I.
The Lion Cub
The elders came down off the rocks one at a time, and every one of them came down differently.
Lord Kenneth came first, because he was nearest and because he had been running since before the pressure lifted.
He came over the western lip of the clearing with all three satchels banging against his hips and his green soul-flame already lit in one cupped hand, the way it always was when he expected to find somebody bleeding.
He found a great many people standing in a knot in the red snow, crying, and nobody bleeding at all, and he stopped so suddenly at the edge of the clearing that one of his satchels kept going without him and landed in a drift.
He did not pick it up.
He stood there with his soul-flame burning in his palm and looked at the knot of children, and at the girl in the middle of it, and his face did something complicated.
“Nobody’s hurt,” he said, to no one.
“Nobody’s hurt.” He put out the flame.
Then he sat down on a rock, rather suddenly, and took off his spectacles, and polished them on his sleeve for a long time.
Lord Lucian came down the crag above the caves without seeming to use his hands.
One moment he was a lean grey shape against the ice wall, three hundred feet up; the next he was walking across the clearing between the two neat rows of dead Ravagers with snow in his wild hair, looking down at the cuts as he passed them.
He stopped beside one of them and crouched.
He put out one finger and touched the edge of the wound, where the crystal plate had parted like water, and held it there.
Then he looked up at his niece, across thirty paces of red snow, and said nothing whatsoever.
But his sword hand, the one that had drawn on its own an hour ago, was very slightly shaking.
The Archduke came last.
He did not hurry.
He came down off the high shoulder of rock at the long, steady, loping stride the whole North knew, the stride that had run beside a hundred children through the blizzard to the Twelfth Tower, and the knot of children in the middle of the clearing heard his boots in the snow and came apart from each other one by one, wiping their faces, standing up straighter, the way young soldiers do when the Archduke of the North is walking toward them.
All except Cedric, who did not let go of his sister, and Lyra, who could not have stepped back if she had wanted to.
Alaric Eisenhardt stopped in front of his children.
He looked at his son first: red-eyed, unashamed, with one arm still locked round Lyra’s shoulders and his jaw set as though he expected to be told to let go and had already decided not to.
The Archduke looked at him for a moment, and nodded once, very slightly, the way he nodded at a wall that had held.
Then he looked at his daughter.
The whole clearing was quiet.
A hundred young soldiers of the North, who had just watched the girl in front of him do a thing none of them had words for, held their breath to hear what the Iron Regent would say to her.
He did not say anything.
He lifted one gloved hand, the hand that had carried the war-blade of the house for forty years, and set it on top of Lyra’s head.
On her ink-black hair, which had come half out of its braid and had blood drying in it.
And he patted it.
Twice.
Gently, a little clumsily, the way he had when she was four years old and had fallen off the terrace wall and not cried.
That was all.
Lyra stood very still under her father’s hand.
She did not look up.
She could not have looked up just then for all the cores in the Frozen Land.
Her throat had closed.
“Papa,” she said, very quietly.
The hand stayed where it was a moment longer.
Then the Archduke took it away, and turned, and walked three paces off across the snow, and stood with his back to all of them, looking at the ruin of the Beast King with great attention, as though it were the most interesting thing he had ever seen.
Nobody said anything.
Rowan Thorne, standing just behind Lyra, put a hand over his own mouth.
And that might have been the end of it.
That might have been the moment, quiet and grave and perfect, that the young soldiers of the Hollowmere subjugation told their grandchildren about for the rest of their lives.
It was not.
Because Lord Roderick had arrived.
* * *
They heard him before they saw him.
Everybody did.
The glass-birches at the edge of the silver forest, which had been silent since the Beast King came through them, began to ring all at once, a great jangling peal like a cathedral falling downstairs, and out of the middle of them, at a dead run, in his sleeveless tunic, came the Cultivation Maniac of House Eisenhardt.
He was laughing.
He had been laughing, by the sound of it, for some time.
“THAT’S MY NIECE!”
He did not slow down.
He came across the clearing like an avalanche that had learned to run, scattering children to either side, and the Archduke, without turning his head, took one step to the left to let him past.
“Uncle,” said Lyra, “wait, Uncle, don’t…”
Roderick Eisenhardt picked her up.
He did not pick her up the way her brother had, in a hug.
He picked her up the way a man picks up a lion cub he is very proud of, which is to say under the arms, with both enormous hands, straight up into the air, until her boots were dangling at the height of his chest and her head was higher than anybody’s in the clearing.
The frost-lily blade, still in her hand, pointed helplessly at the sky.
“LOOK AT HER!” roared Lord Roderick, to the Hollowmere, to the glacier, to the whole of the Frozen Land.
“LOOK!
AT!
HER!
This is my niece!
My niece!
A hundred Ravagers and a Beast King and a Goblin King, in three steps, did you SEE it?”
“Uncle…”
“Three steps!
I counted!
One, two, three!” He swung her round to face the Second Lance, who scattered.
“Did you see her?
You saw her!
Everybody saw her!” He swung her round to face the Ninth Lance, who had not been quick enough to scatter and were simply standing there with their mouths open.
“Sixteen years old!
Sixteen!
When I was sixteen I couldn’t kill a frost-boar without falling in it!”
“Uncle, please put me…”
“NO MORE HOLDING BACK!” bellowed Lord Roderick, and set off across the clearing at a jog, holding her aloft.
“Did you hear that, Hollowmere?
NO!
MORE!
HOLDING!
BACK!
HA!
HA HA HA HA!”
He jogged her past the First Lance.
He jogged her past the Fourth, who bowed, because they did not know what else to do.
He jogged her past the dead Goblin King, and held her up over it, and turned slowly round on the spot so that she could be seen from every side, the way a farmer at a fair shows the judges his best ram.
Lyra Eisenhardt, the Star-Frost Princess of the North, who had just killed a hundred and two monsters and fifty goblins without a single drop of blood on her that was her own, hung in the air above the clearing with her braid swinging and her legs kicking and her face going slowly from white to pink to a delicate shade of green.
“Uncle,” she said faintly.
“I’m…
I’m going to…
help…”
“HA HA HA HA HA!”
“Help…
me…”
It was the first time any of them had ever heard Lyra Eisenhardt ask for help.
Afterward, more than one of them would say that this was the most frightening moment of the entire subjugation.
Nobody moved.
The Seventh Lance stood in a row with their faces doing very difficult things.
Cedric had both hands over his mouth and his shoulders were shaking.
Rowan had turned round completely and was facing the forest.
Finn was staring at the sky with great concentration.
Sigurd Kell had gone purple.
Senna, with tears still wet on her face, made a small, strangled noise and sat down in the snow.
On the rock spur above, Hilde Aarn had her slate out and was writing very fast.
“Is she going to be sick?” whispered a boy from the Tenth.
“Should we…
are we allowed to help her?”
“Nobody,” said Isolde Frostmere, with perfect composure and her bow still in her hand, “is going near that.”
“ONE MORE TIME ROUND!” announced Lord Roderick.
“No,” moaned Lyra.
“Please.
Please, no…”
And then there was a blur of grey, and Lord Roderick’s hands were suddenly empty.
He stopped.
He looked at his hands.
He looked up, puzzled, as though he expected his niece to come down again out of the sky.
Lord Lucian stood three paces away with Lyra tucked under one arm like a sack of barley, her feet just off the ground, her sword hand dangling.
He had taken her out of his brother’s grip so fast that not one person in the clearing had seen him do it, and he had done it, Rowan would later swear, without even drawing a breath.
He set her down on her feet.
Carefully.
He kept one hand on her shoulder until she stopped swaying.
Then he turned round, reached up, and smacked his enormous younger brother across the back of the head with the flat of his hand.
Thwack.
It echoed.
Somewhere at the edge of the silver forest, a glass-birch chimed.
“Ow,” said Lord Roderick, aggrieved, rubbing his head.
“What was that for?”
Lucian looked at him.
Lord Lucian, the Sword Maniac of House Eisenhardt, who spent words the way a miser spends silver, who had killed the last Goblin King with three companies of the Legion and had laughed out loud exactly once in living memory, looked at his brother for a long, flat, silent moment.
“She’s green,” he said.
Then he walked away.
There was a pause.
Then the Seventh Lance broke.
All of them at once.
Cedric went first, with a great helpless bark of a laugh he could not hold in any longer, and then Rowan, bent double, and then Sigurd, howling, and then Finn, silently, with his face in his hands, and Senna, sitting in the snow, laughing so hard she had to hold her bruised side and say ow, ow, ow between gasps.
It spread across the clearing like fire through dry grass.
The Ninth Lance, who had been through the worst hour of their young lives, laughed until they cried.
The Second Lance, who never laughed at anything, laughed.
A boy from the Tenth laughed so hard he fell over.
Even Arne Stenvik smiled, which nobody had ever seen, and said, “Ha,” which brought his total to fourteen.
Lyra stood in the middle of it all with one hand pressed over her mouth and her eyes shut, breathing very carefully through her nose.
Mira Halvard appeared at her elbow with a twist of paper.
“Ginger root,” she said.
“Chew it.
Don’t swallow it.” She paused.
“I have been carrying that for nausea from beast-miasma.
I want you to know that I never once imagined I would be using it for your uncle.”
Lyra chewed.
The world slowly stopped turning.
And on the far side of the clearing, standing alone with his back to all of them, looking at the ruin of the Beast King with great attention, the Archduke of the North stood very still.
His shoulders, under the plain grey Frostweave, were moving very slightly.
It was the only time in his life that anyone ever saw Alaric Eisenhardt laugh in the field.
And nobody saw his face.
II.
The Order
It took the better part of an hour for the clearing to calm down.
Lord Kenneth would not let anyone move until he had looked at them.
He went down the lances one by one with his spectacles back on his nose and his soul-flame cupped in his palm, saying each name as he came to it, the way he always did.
He found three nosebleeds from the pressure, Hilde Aarn’s among them.
He found a sprained wrist in the Ninth from a boy who had fallen over laughing.
He found Senna Vaar’s side, and pressed it, and listened to her breathe, and said “Bruised.
Again.
You are going to stop letting things hit you there, Miss Vaar,” and gave her a salve that smelled of snow-ginseng and a look over the top of his spectacles that made her go pink.
That was all.
A hundred children had stood in the path of a Beast King and a Goblin King and the full weight of whatever Lyra Eisenhardt had become, and not one of them had a wound that needed stitching.
Kenneth wrote it all down in his ledger, and underlined it, twice.
Then he went and picked up the Beast King’s core.
It was still lying in the snow where it had rolled against Cedric’s boot.
It was bigger than a man’s head, a great globe of clear, cold blue ice, and it was so cold that the snow around it had frozen into glass.
Kenneth lifted it in both gloved hands and held it up to the low winter sun, and the light went into it, and every one of the young soldiers watching saw what Lyra had seen in the witch’s core, and in the Ravager’s, and in the Prowler’s before that.
Gold.
Threads of it, fine as silk, laced all through the blue.
Not one thread.
Not three.
A hundred of them, wound through the heart of the core like the roots of a tree through a stone.
Kenneth did not say anything.
He turned his head and looked at his eldest brother.
The Archduke looked back at him for a long moment.
Then he looked at Lyra, who was looking at the core with her lips pressed together and her hand, without her seeming to notice it, resting over the place beneath her collar where she carried the witch’s core next to her skin.
“Later,” said Alaric quietly.
Kenneth wrapped the core in three layers of oilcloth and put it in his largest satchel, and the satchel frosted over white on the outside, and he did not let go of the strap again for the rest of the day.
* * *
The Archduke gathered them on the flattened snow in the middle of the clearing, between the two rows of the dead.
They came in their lances, the way they had been taught at the Twelfth Tower: ten lines of ten, leaders at the front, pathfinders at the right hand.
They were filthy.
They were scorched and splashed and smelled of Ravager and goblin and the Ninth’s chili.
Half of them still had tear-tracks on their faces and the other half were trying very hard to look as though they had never cried in their lives.
Lyra stood in the Seventh’s line between Cedric and Rowan, with ginger root still in her cheek, and did not look at anyone.
The four elders stood in front of them.
Kenneth with his frosted satchel.
Lucian with his hands in his sleeves.
Roderick with a red mark slowly coming up on the back of his head, looking unrepentant.
And in the middle, the Archduke of the North.
He let the silence go on until the last whisper in the Tenth Lance had died.
“The Beast King of the Hollowmere is dead,” said Alaric Eisenhardt.
“The Goblin King of the Rimefang is dead.
The two greatest threats to the Twelfth Tower in twenty years were killed today in this clearing, in front of your eyes.”
Nobody cheered.
They had learned by now not to cheer before he had finished.
“This subjugation,” said the Archduke, “is not over.”
A ripple ran down the lines.
“Lord Lucian.”
Lucian did not take his hands out of his sleeves.
He looked at them all, with his wild black hair and his flat grey eyes, and when he spoke it was the most words any of them had ever heard him say at one time.
“A Beast King is a wall,” he said.
“For forty years, every beast within fifty miles of the Hollowmere has known that it is there, and has kept away from it, and has kept to its own ground.
Today the wall came down.” He tilted his head toward the north, where the great white shoulder of the Kharn Glacier hung over the trees.
“By tonight, they will smell the blood.
By tomorrow, they will smell that the king is gone.
And then they will come.
Every wolf pack in the Kharn.
Every drake in the ice cliffs.
Every boar, every lynx, every stag, every hungry thing that has wanted that ground for forty years and did not dare.
They will come to fight each other for it.” He paused.
“And they will find us standing on it.”
Silence.
“So we stay,” said the Archduke.
He let that settle.
“We do not go back to the Twelfth Tower.
We go forward.
We camp on the shore of the Hollowmere, in the Beast King’s own ground, and we hold it.
Captain Orsa will send the sledges up from the Tower with food and arrows and firewood.
The wounded at the Tower stay at the Tower.
Everyone in this clearing comes with me.” His grey eyes went down the lines, one face at a time.
“And then you hunt.
You hunt, and you hunt, and you hunt.
Every beast that comes to the Hollowmere to take the king’s ground meets you instead.
You will polish your skills on them until you are sick of the sight of your own blades.
You will learn more in the next fortnight than in your whole lives before it.
Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Your Grace!”
“And this time,” said the Archduke, “we will not be on the rocks.”
That landed harder than anything else he had said.
A hundred young faces turned up toward him at once.
“At the Rimefang, I told you we would watch, and we would not come.
That was the lesson of the Rimefang, and you learned it, and some of you paid for it.” His eyes went, briefly, to the Fourth Lance, and the place in their line where Emrik Stahl should have been.
“That lesson is finished.
This is a different one.
From now on, the four of us are here.
On the ground, in the camp, beside you.
If something comes out of that glacier that is beyond you, it will meet one of us first.” A pause.
“So you have no more excuses.”
He looked at them.
“Kids,” said the Iron Regent of the North, and it was the first time any of them had ever heard him use the word, “go wild.”
The lines went very still.
“Do not hold back.
Not one of you.
Whatever you have been keeping in reserve, whatever you have been saving, whatever you have been afraid to use because you might get it wrong in front of the others: use it.
Release your real power.
All of it.
This is an all-out attack, from tomorrow’s dawn to the day I say it is finished.
There are beasts all around you to practise your killing on.
There are comrades beside you who are fighting for their lives on the same ground.
Protect each other.”
His voice did not rise.
It did not need to.
“And hear this.
Nobody in this subjugation is permitted to take a single injury.
Not one.
Not a cut.
Not a sprain.” His eyes found the boy from the Ninth with the bandaged wrist, who went scarlet.
“Not even from laughing.
Every wound is a mistake, and I want no mistakes.
I want you to come home to Frost-Crest whole, every one of you, stronger than you have ever been, with your blades worn thin from use.”
He drew a breath.
The roar that went up from the clearing set every glass-birch in the silver forest ringing at once.
* * *
When it had died down, Lord Roderick stepped forward, rubbing his head, and looked down the lines until he found the Seventh.
Then he found Sigurd Kell.
Sigurd was standing at the end of the line, as anchor.
He was still wearing his spirit-iron cuffs, the ones he had asked for after the Rimefang.
They were black with frost-bear blood and dented in two places where they had taken a bear’s charge.
“Kell,” said Roderick.
“My lord?”
“His Grace said release your real power.” Roderick held out one huge hand, palm up, the hand with Greyback’s three old scars across the back of it.
“You know what that means.”
Sigurd looked at the hand.
Then he looked down at his cuffs.
The whole Seventh turned to watch him.
They all knew what those cuffs meant to him.
They had heard him say, at the Twelfth Tower, with his eyes wet: I’m never taking these off.
Sigurd Kell put his right hand over his left cuff and held it there.
“Not yet, my lord,” he said.
Roderick raised his eyebrows.
“I’ll know when,” said Sigurd.
His big, sunburned face was very serious.
“I hesitated once.
In the gully.
Half a heartbeat.
I’m not going to hesitate again.
So I’m keeping them on until it matters.
And when it matters, I’ll take them off before I’ve even thought about it.
That’s…
that’s the practice, my lord.
That’s what I want to practise.”
There was a pause.
Then Roderick Eisenhardt grinned, very slowly, from ear to ear, and dropped his hand.
“Good lad,” he said.
And then, louder, to everyone: “Good lad!
HA!”
He clapped Sigurd on the shoulder so hard that Sigurd went down on one knee, cuffs and all, and came up again laughing.
* * *
The Archduke said one more thing before he dismissed them.
He said it to only one of them, and he said it quietly, as the lines broke up and the lances went to strip the cores from the dead.
“Lyra.”
She stopped.
Her father did not look at her.
He was watching the young soldiers spread out across the red snow with their butchering knives and their satchels, Finn already kneeling beside the first Ravager with his sleeves rolled up and Mira already arguing with him about the angle.
“You heard the order,” he said.
“Yes, Papa.”
“It includes you.
No more holding back.” A pause.
“But you have had your hour.
Today was yours.
The next fortnight is theirs.” Now he did turn his head, and looked down at her with those tired grey eyes.
“You hunt beside them.
Not in front of them.
You do not take a kill that belongs to someone else.
You do not save anyone who can still save themselves.
Do you understand me?”
Lyra looked across the snow at Cedric, who was trying to lift the Beast King’s skull with Arne and failing, and at Rowan, who was sketching something on the back of a supply chit, and at Isolde, standing on the rock spur above with Hilde beside her, already looking north toward the glacier with her bow in her hand.
“Yes, Papa,” she said.
“I understand.”
“Good,” said the Archduke of the North.
And he went to help his brother with the skull.
III.
Wild
The Hollowmere was a lake.
Nobody had told them that.
They had heard the name all winter, in briefings and in whispers and in the three-voiced howl that came down the wind to the Twelfth Tower at night, and every one of them had imagined something black and terrible: a pit, a lair, a cave full of bones.
What they found, when they came over the last ridge at sunset with the sledges groaning behind them, was a mere a mile across, frozen flat and white and perfectly still, lying in a cup of low hills at the foot of the Kharn Glacier.
The glacier rose behind it like the wall of the world, blue and white and three thousand feet high.
Ice cliffs ringed the far shore, hung with frozen waterfalls.
On the near shore, the Ravagers’ dens pocked the hillside in long dark rows, empty now, smelling of old blood.
It was beautiful.
That was the worst of it.
They made camp on the near shore, in the lee of the dens.
Lord Roderick raised a wall of packed snow round the whole camp in the time it took the Ninth to light their fire, by the simple method of walking in a circle and stamping, and when he had finished it was taller than he was and hard as stone.
Captain Orsa’s sledges came up behind them with firewood and arrows and sacks of barley and a crate marked, in the Kitchen General’s furious hand, SEAFOOD STEW: TONIGHT WEEK: I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN.
Lord Kenneth set up his hospital tent in the middle of the camp and stood in its doorway with his arms folded, glaring at everyone as if daring them to need it.
That night, the howling started.
It was not the three-voiced howl.
That was gone forever.
This was dozens of voices, from every direction at once: north from the glacier, east from the ice cliffs, west from the snowfields beyond the hills.
Wolves, mostly.
Something deeper behind them that might have been a drake.
Something higher that nobody could name.
They went on all night, coming closer and falling away and coming closer again, and nobody in the camp slept much.
Lucian had been right.
The wall was down.
They were coming.
* * *
They came at dawn, out of the west, across the snowfields: and they came mixed.
Nobody had ever seen that before.
Not on the Wall, not in the bestiaries, not in Lord Roderick’s forty years of hunting.
A beast pack was a beast pack: wolves ran with wolves, boars with boars, lynxes alone.
But the death of the Beast King had broken something in the Frozen Land, and what came over the western ridge in the grey light was a thing out of a nightmare.
Three packs of frost-wolves, thirty animals at least, running low and fast and silent.
And in front of them, driven by them, the way a sheepdog drives a flock, a stampede of rime-boars: forty, fifty, pony-sized and bristling white, charging in their pairs, one high and one low, with the wolves snapping at their heels and steering them like living battering rams straight at the snow wall.
And on the rocks above the camp, on every ledge and outcrop where nobody was looking, pale shapes with tufted ears, as still as stone, waiting.
“Lances!” roared the Archduke.
And for the first time in their lives, the young soldiers of the North went wild.
The Second Lance held the western gate.
They had been the anvil at the Sleepers, and they were the anvil now: ten bear-spears set in the snow at a slant, ten Wall captains’ children standing behind them in a line so straight that Captain Orsa would have wept to see it.
The first pair of rime-boars hit the spears and stopped dead.
The second pair hit the first.
The Second Lance’s sharp, practical leader, who had once walked over to tell the Eighth Lance everything it was doing wrong, stood in the middle of the line and called the pairs as they came, high, low, high, low, and her lance split every pair down the middle like an axe splitting kindling.
Separated, the boars lost their nerve.
Separated, they died.
The Ninth Lance did something nobody expected.
They had spent the night cooking.
When the wolves came round the flank of the boar stampede, looking for a way in, the Ninth’s tall, anxious leader stood up on the snow wall with a cauldron in both hands and flung the contents of it into the wind.
It was the chili.
The same chili that had brought Greyback out of the glass-birch forest.
They had made it stronger.
The cloud of it hit the lead wolf pack full in the face.
Frost-wolves hunt by scent; their noses are better than any hound’s.
Thirty wolves stopped running at once and began, as one animal, to sneeze, and weep, and roll in the snow, and rub their faces with their paws, howling piteously, while the Ninth Lance came over the wall with their spears and the First and Third came round the side.
“WE MADE IT FOR THEM!” screamed the Ninth’s leader, with tears of pure joy running down his face.
“WE MADE IT ON PURPOSE THIS TIME!”
A rime-boar broke through between the Second and the Ninth and went thundering into the camp, straight at the Fifth Lance’s cook-fire, where Magnus Hale’s quiet little miracle were just straightening up from the cauldrons.
The baker’s girl from Frost-Crest, a round, freckled, flour-dusted girl called Tilda Marsh who carried a ladle in her belt where other people carried knives, stepped out in front of the fire, pulled out the ladle, and hit the boar on the snout with it as hard as she could.
Bonnnng.
The boar stopped.
It sat down.
It looked, for one long moment, profoundly surprised.
Then the Fifth Lance fell on it from all sides.
Tilda Marsh looked at her ladle.
It was badly bent.
“Oh,” she said, in a small voice.
“Oh, Master Emberly is going to kill me.”
On the rock spur above the camp, Hilde Aarn, who had been given the high line’s left wing while Isolde held the right, was shooting and writing on her slate at the same time, with the slate balanced on her knee.
BOARS KILLED WITH A LADLE: 1.
* * *
The lynxes dropped when the stampede was at its worst.
That was what they had been waiting for: every eye on the ground, every spear pointing west.
They came off the rocks above the camp in silence, five of them, six, silver-white and as big as wolfhounds, dropping onto the backs of anyone who was not looking up.
The Seventh Lance was looking up.
Captain Dorran Voss had taught them that in the pens at Frost-Crest, a lifetime ago, with a chained lynx and a long stick: look up.
Senna Vaar was looking up.
She had been looking up all morning, because she was the pathfinder, because reading the ground meant reading everything above it too, and because the ledge above the eastern dens had been too quiet since dawn.
She was looking up when the lynx on the eastern ledge dropped.
But she was looking at the wrong ledge, because there were two.
Lyra saw it.
She was ten paces away, on the Seventh’s flank, with the frost-lily blade in her hand and a dead wolf at her feet.
She saw the second lynx come off the rock above Senna’s head, silent, claws out, going for the back of the neck the way lynxes always did.
She saw that Senna had not seen it.
And every single thing in her, every instinct and every year of training and every nerve in her body, said go.
You do not save anyone who can still save themselves.
She did not go.
It was the hardest thing she had done in the Frozen Land.
Harder than the Beast King.
She stood there, with her whole body leaning, and her sword hand white on the grip, and did not move.
Because there was someone nearer than she was.
“SENNA!”
It was Finn Brannoc.
The quietest boy in the Seventh Lance, who had once shouted I know!
at the Sleepers and shocked everyone who heard it.
He shouted her name first, the way the Archduke had told them all at the Twelfth Tower: shout their name, and then go.
And Senna, who had known his voice in her sleep since the Rimefang, did not waste half a heartbeat asking why.
She dropped flat in the snow.
And then Finn went.
He was already moving as he shouted, and the lynx was already in the air, and there was no time to aim, so he did not.
He planted the butt of his ash-and-mithril spear in the snow beside Senna’s body and let the point come up, and the lynx came down onto it out of the sky with its own weight, and the frost-mithril went in under its jaw and out behind its ear.
It was still a stick.
It was a very good stick.
The lynx’s body went over Senna’s back and into the snow beyond her and did not move again.
Finn stood over her with the spear in both hands, breathing very hard.
Senna rolled over and looked up at him.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
“You shouted,” said Senna.
“I know.”
“You never shout.”
“I know.”
She held up her hand.
He took it, and pulled her up out of the snow, and then neither of them let go for slightly longer than was strictly necessary for pulling someone up out of the snow.
Then Senna turned away very fast with her ears scarlet, and picked up her spear, and went back to reading the ground.
Finn stood there for a moment, looking at his hand.
Ten paces away, Lyra Eisenhardt let out a breath she had been holding for what felt like a year, and unclenched her fingers from the frost-lily blade one at a time.
On the shoulder of rock above the camp, where nobody was looking, Lord Lucian, who had been standing there the whole time with his sword half out of its sheath, slid it home again.
* * *
The second wave came at noon, from the east, from the ice cliffs.
It was worse.
It was rank three: frost-boars this time, the great humped cart-sized boars whose armored frost crust turned ordinary steel, a dozen of them, charging along the shore of the mere.
And above them, coming down the frozen waterfalls in great slithering bursts, wingless and heavy and frost-blue, with their short crests raised and their jaws already open: frost-drakes.
Four of them.
The Dragon-Ribs had sent their lizards to fight for the king’s ground.
The drakes breathed.
A cone of freezing mist rolled down off the ice cliffs and across the eastern half of the camp, and where it touched the snow wall, the wall turned to glass, and where it touched the Eighth Lance’s tents, the tents froze stiff as boards and cracked.
“FIRE!” yelled the Ninth’s leader, who had become, overnight and without anyone deciding it, the camp’s expert on what to do with a fire.
“Drakes go slow in the warm!
Everybody bring fire!”
The Eighth Lance, who had been guarding fires since the Sleepers and were extremely good at it, came running with burning brands.
The Fifth came with coals in their cauldrons.
And the drakes, who were winter-lazy at the best of times, came down off the cliff into a ring of heat and smoke and chili, and slowed, and blinked, and began to look very much as though they would rather be back in their nests.
But the boars did not slow down.
The Seventh met them on the shore of the mere.
Rowan called it: Senna to read the ice, Sigurd to anchor, Arne and Cedric in front, Finn and Lyra on the flanks.
And the first frost-boar came at Cedric like a rolling hill of blue-white ice, with tusks as long as a woman’s forearm, and Cedric swung the Dragon-Spine Cleaver at its head with every ounce of strength in his body, the way he always did, in a great crushing arc.
The cleaver hit the frost crust and skidded off it with a shriek like a blade on a whetstone.
The boar hit Cedric.
He went over backwards in the snow.
Arne’s axe caught the tusk an inch from his ribs, and turned it, and the boar went past them both and wheeled round for another charge.
Cedric came up out of the snow on one knee.
He looked at his cleaver.
Then he looked at the boar.
Mostly I hit them, he had said once, laughing, at the Twelfth Tower.
And Lyra does the part with the knife.
“Cedric.”
It was Lord Lucian.
Nobody had seen him come down off the rock.
He was simply standing there, on the shore of the mere, ten paces behind his nephew, with his hands in his sleeves.
“Your cleaver,” said Lucian, “is a third lighter than it was a month ago.
Why?”
Cedric stared at him.
The boar was turning.
Its tusks were coming round.
“Because Brunhild…”
“No.
Why.”
The boar charged.
And Cedric Eisenhardt understood.
It was not lighter because it had been forged lighter.
It was lighter because the frost-mithril along its edge had been waiting, every day since Brunhild Ashanvil put it in his hands, for him to stop swinging it like a hammer and start listening to it.
Because it was not a hammer.
It had never been a hammer.
It was an Eisenhardt blade, and the Eisenhardts were dragon-ice in the blood, and the oldest trick in the North, the one every Wall soldier knew and nobody south of the Kharn could do, was this: lay the blade at the same cold as the ice, and the ice will open for it like a seam.
He did not swing.
He breathed out, and let the cold come up out of his chest and down his arm and into the steel.
The mithril inlay along the edge of the Dragon-Spine Cleaver flared blue, then white, then a colour like the heart of a glacier.
Frost raced along the blade.
The air around him went suddenly, bitterly still, and for one heartbeat every snowflake falling within three paces of Cedric Eisenhardt stopped in the air and hung there, glittering, sharp-edged, like a cloud of tiny knives.
The boar arrived.
Cedric stepped aside, a hand’s breadth, the smallest step that would do, the step Rowan had been trying to teach him for eleven years.
And he laid the cleaver along the boar’s spine, behind the skull, where the crust was thinnest, gently, almost tenderly, the way you lay a hand on a horse’s neck.
The frost crust opened for it like a seam.
The frost-boar went past him in two pieces and slid twenty yards across the ice of the Hollowmere, and lay still.
The snowflakes fell.
Cedric stood there with the cleaver in his hands, white frost smoking off its edge, and stared at what he had done.
“Oh,” he said.
Behind him, Lord Lucian had taken his hands out of his sleeves.
He was looking at the place where the snowflakes had hung in the air: three paces, all the way round his nephew, in a perfect circle.
He did not say anything about it.
But his flat grey eyes had gone very bright.
“Again,” said Lucian.
There were eleven more frost-boars.
Cedric did it again.
And again.
And again.
By the fifth, he was laughing.
By the eighth, so were Rowan and Arne.
By the eleventh, Arne Stenvik, standing beside him with his axe on his shoulder and frost-boar blood to the elbows, turned to him and spoke a whole sentence, the longest sentence anyone in the Seventh had ever heard him say.
“You,” said Arne, “are going to be very hard to keep up with now.”
Then he grinned, and went to try it himself.
On the rock spur, Hilde wrote on her slate: ARNE: 24 WORDS.
And under it, after some thought: CEDRIC: FROZE THE SNOW???
IV.
The Mirror on the Mere
They held the Hollowmere for four days, and on every one of those days, the Frozen Land sent something new.
Wolves from the west, every dawn, until the Ninth ran out of chili and had to send to the Twelfth Tower for more, and the Kitchen General sent it up on the next sledge with a note that said only WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH IT.
Rime-elk, a whole herd, stampeding blind across the mere at midnight with something behind them that nobody ever saw.
A second clutch of frost-drakes off the ice cliffs, which Lyra went up to meet alone, running straight up the frozen waterfalls in the dark with the frost-lily blade singing, because no one else in the camp could climb that ice and so those kills belonged to nobody but her.
She came down at dawn with four rank-three cores in her satchel and frost in her eyelashes and an expression on her face that Cedric said afterward was the happiest he had seen her in three years.
And every evening, Lord Kenneth stood in the doorway of his empty hospital tent with his ledger, and called the names of the lances one by one, and every lance answered, and he wrote down the same number he had written the night before.
Injuries: 0.
On the fifth morning, the mere itself woke up.
* * *
Senna saw it first.
She always did.
She was out on the ice at first light with the butt of her spear, reading the mere the way she read every new ground, step by step, listening to the sound the ice made under the steel.
The Hollowmere was old ice, thick and sound, except at the northern shore, where the Kharn Glacier came down to meet it.
There, over centuries, the glacier had pushed the lake ice up into long ridges and cracked it open into rifts: a whole field of them, snow-bridged and treacherous, running between the shore and the glacier’s foot.
And out on that rift field, in the grey dawn, there was a light.
A small, warm, golden light.
Low down, just above the snow.
“There’s someone out there,” said a boy from the Tenth, behind her, the one who had once asked if they were allowed to clap.
“Someone’s lost.
Look, they’ve got a torch…”
He took a step toward it.
“Stop,” said Senna, in a voice like a slammed door.
The boy stopped.
She did not take her eyes off the light.
Nobody lit a torch on the Frozen Land at dawn.
Nobody was lost on the Hollowmere: Lord Kenneth called every name, every night.
And the light was not moving forward, the way a lost traveller would move toward a camp.
It was just there.
Waiting.
Exactly where the snow over the rifts was thinnest.
“That’s not a torch,” said Senna Vaar quietly.
“That’s bait.”
And then the stags came out of the morning mist on the far side of the mere, and everything happened at once.
* * *
There were six of them.
Or there were sixty.
That was the problem.
They were the most beautiful things any of the young soldiers had ever seen: great white stags, larger than any rime-elk, stepping out of the mist on the glacier side of the Hollowmere with their heads held high.
And their antlers were ice.
Not frosted bone: ice, clear as glass, branching up and out in great crowns, catching the dawn light and breaking it into rainbows.
And where the light broke, more stags appeared.
They came out of the rainbows.
Six became twelve, twelve became thirty, thirty became more than anyone could count: a whole herd of white stags with crystal crowns, spread across the mere from shore to shore, shimmering, stepping, lowering their heads.
Every one of them looked solid.
Every one of them looked real.
“Mirror stags,” said Lord Roderick, from the snow wall, with great satisfaction, the way another man might have said Midwinter Feast.
“Haven’t seen a herd that size in thirty years.
Most of them aren’t there, children.
The real ones come at you from the side while you’re stabbing the pretty pictures.
Have fun!”
The herd lowered its antlers.
And charged.
* * *
The Fourth Lance was nearest.
They met the charge on the open ice: and their spears went through the first stag as if it were mist, because it was, and the Kharn boy who led them stumbled forward through nothing at all, and from his left, out of a shimmer of light where nothing had been, a real stag came at him with its crystal antlers lowered.
Arne Stenvik had been the Fourth’s before he was the Seventh’s, and he was a hundred yards away, and he roared the boy’s name across the ice.
The Kharn boy threw himself flat.
The antlers went over him.
But there were more.
Everywhere, all down the shore, lances were stabbing at stags that were not there and being struck from the side by stags they had not seen, and the herd was wheeling and shimmering and multiplying faster than anyone could think.
Mira Halvard stood in the middle of the Fourth Lance’s broken line with a fog-breaker in each hand.
She had worked it out.
She thought she had worked it out.
The reflections were light, only light, bent through ice.
Light had no weight.
Light did not push the air aside when it moved.
A real stag, the size of a cart, running, would shove the air in front of it like a bow-wave.
A reflection would not.
She was not sure.
She was almost sure.
She had no time to test it.
You waited until someone asked you.
When you know, act.
Even if you might be wrong.
Mira Halvard pulled the fire-lotus pins out of both fog-breakers with her teeth and threw them as far out onto the ice as she could, one after the other, into the very heart of the charging herd.
They burst.
Chili and warming-root and smoke-salt and a thread of sun-pepper, and the fire-lotus caught it all, and two great clouds of thick red-brown smoke rolled out across the Hollowmere, four paces wide and thirty heartbeats long, and swallowed the front of the herd.
And the reflections ran through it as though it were not there.
The smoke did not move for them.
Not a swirl, not a ripple.
They ran through it like light through glass, and the smoke hung perfectly still around them.
But where the real stags ran, the smoke tore.
It swirled and parted and streamed behind them in long ragged wakes, like water behind a boat, and suddenly, out of sixty shining stags, every soldier on the ice could see exactly which six were real.
“THOSE!” Mira was screaming.
She had three more fog-breakers out of her satchel and was throwing them as fast as she could pull the pins.
“The ones that move the smoke!
Only the ones that move the smoke!”
The Fourth Lance’s Kharn leader, getting up off the ice with snow all down his front, stared at her.
“Were you sure?” he said.
“That that would work?”
“No!” said Mira, and flung another one.
* * *
On the rock spur above the camp, Isolde Frostmere stood at the head of the high line, with sixteen archers strung out along the ridge on either side of her, and watched the smoke tear.
She had frozen once before, at the Rimefang.
Forty heartbeats.
The Archduke had counted.
She did not freeze now.
Not because she was not afraid.
She was.
The fear was there, cold and clear, in the middle of her chest, exactly where it had been on the ledge.
But she had learned something since the Rimefang, lying awake at the Twelfth Tower with the hum of her bow in her ears, and it was this: fear was only a thing that happened.
It did not have to be a thing that stopped you.
“String,” said Isolde Frostmere.
Sixteen bows came up along the ridge.
“Fingers.”
She drew.
There was no arrow on her string.
There did not need to be.
She reached into the empty space between her fingers and the bow, the way she had in the gorge, and found the silver there, waiting.
But she did not pull out a storm of it this time.
She did not let it bloom.
She took only a little.
A sliver.
A needle of silver light no longer than her finger.
Make a small silver arrow.
And then another.
She could feel them now.
Not with her eyes.
The way she had felt the witch in the dark of the gorge: by what was cold and what was not.
The reflections had no heat.
They were nothing, ice and light.
But six great white shapes running across the Hollowmere were warm, and their hearts were beating, and to Isolde’s silver-grey eyes, half-closed along the line of her bow, they shone through the mist and the rainbows and the smoke like lanterns.
She loosed.
The little silver arrow went out across the mere, small and bright and perfectly quiet, and struck the nearest real stag on the shoulder.
It did not kill.
It was not meant to kill.
It stuck there, glowing, a tiny silver star on the white hide, and it did not go out.
She drew another.
Loosed.
A second stag, marked.
A third.
“Arrows,” said Isolde, “on the silver.”
And sixteen archers on the high line, who had spent four days learning to listen to her, saw the silver stars and understood.
The arrows went down.
Not in a storm.
In a pattern.
Every one of them aimed at a silver mark, every one of them fired by someone who knew exactly which stag was real and exactly where it would be.
Isolde called them, one by one, small and steady and cold: Brenna, the second star.
Ostrid, the fourth.
Aarn, take the sixth.
The high line had never fought like that.
It was not a rain of arrows.
It was a conversation.
On her left, at the end of the line, Hilde Aarn was drawing on the sixth star.
She was alone.
She had been alone for more than a week, ever since they left the Twelfth Tower for the Sleepers, and every time she drew, her hand still went out to the left, to where her brother should have been.
Hakon was twenty miles away, on the wall of the Twelfth Tower, with his arm in a splint.
She could not see him.
She could not hear him.
She drew anyway, and breathed, and said it under her breath, the way they always had:
“Three.
Tall one.
Left.
Now.”
And loosed.
The frost-arrow went out across the ice and burst against the sixth stag’s flank like thunder in a jar, and the great white beast went down.
Twenty miles to the south, on the battlements of the Twelfth Tower, where he had been standing at the northern parapet since dawn for no reason he could explain to Captain Orsa, Hakon Aarn’s head came up.
He looked north, toward the Hollowmere, which he could not possibly see.
Then he smiled, and said, to nobody, “Now.”
* * *
The last real stag broke through.
It came out of the smoke at a dead run, a great old male with a crown of ice like a chandelier, with two silver stars on its shoulder and three arrows in its flank.
It had lost the herd.
It was terrified.
And it was running straight for the northern shore, straight for the rift field, straight for the small golden light that was still flickering patiently above the snow.
Senna saw it coming.
“The angler!” she shouted.
“It’s running for the light!
Everyone off the north ice!”
The stag ran onto the snow bridge over the deepest rift.
The bridge held.
And then out of the rift, out from under the snow, a tongue came up: thirty feet long, pale grey, barbed like a fish-hook.
It whipped round the stag’s foreleg, and pulled.
The stag screamed and went down onto its knees on the snow bridge.
And the boy from the Tenth, the one who had wanted to clap, who had been running after the stag with his spear because he had marked it and it was his, ran out onto the snow bridge behind it.
The rift angler was blind.
It hunted by vibration.
And a boy running on a snow bridge makes a great deal of vibration.
The tongue let go of the stag.
It came round, very fast, and wrapped itself round the boy’s ankle, and yanked.
His feet went out from under him.
He hit the snow bridge on his back and began to slide toward the edge, toward the place where the bridge was thinnest, toward the dark slot in the ice below, screaming.
Sigurd Kell was already moving.
He did not think about it.
That was the whole point.
He had been practising not-thinking for five days.
He was twenty yards away when the tongue whipped round the boy’s ankle, and by the time the boy hit the snow he was ten, and somewhere in those ten yards, without breaking stride, without looking down, without a single half-heartbeat of anything at all, Sigurd Kell had reached across with his right hand and snapped open the catch on his left cuff, and then with his left hand the catch on his right, and kicked off the ankle cuffs as he ran, one, two.
Two hundred kilograms of spirit-iron fell away from him into the snow behind.
And Sigurd flew.
Nobody had known.
Not even Sigurd.
Two weeks in the cuffs, carrying two hundred kilograms everywhere he went, running the Frozen Land in them, fighting goblins and frost-bears in them: and now they were gone, and his body did not know what to do with how light it was.
He crossed the last ten yards in what looked like a single stride.
He went out onto the snow bridge like a thrown spear, which should have broken it and did not, because he barely touched it.
He caught the boy from the Tenth by the collar with one hand, a yard from the edge, and planted his feet, and pulled.
The tongue went taut as a bowstring.
The thing in the rift pulled back.
For one heartbeat, the big loud tower captain’s boy from the Ninth Tower and a blind beast from the bottom of the ice played tug-of-war with a terrified child on a snow bridge over a hundred-foot drop.
The beast lost.
Sigurd hauled the boy up off the snow and back toward the shore with the angler’s tongue still wrapped round his ankle and the angler itself being dragged up out of its rift after him, pale and eyeless and squirming, clinging to the ice walls with a dozen grey limbs, unwilling to let go.
“ROWAN!” bellowed Sigurd.
Rowan Thorne was already on the shore.
He was standing at the end of the snow bridge with his plain steel sword in his hand and his eyes closed.
He could not see the angler.
It was below the bridge, under the snow, clinging to the underside of the ice where the tongue came up.
To cut it, he would have to cut through the snow bridge.
And if he cut through the snow bridge, it would fall, and Sigurd and the boy from the Tenth would fall with it.
Don’t cut the log.
Cut the stone.
He had been trying for two weeks.
Every night at the Twelfth Tower, and every night on the shore of the Hollowmere, with a stone on a log and Lord Lucian’s flat grey voice in his head.
He had managed half.
He had never managed the whole thing.
The log always split.
Rowan breathed in.
He did not look at the bridge.
He did not look at the snow.
He felt for the thing beneath them, the way he had felt for the warrior’s heart through its armour in the gorge: the cold, eyeless, hungry thing hanging under the ice, with its heart beating slowly in the middle of it.
And he felt the bridge in between, the snow and the ice and the weight of his friend standing on it, and he let all of that go, and he thought about nothing in the world except the heart.
Then he laughed.
Softly.
With his eyes shut.
The way he always did when he stopped trying.
And he cut.
It was the smallest cut that would do.
His blade went down through the snow bridge and out the other side, and the snow bridge did not notice.
Not a crack.
Not a flake.
It was as if the sword had passed through mist.
And under the bridge, in the dark, the rift angler’s heart stopped.
The tongue went slack round Sigurd’s ankle.
Far below, something heavy let go of the ice walls and fell, a long way, into the dark.
The snow bridge stood, perfectly whole, with Sigurd Kell and a sobbing boy from the Tenth standing on it.
Rowan opened his eyes.
He looked at the bridge.
He looked at his sword.
There was no snow on it.
There was a single smear of pale grey blood along the last inch of the edge, and nothing else.
“Oh,” said Rowan Thorne faintly.
“Oh, gods.”
On the shore behind him, Lord Lucian had come down off the rocks.
He stood looking at the snow bridge for a long time.
Then he looked at the farmer’s son from the barley fields.
“Come and find me tonight,” said Lucian.
“Bring your sword.”
And he smiled.
* * *
That night, round the Seventh’s fire, on the shore of the Hollowmere, they swore Arne Stenvik in.
There was no Oskar Vaar to say the words, so Senna said them, because they were her father’s words and she knew them better than anyone.
Cedric and Rowan and Finn and Sigurd stood in a ring round the fire with their blades bare, and Arne stood in the middle with his frost-mithril axe, looking very large and very serious and slightly alarmed.
“Your back is my back,” said Senna.
“Your breach is my breach.
While the Wall stands.
No blood.
No magic.
And no crying.”
Arne looked round the ring at them: the heir of the North, the farmer’s son, the tavern-keeper’s boy, the tower captain’s son with fresh red marks on his wrists where the cuffs used to be.
“Yes,” said Arne Stenvik.
Then his square face crumpled, and he cried anyway, enormously, and Sigurd cried, and Cedric cried, and Rowan said “No crying!” and was crying himself, and Finn put his hand over his eyes and his shoulders shook, and Senna threw up her hands and said, “Every time,” and Lyra, sitting on the other side of the fire with Isolde on one side of her and Mira on the other and her knees drawn up to her chin, laughed until she had to wipe her eyes.
Hilde read out the slate afterward.
It took a long time.
BOARS KILLED WITH A LADLE: 1.
LADLES BENT: 1.
WOLVES THAT SNEEZED: 30 (APPROX).
FOG-BREAKERS MIRA THREW WITHOUT BEING SURE: 5.
SILVER STARS: 14.
CEDRIC: FROZE THE SNOW (LORD LUCIAN SAYS DON’T TALK ABOUT IT YET).
SIGURD: TOOK OFF CUFFS (NO HESITATION) (I TIMED IT).
ROWAN: CUT THE STONE, LEFT THE LOG (THE LOG WAS A BRIDGE) (SIGURD WAS ON IT).
FINN: SHOUTED.
ARNE: 26 WORDS + CRYING.
INJURIES: 0.
She lowered the slate.
“And one more,” she said, and her voice wobbled, and she did not care.
“HAKON: HEARD ME.”
Nobody asked her how she knew.
Nobody needed to.
Later, when the fire had burned down and the others had gone to their tents, Lyra sat alone at the edge of the snow wall with her chin on her knees, looking south.
The frost-lily blade lay across her lap, humming softly to itself.
Behind her ribs, under her grandmother’s net, the thing that had woken in the clearing slept quietly on.
For the first time since she was thirteen, it did not ache.
She had not saved anyone in five days.
She had not had to.
Above the far southern hills, high up against the stars, something was wheeling: a single dark speck with wings far too large to be any bird she knew, turning south on the wind toward the Wall.
She watched it until it vanished into the dark.
Then she went to bed, and slept until morning, and did not dream at all.
End of Chapter 15.