I.
The King’s Ground
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 Kharn passes, 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. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
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: 25 WORDS.
And under it, after some thought: CEDRIC: FROZE THE SNOW???
II.
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.
Flickering gently, the way a lantern flickers when somebody is carrying it.
“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.
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.
Fifty 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 fifty 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 flying north: a single dark speck with wings far too large to be any bird she knew, riding the wind toward the Wall.
She watched it until it vanished into the dark beyond the Kharn.
Then she went to bed, and slept until morning, and did not dream at all.
* * *
End of Chapter 16.