did not.
Hilde sat on the floor beside the pallet and held his good hand, and for most of the day she talked, the way Hilde always talked, about everything and nothing.
The food.
The tower.
How tall Captain Orsa wasn’t.
How the Kitchen General was going to faint when he heard what Mira had done with his spice pouches.
Then, late in the afternoon, in the middle of a sentence about the barracks cat, she stopped.
She did not start again.
She simply sat there, holding his hand, and her face crumpled, all at once, like a child’s.
“I wasn’t there,” she said.
“On the ledge.
I was at the other end.
I couldn’t see you.
I heard you scream and I couldn’t even see you, and I just kept shooting because I didn’t know what else to do, and you were bleeding the whole time, and I…”
She could not finish.
She bent over his hand and cried: great, ugly, hiccupping sobs that shook her whole body, the kind she had not cried since they were small.
Up and down the hall, people looked, and then carefully looked away.
Hakon let her.
He did not tell her to stop.
He lay there with his splinted arm across his chest and his other hand in both of hers, and waited, and when the worst of it had passed, he said, quite calmly:
“You were there.”
She lifted her wet, blotched face.
“I felt you,” said her brother.
“The whole time.
Every arrow.
I knew when you were going to shoot before you did.
I knew when you ran out.
I didn’t need to see you, Hil.
I’ve never needed to see you.” He squeezed her hands.
“You were exactly where I needed you to be.
At the other end, holding it.
If you’d come running to me, they’d have come over the north end of the ledge and killed Isolde.”
Hilde stared at him.
“Oh,” she said.
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You never think of anything,” said Hakon.
“That’s why you have me.” He closed his eyes.
“Now stop dripping on my good arm.
It’s the only one I’ve got.”
She laughed, wetly, and wiped her face on her sleeve, and put her head down on the edge of the pallet next to his shoulder.
A few minutes later, they were both asleep.
* * *
Sigurd Kell found Rowan on the Wall-top on the second night.
Rowan was sitting on the parapet with his legs hanging over the Frozen Land side, looking north toward the dark bulk of the Kharn.
Sigurd came along the walkway in the dark and stopped a few paces away and stood there, not saying anything, for so long that Rowan finally looked round.
“If you’re going to push me off,” said Rowan, “do it now.
I’m too tired to fight.”
Sigurd did not smile.
He came and sat down on the parapet beside him, heavily, with his huge hands hanging between his knees.
“I had a speech,” he said.
“I practiced it.
In the barracks.” He stared out at the dark.
“It’s gone.”
Rowan waited.
“Nine weeks,” said Sigurd at last.
“Nine weeks, I said things.
About the farm.
About the plough.
About you being the Young Lord’s pet.
I said them because they were the worst things I could think of, and I said them loudly, so everyone would hear.” His jaw worked.
“And I told myself it was because you didn’t deserve to be better than me.
That you’d had it easy.
Eleven years in the citadel school, the Archduke’s favorite, while my father was on the Ninth Tower and I was…”
He stopped.
“And then that axe came down,” he said, very low, “and I was one step from you.
One step.
And for half a heartbeat, Rowan, I didn’t move.
I stood there and I thought, he’ll die, and something in me…” His great hands clenched.
“Something in me didn’t mind.”
The wind moved along the Wall-top.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
“And then you moved,” said Rowan.
“And then I moved.” Sigurd’s voice was rough.
“Half a heartbeat late.
If that thing had been any faster…”
“It wasn’t.”
“It might have been.”
“It wasn’t, Sigurd.” Rowan turned on the parapet to face him.
“You want to know what I was thinking on that ledge?
When the archers turned round and saw us, and the troops started up the cliff, and Hakon screamed?” He did not wait for an answer.
“I was thinking that I’d put us there.
My plan.
My ledge.
I drew it on a scrap of paper by candlelight and I was proud of it, and I walked ten people out onto the side of a cliff with nowhere to go, and the Archduke said don’t die on it, and we nearly did.
All of us.
Because of me.” He looked down at his hands.
“If you want to talk about half a heartbeat.
I froze too.
On the ledge.
When Hakon was hit.
I didn’t know what to do.
Isolde stood up and did something none of us understand, and the twins held both ends, and Mira burned a sack of spices, and I just…
stood there, holding the rope.”
Sigurd stared at him.
“You killed that thing,” he said.
“The big one.
With a cut I didn’t even see.”
“I don’t know how I did that either,” said Rowan.
“I’ve tried it forty times since.
On the woodpile.
Nothing.” He laughed, very short.
“So I suppose we’re both frauds.”
They sat there on the parapet, side by side, looking out at the Frozen Land.
Behind them, boots scraped on the stone.
Cedric came along the walkway with a lantern in one hand and a clay jug in the other, and Finn Brannoc was a step behind him with four cups.
“Captain Orsa’s cider,” said Cedric, sitting down on Rowan’s other side without being asked.
“Don’t tell her.
Or my father.
Or Uncle Kenneth.
Or anyone.” He poured.
“What are we talking about?”
“How we’re both frauds,” said Sigurd.
“Oh, good,” said Cedric.
“I dropped my left shoulder.
Twice.
In front of a goblin.
My little sister had to save my life, and she was annoyed about it.” He handed round the cups.
“Finn’s the only one of us who did everything right.”
Finn considered this.
“I got knocked onto my knees,” he said, “by something with a stick.”
“A mammoth,” said Rowan.
“It was a whole mammoth’s leg.”
“It was still a stick.”
They drank.
The cider was hot and sweet and far stronger than it had any right to be, and it went down into their chests like a hearth being lit.
It was Oskar Vaar who found them there an hour later, on his rounds of the Wall-top, four boys in a row on the parapet with an empty jug between them.
He did not tell them to get down.
He stood with his lantern and looked at them, at the Archduke’s heir and the farmer’s son, the tower captain’s boy and the tavern-keeper’s, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the cold.
“You know the Wall custom,” he said.
It was not a question.
They looked at him.
The old sergeant set down his lantern on the stone.
He drew the short sword at his hip and held it out in front of him, point down, hilt up.
“On the Wall,” he said, “when men have stood in the same breach, and each of them has kept the others alive, they put their hilts together, and they say the words.
And after that, they’re shield-brothers.
Not kin.
More than kin.
The Archduke and Sir Magnus did it at the Kharn breach.
My father did it with Captain Orsa’s father, on this tower.” He looked at them.
“It isn’t done lightly.”
Nobody spoke.
Then Cedric got down off the parapet and drew the Dragon-Spine Cleaver.
Rowan got down.
He drew his plain longsword.
Sigurd drew his broadsword.
Finn, who had no sword, took his spear from where it leaned against the wall and held it hilt-end up beside the others.
They put them together, in the lantern light, on the top of the Wall: a cleaver of dark ancestral steel inlaid with mithril, a longsword and a broadsword and a spear of pale frost-mithril, all four touching in the middle.
“Say it after me,” said Oskar Vaar.
“Your back is my back.”
“Your back is my back,” said four voices.
“Your breach is my breach.”
“Your breach is my breach.”
“While the Wall stands.”
“While the Wall stands.”
The old sergeant picked up his lantern.
“That’s it,” he said.
“No blood, no magic, no crying.
That’s the Wall.
Now get off my parapet before you fall off it.”
He walked on along the Wall-top.
Behind him, four boys stood in the dark with their weapons still touching, and for a long moment none of them moved.
Then Sigurd Kell cleared his throat, very loudly, and said that it was cold, and that he was going to bed, and walked away very fast.
And Rowan and Cedric looked at each other, and grinned, and did not say anything about the fact that his eyes had been wet.
* * *
Isolde Frostmere had not touched her bow since the Rimefang.
It stood in the corner of the small room the Twelfth had given the girls of the Seventh, leaning against the wall in its case, and she did not look at it.
She slept most of the first day.
On the second, she sat on her bunk with her knees drawn up and her arms around them and stared at the opposite wall, and when Mira brought her soup she ate it without seeming to notice what it was.
On the second night, Mira sat down on the end of her bunk, uninvited, and said, “You’re frightened of it.”
Isolde did not answer.
“The bow,” said Mira.
“Or yourself.
Or both.
You haven’t looked at it once in two days.”
For a long time, Isolde said nothing.
Then, very quietly, without turning her head:
“I don’t know how I did it.”
Mira waited.
“I don’t know what it was.
I don’t know where it came from.
I stood up because I was so frightened that I couldn’t bear it anymore, and I let go of something, and it just…
happened.” Isolde’s voice was flat and careful, the way it always was, but her hands were shaking round her knees.
“I’ve been trying to do it since.
In my head.
And I can’t find it.
I can’t find where it came from.” She swallowed.
“What if it only comes when I’m about to die?
What if next time I’m on a ledge and I stand up and nothing happens?
What if I freeze again?”
Mira did not say anything for a moment.
Then she reached into her coat, and took out the little tin of salve, the one that had gone back and forth between them across the Frozen Land, and turned it over in her fingers.
“Do you know why I carry this?” she said.
Isolde looked at her, for the first time.
“Because I’m frightened all the time,” said Mira Halvard.
“I always have been.
Of everything.
Of the cold, and heights, and cauldrons exploding, and being wrong in front of people.
Of not being good enough.” She said it quite matter-of-factly, as though describing the drying method of an herb.
“So I prepare.
I make a salve for my fingers in case they freeze.
I carry sun-pepper for eight years in case I ever need it.
I learn a hundred and one herbs blindfolded in case someone ever tests me.
I’m not brave.
I just can’t stand being caught without the thing I need.” She looked at the tin.
“You froze on the ledge because you’d never been frightened before.
You didn’t know what it was.
Now you do.”
She held out the tin.
“Next time,” she said, “you’ll know what’s happening.
And you’ll know it passes.
And you’ll know that on the other side of it there’s a silver arrow that killed a hundred goblins and a witch.” A pause.
“That’s more than most people ever get to know about themselves.”
Isolde looked at the tin.
Then, slowly, she took it.
“Halvard,” she said.
“Mira,” said Mira.
“If you’re going to cry on my bunk, you might as well use my name.”
Isolde Frostmere made a small, choked sound that might have been a laugh.
Then she did cry, briefly, with her forehead on her knees.
Mira sat on the end of the bunk and did not touch her and did not leave.
And when it was over, Isolde wiped her face, and got up, and crossed the room, and took her bow out of its case for the first time in two days, and sat down with it across her knees.
She did not draw it.
She just held it.
But after a while, very faintly, Lyra heard it begin to hum.
* * *
Lyra did not cry.
She had not cried since the spring.
She lay awake on the second night in the girls’ room, on her back, with her bruised arms folded across her chest and the witch’s core in the pocket over her heart, and listened to the others breathing, and thought about the gully.
She thought about the moment the champion’s club had come down on Senna.
She had been twenty feet away.
She had seen it coming.
She could have ended it before it started, with one draw of the frost-lily blade, one thread of void-intent.
She had known it, standing there, as clearly as she knew her own name.
And she had not done it.
She had let the club land.
She had let Senna fly across the gully and hit the rock wall.
She had let Hakon take a black-ice arrow on a ledge while she cut arrows at exactly the speed of an ordinary Sword Master and not one hair faster.
She had let the Fourth Lance fight blind in the fog, and a boy lose his eye.
Because the price of saving them was the secret, and the secret was the whole of her house.
She had done the right thing.
She knew that.
Her grandmother would say so.
Her father would say so.
It did not help at all.
“You’re doing it again,” said a voice in the dark.
Lyra turned her head.
Senna was lying on the next bunk, on her uninjured side, looking at her.
In the faint glow from the brazier her eyes were very dark.
“Doing what?”
“Holding your breath.” Senna’s voice was low, so as not to wake the others.
“Not your real one.
The other one.
You do it when you’re thinking about something bad.
Your shoulders go up.” A pause.
“You did it in the rift field.
Just before you tripped.”
Lyra went very still.
“I know you didn’t trip,” said Senna.
“I’ve walked the Kharn passes since I was nine.
I know what a person looks like when they trip, and I know what they look like when they choose to.” She was quiet for a moment.
“You felt that hole before I did.
And I was looking right at it.”
The brazier ticked.
Across the room, Hilde muttered something in her sleep and rolled over.
“I won’t ask,” said Senna.
“I just wanted you to know that I know.
So you don’t have to hold your breath around me.” She shifted on her bunk, wincing as her ribs moved.
“My father holds his breath, sometimes.
At night.
When he thinks about the Wall.
My mother used to tell him: you don’t have to carry it alone just because you carry it best.”
Lyra did not say anything.
She could not.
After a while, Senna closed her eyes.
And after a while longer, Lyra let her shoulders come down, a little, and let out a breath she had not known she was holding.
It was not the whole of it.
It would never be the whole of it.
But for the first time in three years, someone outside her family had looked straight at the edge of her secret and decided not to push, and to stay anyway.
But it was close.
III.
The Yard at Night
On the third night, the yard of the Twelfth Tower was full.
Nobody had called them there.
Nobody had rung a bell or read out a list.
The Archduke had said rest, and on the first night they had rested, and on the second they had talked.
On the third, one after another, they got up from their bunks and their pallets and the long benches of the mess hall, and took their weapons, and went out into the cold.
The braziers along the walls were lit.
The snow in the middle of the yard had been trampled flat.
And by the time the moon came up over the Kharn, half the candidates of the North were out there in the dark, alone or in pairs or in knots of three and four, training as though the goblins were still coming up the gully.
Lyra stood in the shadow of the stable door for a long time, watching.
Near the well, Emrik Stahl of the Fourth was standing in a circle of his own lance mates with a practice axe in his hands and a patch over his left eye.
They were coming at him one at a time, slowly, from every side, and every time one of them came from his left he was a heartbeat late.
Every time, he swore, and set his feet, and said again.
His lance leader stood just off his left shoulder the whole time, and called out a single word, left, a moment before each blow, and by the time the moon had cleared the Wall, Emrik was turning before the word came.
By the stables, Senna Vaar was stretching, very carefully, one arm and then the other, with her face white and her teeth set against the pain in her ribs.
Finn Brannoc sat on an upturned bucket beside her with his spear across his knees, not training, not talking, simply there.
Every time she winced, he looked at her.
Every time he looked at her, she scowled at him.
Neither of them moved away.
On the long wall of the barracks, the Aarn twins had chalked a row of circles, one inside another, like the targets on the citadel’s long range.
Hilde was shooting at them.
Hakon, with his arm strapped across his chest, stood beside her and called the shots.
“Left.
Wind.
Left, Hil, not your left.” And a little way off, with her back against the well and her bow across her knees, Isolde Frostmere was watching them.
After a while she got up, and went over, and said something to Hilde in a low voice, and moved her elbow half an inch with two fingers.
Hilde’s next arrow went into the dead center of the smallest circle, and Hilde turned round with her mouth open, and Isolde, very nearly, smiled.
On a bench under the colonnade, Mira Halvard had set up a small workbench of planks and barrels, and on it, in a neat row, were twelve small balls of waxed paper, each the size of an apricot and tied at the top with thread.
She was making a thirteenth.
Her fingers were stained orange to the knuckle.
“What are those?” Lyra asked, coming over.
“Seasoning,” said Mira, without looking up.
She tied off the thread.
“Chili, warming root, smoke-salt, a thread of sun-pepper and a pinch of powdered fire-lotus as an igniter.
Throw it into a fog and it bursts.
I timed it.
It clears a space four paces wide for thirty heartbeats.” She set it down at the end of the row and picked up another sheet of paper.
“The Kitchen General is going to kill me.”
“He’s going to hire you,” said Lyra.
Mira made a small sound that might have been a laugh, and kept working.
* * *
In the middle of the yard, where the woodpile stood, Rowan Thorne was trying to cut a log without touching the bark.
He had been at it for an hour.
The woodpile around him was a ruin of split logs and flying chips.
He stood with his plain longsword held low and his eyes closed, the way he had stood in the gully, and breathed, and cut.
And every time, the blade went into the bark exactly as a blade should, and the log split, and he opened his eyes and looked at it and swore.
Lyra watched him do it eleven times.
On the twelfth, someone else was watching too.
Lord Lucian Eisenhardt had come out of the tower without anyone seeing him, the way he always did, and was leaning against the corner of the woodpile with his arms folded and snow in his wild hair.
He watched Rowan cut the twelfth log in half.
Then the thirteenth.
“Stop,” he said.
Rowan’s eyes snapped open.
He saw who it was, and went red to the ears, and lowered his sword.
“My lord.
I didn’t…”
“You’re trying to cut the log,” said Lucian.
Rowan looked at the ruined woodpile.
“Yes, my lord.”
“In the gully, you weren’t trying to cut the club.” Lucian unfolded his arms and came over, and nudged a split log with the toe of his boot.
“Or the breastplate.
You weren’t looking at them at all.
You were looking at the heart.
The club and the steel were just in the way, and for one moment, you didn’t care that they were in the way.” He looked at Rowan.
“You didn’t cut through them.
You cut past them.
There is a difference, and it’s the whole difference.”
Rowan stared at him.
“Now you’re standing here trying to cut through bark,” said Lucian.
“Because you’re trying to do the trick.
You’re thinking about the bark.
As long as you’re thinking about the bark, the bark will stop you.”
He bent down and picked up a log, and set it on the chopping block.
Then he took a small stone from the ground, the size of a walnut, and put it on the other side of the log, on the snow, where it could not be seen from where Rowan stood.
“Don’t cut the log,” said Lucian.
“Cut the stone.”
Rowan looked at the log.
He looked at the place behind it where the stone was, which he could not see.
He closed his eyes.
He did not cut for a long time.
Lyra, watching from the stable door, saw his shoulders come down, and his breathing slow, and his hands loosen on the grip.
She saw him stop thinking about the log.
It was a very small change.
It was everything.
He cut.
The sword went into the log.
And the log split in half, and fell apart on the block, because he had not done it.
But behind it, on the snow, the stone was also in two pieces.
Rowan opened his eyes and looked at the split log and the split stone, and did not seem to know what to feel.
“Half,” said Lucian.
“You went through the log and past it at the same time, because you still don’t quite believe the second part.
That’s better than nothing.” He turned to go.
“Every night, until spring.
A log and a stone.
When you can cut the stone and leave the log standing, come and find me.”
“And then what, my lord?”
Lucian stopped.
He looked back over his shoulder, and for a moment, in the brazier light, the Sword Maniac of House Eisenhardt looked almost young.
“And then,” he said, “I’ll start teaching you.”
He walked away.
Rowan stood in the middle of the ruined woodpile holding his sword, and then, very slowly, he bent down and picked up another log.
* * *
At the far end of the yard, Sigurd Kell had found Lord Roderick.
Lyra could not hear what he said.
She saw him standing in front of the huge Elder with his fists clenched at his sides and his chin up, saying something short and hard.
She saw Roderick listen, with his great arms folded and his head on one side.
She saw him ask a question, and Sigurd answer.
Then she saw her uncle’s face split in a grin, and saw him reach into the sack at his feet, which she had not noticed before, and take out a pair of dull grey spirit-iron cuffs.
Sigurd held out his wrists.
The cuffs closed with a small, final click.
Roderick took out another pair and knelt in the snow and closed them round Sigurd’s ankles.
Then he stood up and clapped the boy on the shoulder hard enough to make him stagger, and said something that made Sigurd laugh out loud, and walked off.
Sigurd went to the foot of the Wall-top stairs, and began to climb them, and came back down, and began to climb them again.
Within a quarter of an hour, there was a queue in front of Uncle Roderick’s sack.
* * *
Lyra had not meant to spar with anyone.
She had come out to watch, and to think, and perhaps to walk once round the yard before bed.
But Cedric found her by the stable door, and held out a practice sword, hilt first.
“Two years,” he said.
“You haven’t sparred with me in two years.
You said you were busy.” He jerked his head at the trampled snow in front of them.
“You’re not busy now.”
She looked at the sword.
She looked at her brother’s face, which was not joking at all.
“I dropped my shoulder,” said Cedric quietly.
“In a real fight.
In front of a real goblin, and you had to come in under it or I’d have died.
I’ve been dropping it since I was nine, Lyra.
Rowan’s known for years.
Father’s told me a hundred times.
And I never fixed it, because I never had to, because I always won anyway.” He held the sword out a little further.
“I’m not going to win anyway anymore.
Show me.”
Lyra took the practice sword.
They sparred in the middle of the yard under the braziers, slowly at first, then faster.
She did not do anything that a Sword Master could not do.
She did not need to.
She simply came at him, again and again, from his left, and every time his left shoulder dropped, she tapped it with the flat of her blade.
The first ten times, he swore.
The next ten, he groaned.
Around the thirtieth, he stopped making any sound at all, and she saw him start to feel it coming: the little hitch in his weight, the moment before the shoulder went.
Around the fiftieth, he caught it himself, halfway down, and held it, and her blade went past him into empty air.
He stood very still in the snow, breathing hard, looking at his own shoulder as though it belonged to someone else.
“Again,” he said.
They did it again.
And again.
By the time they stopped, a small crowd had gathered to watch: the Seventh Lance and half the Fourth, and Rowan with a log under his arm.
And when Cedric finally lowered his cleaver and stood there with his chest heaving and his left shoulder exactly where it should be, somebody at the back of the crowd started to clap.
Cedric looked at his sister.
“You could have done that,” he said, very low, so that only she could hear, “any time in the last two years.”
“You never asked,” said Lyra.
Her brother looked at her for a long moment.
Then he held out his hand.
She took it.
And he pulled her in and hugged her, briefly, hard, in front of everyone, practice swords and all, and let her go.
She walked back to the stable door alone, afterward, and stood in the shadow of it, and looked up at the stars over the Kharn.
Until summer, her grandmother had said.
Perhaps a little longer, if she’s careful.
All around her in the yard, a hundred children who had been beaten, and frightened, and hurt, were getting up off the ground and trying again.
Rowan with his logs.
Isolde with her empty string.
Sigurd on the stairs with the iron on his wrists.
Emrik learning to turn his head.
None of them could hide what they were.
None of them were trying to.
They were trying to become more.
Lyra closed her eyes, and breathed, and reached inside herself for the net her grandmother had woven.
She did not open it.
Not yet.
She was not ready, and neither was it.
But for the first time, she did not simply lean against it, the way she had leaned against the old seal for three years like a tired woman against a door.
She touched it.
She felt the shape of it, strand by strand.
Where it was strong, and where it was already beginning, very faintly, to wear.
A door to learn to open.
She did not know how.
Not yet.
But standing in the yard of the Twelfth Tower, under the stars, with her friends all around her in the dark refusing to be less than they could be, Lyra Eisenhardt decided that she was going to find out.
IV.
The Reckoning
On the morning of the fourth day, the Archduke called them into the great hall.
The pallets had been cleared away.
The long tables had been pushed back against the walls.
In their place, Captain Orsa’s soldiers had set out ten rows of benches facing the great hearth, one row for each lance, and the candidates filed in and sat down on them in silence, lance by lance.
The wounded came too.
Ylva Brenn came in on crutches, grey-faced, and would not let anyone carry her.
Hakon Aarn came in with his arm strapped across his chest.
Emrik Stahl came in last, with a black patch over his eye, and sat down at the end of the Fourth Lance’s bench, and his lance mates moved up without a word to make room on his left.
In front of the hearth stood the House of Eisenhardt.
Lucian on the left, Kenneth on the right.
Roderick behind them, taller than all of them, with his arms folded.
And in the middle, the Archduke, with a single sheet of paper in his hand.
He did not sit.
He did not say good morning.
“On the ridge above the Rimefang,” he said, “I told you I would watch every step you took and every blow you struck.
I did.
So did my brothers.” He held up the paper.
“This is what we saw.”
Nobody breathed.
“I’m going to tell every lance what it did wrong.
Some of you, I’m going to tell by name.
I’m not going to soften it, and I’m not going to tell you what you did right, because you already know what you did right.
You’re alive.
That’s what you did right.” His grey eyes went along the rows.
“What you did wrong is the thing that will kill you next time.
So listen.”
He began with the First.
* * *
It took nearly two hours, and it was the hardest two hours of Lyra’s life, including the Thousand Steps.
The First Lance had gone in at the mouth of the gorge in a perfect wedge, the Archduke said, and it had held perfectly for as long as they could see.
The moment the fog came down, it had broken into ten people fighting ten separate fights, because the leader had stopped calling and started swinging.
“When you can’t see,” he said, “your voice is the lance.
Stop using it, and you have no lance.” The First Lance’s leader, a tall, grave girl from one of the tower families, went scarlet to the ears, and nodded, and did not look away.
The Second had held its shield-line like a wall.
It had also never once looked up, and forty goblin troops had climbed the rock on its right flank and come down on its shoulders from above.
“The Wall doesn’t only face forward,” said Alaric.
“Neither do you.”
The Third.
He looked at Ylva Brenn, on her crutches at the end of the Third Lance’s bench.
“Ylva,” he said, “why did you leave the line?”
The girl’s chin came up.
For a moment, Lyra thought she would not answer.
Then she said, in a thin, clear voice, “There was a goblin with a torch, Your Grace.
Going for the tents at the back of the warren.
I thought there might be prisoners in them.
From the farms.”
The hall was very quiet.
“There might have been,” said the Archduke.
“There weren’t.
We searched every one.” He let that sit.
“You left a gap in your line to chase something you thought might be there, and an archer put an arrow through it, and it went through you.
If it had gone through the girl beside you instead, you’d be sitting here knowing that.” He paused.
“Next time you see something your lance can’t see, you tell them.
You don’t go alone.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” whispered Ylva.
The Fourth.
The Archduke looked down the row at the boy with the black patch over his eye, and for the first time that morning, his voice changed.
Only slightly.
“Emrik Stahl,” he said.
“When the warriors came out of the fog, one of them went for your lance leader’s back.
You saw it.
Nobody else did.
You broke from the line and charged it, alone, with an axe, and you killed it.”
Emrik sat very straight.
“That was brave,” said the Archduke.
“And it was wrong.
It was the bravest wrong thing anyone did in that gorge.
You went alone into a place where two more warriors were waiting, and nobody followed you, and you lost your eye for it.” He turned his head and looked, very deliberately, at the other nine on the Fourth Lance’s bench.
“And nobody followed him.
Nine of you.
Your lancemate charged into three warriors, and you held your line and watched him go.
That’s the other half of it.”
The Fourth Lance’s leader, a stocky Kharn boy, opened his mouth.
Then he shut it again, and his eyes were suddenly wet.
Emrik put up his hand.
The Archduke looked at him.
“Your Grace,” said Emrik.
His voice was steady.
“I’d do it again.
I’d see it again, and I’d go again.
I can’t help it.” He swallowed.
“So what should I do?”
For a long moment, Alaric Eisenhardt did not answer.
Lyra saw something pass across his face, very quickly, and then go.
“Shout,” he said.
“Shout their name, and then go.
So that when you get there, you’re not alone.” He looked at the Fourth.
“And the rest of you, when you hear him shout, you go too.”
The Fifth and Sixth had done well, and he told them so in a single sentence each, and then spent a quarter of an hour telling them everything they could have done better.
The Eighth, Ninth and Tenth had waited on the lip for the horn, and they had been right to wait.
But the Ninth’s leader had seen the fog fall a full thirty heartbeats before the horn sounded, and had not asked to go.
“When you’re the reserve,” said the Archduke, “your job isn’t waiting.
It’s watching.
And the moment you see the thing that changes the battle, you tell me.”
And then he came to the Seventh.
* * *
“Rowan Thorne.”
Rowan stood up.
“Your plan was good,” said the Archduke.
“I said so at the time, and I meant it.
You found the one piece of high ground in the gorge that nobody was watching, and you used it.
Without that ledge, the archers on the west wall would have kept shooting into the mouth of the gorge until the First and Second were cut to pieces.” He paused.
“And you put ten people on a goat track with no way back.
When the troops came up the cliff, you had nowhere to go.
No retreat, no reserve, and nobody watching below.
You didn’t win on that ledge because of your plan, Rowan.
You won because Isolde Frostmere did something none of us expected.
A plan that only works if a miracle happens isn’t a plan.
It’s a gamble.
With other people’s lives.”
Rowan’s face had gone quite white.
But he did not look away.
“I know, Your Grace,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing for three days.”
“Good.
Keep thinking it.
Every time you draw a plan, draw the way out first.”
Rowan sat down.
Beside him, Sigurd Kell nudged him with an elbow, very slightly, without looking at him.
“Isolde Frostmere.”
Isolde stood.
Her face was composed and pale and absolutely still, the way it had always been, before the Rimefang.
“You froze,” said the Archduke.
“On the ledge, when the first volley came.
For forty heartbeats, the best archer in the North lay flat on her face and did not draw her bow while her lancemates were shot at.
I counted.”
Isolde did not flinch.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Then you did something I have seen perhaps twice in my life.
And then you collapsed.
You put everything you had into one arrow, and when it was gone you couldn’t stand.” He looked at her steadily.
“The silver rain can’t be your plan, Isolde.
It can’t be anybody’s plan.
If you’d frozen for eighty heartbeats instead of forty, or if the goblins had had a second witch, the Seventh Lance would be dead.
You need to learn to shoot when you’re frightened.
And you need to learn to make a small silver arrow, and then another, and then another, instead of one great one that leaves you on the ground.” A pause.
“Can you do that?”
“I don’t know, Your Grace,” said Isolde.
Then, after a moment: “I’ll find out.”
“Hilde and Hakon Aarn.”
The twins stood together.
“You held both ends of that ledge,” said Alaric, “and I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’d like to again.
But you ended up at the two ends by accident.
You didn’t choose it.
Nobody chose it.
Which is why Hakon was standing at the most exposed point on the rope with nothing between him and forty archers.” He looked at Hakon’s strapped arm.
“What you two can do is a weapon.
A weapon you don’t aim is just luck.”
“Cedric.”
Cedric stood up.
“You dropped your left shoulder,” said his father.
“Twice.
In front of a goblin warrior.
And your sister had to come in underneath it or you’d be dead.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve told you about that shoulder since you were nine years old.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Archduke looked at his son for a long moment.
“I also watched her spend three hours last night in the yard fixing it,” he said.
“So I’ll say nothing more about it, except this: it took a goblin to make you listen.
Don’t let it take a worse teacher next time.”
Cedric sat down, red to the ears.
Several people in the hall were trying not to smile.
“Sigurd Kell.
You spent nine weeks fighting the wrong enemy.
You spent one morning fighting the right one.
I’d like to see more of the second.” Sigurd’s jaw tightened, and he nodded once.
“Senna Vaar.
You went at the champion alone, from the front, with a spear, because nobody else was closer.
You were right that nobody else was closer.
You were wrong to go from the front.
Your father will tell you the same about bears, if you ask him.” Senna went red, and nodded.
“Mira Halvard.”
Mira stood up, very straight, with her stained orange fingers clasped in front of her.
“You saw the fog come down,” said the Archduke, “and you knew what it was, and you knew how to break it.
You had the answer in your satchel.
You’d carried it for eight years.” He paused.
“And you waited until someone asked you.
By then, the Fourth had been fighting blind for ten minutes.”
Mira’s lips went white.
She opened her mouth, and then shut it again.
“You’re not the kind of person who likes to be wrong in front of people,” said Alaric, not unkindly.
“So you wait until you’re sure.
On the ice, being sure takes too long.
When you know, act.
Even if you might be wrong.
Especially then.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” said Mira.
Her voice was very small.
“Finn Brannoc.”
Finn stood.
The Archduke looked at him for a long moment.
“Good,” he said.
And that was all.
Finn sat down again, looking as though he had been struck by lightning.
“Lyra.”
She stood.
Every eye in the hall was on her, and she could feel them, the way she had felt them on the dais at the Rite.
Her father looked at her for a long moment, without any expression at all.
“You caught a blow,” he said, “that you should never have caught.
A mammoth-bone club, swung by a goblin twice your weight, on a sword held flat.
A Sword Master’s arms would have broken.
Yours didn’t, which is luck.” He paused.
“You didn’t need to catch it.
You were fast enough to move.
You chose to stand.
Your feet were in the wrong place, and you let them be.”
The words went into Lyra like a cold needle.
She understood exactly what he was saying, and exactly what he was not.
You were too convincing.
And not convincing enough.
A Sword Master would have dodged.
“Next time,” said her father, “move your feet.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” said Lyra.
She sat down.
Beside her, on the bench, she felt Senna’s shoulder press very lightly against hers, and stay.
* * *
When the Archduke had finished, he stepped aside, and Lord Lucian stepped forward.
The Sword Maniac did not have a paper.
He did not seem to need one.
He stood in front of the hearth with his hands behind his back and his wild hair falling in his eyes, and looked at them.
“You fought,” he said, “like a hundred people.”
They waited.
He did not go on for a moment, and a few people looked at each other, confused.
“That’s the problem,” said Lucian.
“A hundred people.
The swords in the First fought their goblins, and the spears fought theirs, and nobody looked at anybody else.
I watched a boy in the Sixth kill a warrior and then stand there admiring it while another warrior walked up behind his lancemate.” His eyes went along the rows.
“You’re not ten swords in a lance.
You’re one weapon with ten edges.
When one edge strikes, the other nine should already be moving to where the next blow is going to land.”
“How, my lord?” That was the leader of the First, the tall, grave girl.
“We can’t see each other in the fog.
We can’t hear each other.”
“You can feel each other,” said Lucian.
“The Aarn twins were at opposite ends of a cliff, and they fired as one archer.
They’re twins, and they’ve had sixteen years of practice.
You have ten weeks.” He shrugged, very slightly.
“So practice.
Spar in threes, not in pairs.
Fight blindfolded, with your lancemates calling.
Learn the sound of each other’s feet.
By spring, I want every one of you to know where the other nine are without turning your head.”
He paused, and something in his face changed.
“I saw one lance do it,” he said.
“For about four minutes.
In a gully at the north end of the gorge.
A spear pinned a warrior’s arm, and a second spear took its knee, and a cleaver broke its club, and a longsword went for its heart, and not one of them looked at the others.” He was not looking at the Seventh.
He did not need to.
“Four minutes.
I want you all to do it for four hours.”
Then Lord Kenneth stepped forward, with his ledger under his arm.
“I have one thing to say,” said the Alchemy Maniac, “and I’m going to say it very clearly, because I’m very annoyed.”
He opened his ledger.
“Eleven of you are alchemists,” he said.
“Eleven.
I’ve taught you for nine weeks.
You can refine clean mid-grade pills, all of you, and two of you can refine high-grade.
You know more about wounds and poisons and fevers and frostbite than any field-surgeon on the Wall.
And in the Rimefang, three of your lances didn’t have a single one of you in them, and one lance had two.” He looked up.
“When Ylva Brenn took a black-ice arrow in the thigh, there was nobody in the Third who knew that black ice poisons the blood as it melts, and she lay in the snow for twenty minutes with it melting.
When the fog came down on the Fourth, there was nobody in the Fourth who could have done what Mira Halvard did.
And when Mira did it, it was a hundred and fifty yards away, in a different lance, for the Seventh alone.”
He closed the ledger.
“The alchemists are not an afterthought.
You are not the ones who stand at the back and wait for people to bleed.
You are the ones who break hexes and counter poisons and keep people alive long enough for the swords to matter.
Every lance needs one.
Every one.
From today.”
* * *
The reassignments did not take long.
The Archduke read them out from the back of his sheet of paper, lance by lance.
Most of them were small: an archer moved from the First to the Sixth, a spear from the Ninth to the Third.
The alchemists were spread out, one to each lance, as Kenneth had said.
Three of the wounded would not be going on.
Ylva Brenn, Emrik Stahl and Hakon Aarn would stay at the Twelfth Tower under Captain Orsa’s care until the lances came back from the Hollowmere.
Ylva nodded.
Emrik said nothing, but his jaw was tight.
Hakon looked at his sister.
Hilde’s face had gone completely white.
“And the Seventh,” said the Archduke.
The Seventh Lance went very still.
“The Seventh had two alchemists.
It will have one.
Mira Halvard moves to the Fourth, to take Emrik Stahl’s place.” He did not look up from the paper.
“Arne Stenvik moves from the Fourth to the Seventh, in exchange.
And Isolde Frostmere remains in the Seventh, but for the next hunt she will not be on its rope.” Now he did look up.
“She will command the high line.
Every archer from every lance, on the high ground above the hunt, under one captain.
With Hilde Aarn as her second.”
Nobody spoke.
Then Mira stood up.
Lyra saw her do it, and saw what it cost her: the stained fingers clenching, the tight line of her mouth.
She looked along the bench at Isolde, and Isolde looked back.
“Your Grace,” said Mira.
“The Fourth has no alchemist?”
“The Fourth has no alchemist.”
“And they lost Emrik because nobody could see what was coming for him in the fog.”
“They did.”
Mira was silent for a moment.
Then she turned to the Fourth Lance’s bench, and to the stocky Kharn boy who led it, and to Emrik Stahl at the end of it with his black patch.
“I’ll need a new satchel,” she said.
“Mine’s full of spices.
And somebody will have to carry my cauldron.”
The Fourth Lance’s leader stared at her.
Then he stood up and bowed, very formally, as though she were a lady at a banquet, and several people laughed, and the tension broke.
Mira sat down.
Her hands, Lyra saw, were shaking.
Isolde reached over without a word and took the little tin of salve out of her own coat, the one that had gone back and forth between them across the Frozen Land, and pressed it into Mira’s hand, and closed Mira’s fingers round it.
“You’ll need it more than I will,” said Isolde quietly.
“The Fourth don’t know about ears.”
Mira looked down at the tin for a long moment.
Then she put it in her pocket, next to her heart, and did not say anything at all.
At the end of the Seventh’s bench, Hilde Aarn had taken her brother’s good hand, and was holding it so hard her knuckles had gone white.
“I’ll be at the other end,” Hakon murmured to her.
“Like on the ledge.
Just further away.” He squeezed her fingers.
“I’ll feel it.
The whole time.”
Hilde nodded, and nodded, and did not cry, and Lyra thought it was the bravest thing she had seen anyone do in that hall all morning.
V.
The Sleepers of the Kharn
“Right,” said Lord Roderick Eisenhardt, and clapped his hands together with a sound like a door slamming.
“Bears.”
The whole hall jumped.
The Cultivation Maniac had been standing behind his brothers for two hours with his arms folded, silent, which for Roderick was very nearly a medical condition.
Now he stepped forward into the space in front of the hearth, rolling his great shoulders, and the grin that spread across his face was the first real grin anyone in the Twelfth Tower had seen in four days.
“Frost-bears,” he said.
“I love frost-bears.
Best beast in the North.
Anybody here ever seen one?
Alive, I mean.
Not on the floor of your bedroom.”
A few hands went up, hesitantly.
Senna’s was one of them.
“Vaar!” Roderick beamed at her.
“The Kharn girl.
What did you see?”
“I killed one, my lord,” said Senna.
Then, as the whole hall turned to look at her: “A small one.”
“How small?”
Senna thought about it.
“It came up to about here,” she said, and held her hand at the height of her own shoulder.
“On four legs.”
There was a pause.
“That,” said Roderick with enormous satisfaction, “is a two-year-old, and it would have weighed as much as five grown men, and you killed it with your grandfather’s spear.
Somebody tell her father she’s mad.
Right.” He turned back to the hall.
“I’m going to tell you everything about the frost-bear, and you are going to remember all of it, because in two days you’re going to meet one.
Several, actually.
Probably eight.”
The hall went quiet again.
“Start with the size.” Roderick lifted one hand above his head, as high as it would go, then went up on his toes.
“A grown male, standing up on his hind legs, is about here.
Twice the height of a tall man.
On four legs, he’s about the height of your chest, and he’s as long as a cart.
He weighs what ten of you weigh.
Maybe twelve.
And none of it is fat, except the part that is, and that part is a hand thick all over, under the skin, and it will stop a sword-cut like a sack of wet sand.”
Somebody in the Sixth Lance made a small, unhappy noise.
“Now the coat.” Roderick pointed to the frost-bear rug in front of the hearth, the one every candidate in the hall had walked across that morning without thinking about it.
“That’s three layers.
On the outside, long guard hairs, white, and every single one of them is hollow, like a straw.
Underneath, a thick underfur, like the down in your quilts back at Frost-Crest.
Underneath that, black skin, which drinks in the sun.
The cold doesn’t get in.
It slides off the guard hairs and it can’t get through the down and it can’t get through the fat, and the bear doesn’t care if it’s midwinter on the top of the Kharn.” He turned, and looked straight at the Seventh Lance’s bench.
“So which of you is going to tell me why that matters?”
There was a silence.
Then Cedric said, slowly, “Frost doesn’t work on them.”
“Frost doesn’t work on them!” Roderick pointed at his nephew as though he had won a prize.
“Frost-qi, frost-arrows, the famous Eisenhardt frost that freezes your enemy’s blood in his veins.
You can pour it all over a frost-bear and he’ll thank you.
He’ll think it’s a nice cool bath.” His grin faded a little.
“A lot of you are frost-born.
The whole North is.
You’ve been taught since you could walk that your frost is your best weapon.
Against the frost-bear, it is your worst.
Leave it in your pocket.
Use steel.
Use mithril.
Use your legs.”
Lyra felt her brother go very still beside her.
She knew why.
Half of what the Dragon-Spine Cleaver did, it did with frost.
“Now.
What does he do to you?” Roderick held up his great right hand, fingers spread, curved like claws.
“This.
The paw.
As wide as a shield, with five claws as long as your fingers, on the end of a leg that can lift a boulder.
He’ll swing it once, from the side, like this.” He swung his arm, slowly, in a flat arc.
“One blow breaks a shield.
Two break the arm behind it.
The Frostweave will turn a claw.
It won’t turn the weight.” He dropped the hand.
“Then there’s the bite.
Then there’s the thing he does when he stands up and takes you in both arms and squeezes, which I won’t describe, because some of you have just eaten.”
Hilde Aarn put her hand over her mouth.
“How fast?” That was the leader of the Second, sharp and practical.
“Over a hundred paces?” Roderick shrugged.
“Faster than a horse.
Faster than any of you, even without your cuffs.
Don’t ever try to outrun one.” He held up a finger.
“But only over a hundred paces.
He’s built to charge, not to chase.
And he’s long.
It takes him a long time to turn.
From the front, he’s a mountain falling on you.
From the side…” He turned himself, ponderously, in a slow circle, like a barge on a river, and several people laughed.
“From the side, he’s a very big animal having a very bad time.”
“Where do we hit him, my lord?” That was Sigurd.
“Good question.
Not the head.” Roderick knocked on his own forehead with his knuckles.
“His skull’s as thick as a shield and it slopes, so your blade will skid off it.
Not the belly, because of the fat.
Here.” He turned sideways and laid his hand flat against his own ribs, just behind his upper arm.
“Behind the foreleg, low, when he’s turned side-on.
That’s his heart and his lungs, and there’s no bone in the way if you go in at the right angle.
A spear there, or a longsword, driven hard, and he’s done.
Second-best is the back of the hind leg, the big tendon above the heel.
Cut that, and he can’t charge anymore.” He glanced at Senna, with a small approving nod.
“From the side, Vaar.
Not the front.”
Senna went red.
“What about his senses, my lord?” asked Isolde, from the end of the bench.
Her voice was cool and careful, the way it always was, but she was leaning forward.
“Ah!
Archer’s question.” Roderick tapped his nose.
“He smells everything.
A frost-bear can smell a cooking fire ten miles off.
He can smell a seal under three feet of ice.
He can smell you, and what you had for breakfast, and whether you’re frightened.” He tapped his ears.
“Hears well.
Not as well as he smells.” Then he tapped his eyes.
“Sees badly.
Very badly, for a hunter.
Movement, yes.
Shapes, not much.
Colors, not at all.
So your high line, Frostmere, is invisible to him, as long as the wind is right.
He’ll never know where the arrows are coming from.”
“And the arrows won’t go through his coat,” said Isolde.
“Not ordinary ones.
So you won’t try to kill him with them.” Roderick pointed at her.
“You’ll steer him.
An arrow in the snow in front of his nose, and he turns.
An arrow on his shoulder, and he turns the other way.
An arrow in the eye, if you can, and he’ll stop to paw at his face while the lances go in.
You’re not the hammer, Frostmere.
You’re the shepherd.”
Isolde considered that for a long moment.
Then she nodded, slowly, as though the idea pleased her.
“Now the most important thing.” Roderick stopped pacing.
“How he behaves.”
He held up his hand again, and began to count on his fingers.
“One.
When he stands up on his hind legs, he isn’t attacking.
He’s looking.
Trying to see you with those bad eyes, and trying to look big so you’ll go away.
If a bear stands up in front of you, stand still.
Make yourself tall.
Don’t run.” A second finger.
“Two.
When he drops back down onto four legs and his ears go flat and he starts to sway his head from side to side, that’s when he’s coming.
You’ll have about three heartbeats.” A third.
“Three.
Never run.
Running tells him you’re food.
Everything that runs from a frost-bear is food.” A fourth.
“Four.
Never, ever get between a mother and her cubs.
A male will kill you because he’s hungry.
A mother will kill you because you’re there, and she won’t stop until you’re very, very flat.”
He held up his thumb.
“And five.
Never go into the den.
Never.
Not for a core, not for a cub, not because your friend’s in there.
A den is a cave with a bear in it and one way out, and the bear is standing in it.”
The hall was absolutely silent.
“Now,” said Roderick.
“Here’s the part that’s wrong.”
He glanced at the Archduke.
Alaric nodded, very slightly, and Roderick went on, and his voice had lost all its cheerfulness.
“Frost-bears sleep through the deep winter.
Every one of them.
They eat all autumn until they’re fat as barrels, and then when the first great blizzard comes, they go into their dens in the glacier caves, and they sleep until the thaw.
They don’t wake up.
Not for hunger, not for cold, not for anything.
You could walk into a den in midwinter and sit on a sleeping frost-bear and he wouldn’t notice.
I’ve done it.” A faint flicker of the old grin.
“Don’t.”
“But they’re awake,” said the Archduke.
“But they’re awake.” Roderick nodded.
“A whole sleuth of them.
Eight, the Twelfth’s patrols think, in the old glacier caves at the foot of the Kharn, four miles east of the Hollowmere.
The Sleepers, the Wall calls those caves, because in forty years of patrols nobody has ever seen a bear come out of them before the thaw.” He paused.
“They came out a month ago.
They’ve been raiding the Twelfth’s herds in the valley below the Wall ever since.
Twenty head of cattle.
Two shepherd’s dogs.
Last week, a shepherd.”
A murmur went round the hall.
“He lived,” said Captain Orsa shortly, from the side of the hearth.
“He won’t walk again.”
“A frost-bear that wakes in midwinter,” said Roderick, “has eaten nothing for two months and burned half its fat just waking up.
It’s starving.
It’s in a temper.
And it’s lost the only thing that makes a frost-bear safe to be near, which is that it would rather go around you than through you.
A starving bear goes through.” He looked round the hall.
“It won’t be afraid of your fire.
It won’t be afraid of your shouting.
It won’t be afraid of you.
It’ll just be hungry.”
“Why did they wake, my lord?”
The question came from the Seventh’s bench.
Every head turned.
Lyra had not meant to ask it aloud.
It had simply come out.
Roderick looked at her.
Then, slowly, he turned and looked at his younger brother.
Lord Kenneth, who had been standing silent by the hearth with his ledger under his arm, took a long breath before he answered.
“We don’t know,” said the Alchemy Maniac.
“Not for certain.
But I have a guess.” He looked out across the hall.
“The Sleepers are four miles from the Hollowmere.
The Rime Ravagers hunt by the mana in their prey’s blood, and they eat cores.
A sleeping frost-bear is a very large, very still, very full core, lying in a cave, with no way to defend itself.”
The hall went cold.
“I think the Ravagers went into the Sleepers,” said Kenneth quietly.
“I think they went in to feed, and the bears woke up to find their dens full of wolves with six eyes.
And the ones that got out ran.
South.
Toward the only other food there is.” He paused.
“Toward us.”
Nobody said anything for a long time.
“Which is why,” said the Archduke, breaking the silence, “the frost-bears are the second hunt, and the Hollowmere is the third.
We clear the Sleepers.
We see what’s in those caves.
And then we go on to the Hollowmere knowing exactly what we’re walking into.”
He unfolded the sheet of paper in his hand again, and turned it over.
“The high line,” he said.
“Isolde Frostmere, captain; Hilde Aarn, second.
Every archer from every lance, on the ridges above the ground, with the wind in your faces.
You steer the bears.
You don’t try to kill them, and you don’t come down.”
Isolde nodded once.
Hilde, beside her, had gone pale, but her chin was up.
“The Ninth Lance,” said Alaric, “will cook.”
The Ninth Lance stared at him.
“A frost-bear can smell a cooking fire ten miles away,” said the Archduke, perfectly seriously.
“And I’m told your stew can be smelled from the Wall-top.
You’ll build your fire on the open snow, a quarter-mile from the caves, with the wind blowing toward them.
And you’ll make that stew.
With all the chili.” A faint murmur of laughter went round the hall.
The Ninth Lance’s anxious leader looked as though he might faint.
“The Eighth will stand with them and guard the fire.
When the bears come for it, the Eighth falls back, slowly, in a line, facing them.
Not running.”
“The Second Lance is the anvil.
Captain Orsa is lending you the Twelfth’s bear-spears: long, heavy, with a crossbar below the blade.
You’ll set them in a line, butts in the snow, points out, in front of the fire.
A bear that charges the Eighth runs onto the Second.”
“The Seventh is the hammer.
You’ll come in from the side.
From the side, Rowan, not the front.
Behind the foreleg, low.
Arne Stenvik takes the hind leg.
Cedric, your cleaver goes for the spine behind the shoulders, and you will not use a single thread of frost.”
Cedric nodded, grim.
“The First and Fourth on the flanks, with their alchemists ready, in case a bear breaks sideways.
The Fifth, Sixth and Tenth at the mouths of the caves, but not in them.
Your job is to see what comes out, and whether there are cubs.” He looked round the hall.
“If there are cubs, and a mother with them, we let them go.
We’re not here to empty the Kharn of bears.
We’re here for the starving ones that are killing the herds.
A mother with cubs goes free, and anyone who disagrees with that can take it up with Lord Roderick.”
“They can take it up with me,” said Roderick, cracking his knuckles, “on the Thousand Steps.
In cuffs.”
Nobody disagreed.
“One more thing,” said Roderick.
He hesitated, which Lyra had never seen him do before.
“The Twelfth’s patrols have seen the bears, but only one of them clearly.
The biggest.
An old male, grey round the muzzle, with a torn left ear, walking with a limp in his right hind leg.” He paused.
“The Wall calls him Greyback.
He’s been in those caves for thirty years.”
“You know him, my lord?” asked Senna.
“We’ve met.” Roderick rubbed the back of his neck, a little sheepishly.
“About thirty years ago.
When he was young and I was stupid.
I was trying to test my grip strength.” He held up his right hand, and for the first time Lyra noticed three thin white scars across the back of it, very old, in a row.
“I got his ear.
He got my hand.
We called it even.”
The whole hall stared at him.
“He’s rank four now,” said Roderick, quite seriously.
“Maybe higher.
He’s the oldest, cleverest, meanest bear on the Kharn, and if he’s awake and starving, he’s the one that took the shepherd.
He won’t charge the Second’s spears like a fool.
He’ll circle.
He’ll wait.
He’ll come for the fire from the side you’re not watching.” He looked at the Seventh Lance.
“If Greyback comes out of those caves, he’s yours.
Don’t let him get behind you.”
He paused.
“And if you get close enough,” said Lord Roderick Eisenhardt, and his old grin came back, slowly, “give him my regards.”
* * *
They filed out of the great hall into a grey, still afternoon, and for a while nobody in the Seventh Lance said anything.
Arne Stenvik fell in beside them at the door.
He was a big, quiet, sandy-haired boy from the Fourth, with a wide, square face and a long-hafted axe of frost-mithril over his shoulder, and he looked at the eight of them with the careful expression of someone joining a family at dinner in the middle of a fight.
“I’m the hind leg,” he said.
“Apparently.”
“You’re the hind leg,” agreed Rowan.
He held out his hand.
“Welcome to the Seventh.
We’re the trouble.”
Arne looked at the hand, and then at the others: Cedric and Sigurd shoulder to shoulder; Finn with his spear; Senna holding her side; Hilde, white-faced, still looking back through the door at her brother; Isolde with her bow case; Lyra.
“I know,” said Arne, and shook it.
“Everybody knows.”
Cedric laughed.
Sigurd grinned.
Even Senna’s mouth twitched.
Lyra walked a little behind them, across the yard, with her hand resting on the notched frost-lily blade at her hip.
Behind her ribs, the net was steady.
In the pocket over her heart, the witch’s golden-threaded core was a small, hard weight.
Move your feet, her father had said.
The Sleepers were two days away.
And beyond them, four miles on, the Hollowmere, where something with six eyes and three voices had gone into a cave full of sleeping bears to feed.
She thought about what her father had really meant.
A Sword Master would have dodged.
In two days she would face a starving bear that frost could not touch, the one weapon her family had always had.
She would have to fight it with nothing but steel and footwork and what a Sword Master could believably do.
It occurred to her, walking across the yard of the Twelfth Tower in the grey afternoon light, that she was looking forward to it.
End of Chapter 10