I.
The Order Home
They broke camp on the shore of the Hollowmere in the dark before dawn, on the ninth day.
Nobody had told them it was the last day.
Nobody needed to.
The beasts had stopped coming.
For two nights now the howling had been far off, and thin, and going away, and on the eighth evening Lord Lucian had walked the whole shore of the mere alone with his hands in his sleeves and come back and said one word to the Archduke, which was “Done.” The wall of the Beast King had come down, and the Frozen Land had come to fight for its ground, and the Frozen Land had lost.
Whatever was still out there on the snowfields had learned to leave the Hollowmere alone.
So they packed by lamplight, in silence, the way the Wall soldiers did.
The Eighth Lance’s tents, which had been frozen, cracked, mended, frozen again and mended again until they were more patch than tent, came down for the last time.
Lord Roderick’s snow wall was left standing; he said it would be there in spring, and very likely in the spring after that.
Kenneth’s hospital tent came down empty, and he folded it himself and patted it, the way another man might pat a horse that had carried him a long way without once being needed.
Captain Orsa had come up from the Twelfth Tower in the night with the last of the sledges.
She stood in the grey light at the edge of the camp, small and square and iron-grey, with her steel cap under her arm, and watched the hundred young soldiers of the subjugation form up in their lances on the snow for the last time.
She did not make a speech.
She was not a woman who made speeches.
She walked down the lines once, slowly, looking at their faces, and when she came to the end she put her cap back on and turned to the Archduke.
“My lord,” she said, in her voice like a slammed door.
“I’ve had six intakes of children through my tower in twenty years.
I’ve buried some of them.” She looked back at the lines.
“I didn’t bury any of this lot.
Not one.” A pause.
“Don’t tell them I said they were good.”
“I won’t,” said the Archduke gravely.
“The Twelfth goes home,” said Captain Orsa, to her own soldiers.
“There’s a wall to watch.” And she turned and walked away south toward the Tower with her garrison falling in behind her, and did not look back, though every one of them did.
The sledges went with her.
On the last one, under a pile of frost-bear pelts, was the Beast King’s core, wrapped in three layers of oilcloth and frosted white, and Lord Kenneth’s personal promise to Captain Orsa that if the oilcloth so much as cracked she was to send a rider for him at once.
The wounded who had stayed at the Twelfth Tower, Hakon Aarn and Emrik Stahl and Ylva Brenn, would come home the slow way, by sledge and by road, with an escort of the Legion.
Everyone else would come home the fast way.
* * *
The Archduke stood in front of them in the grey light with the war-blade of his house on his back.
“We go home,” he said.
“Now.
Today.
To Frost-Crest.”
A stir went down the lines.
They had all known it was coming.
It was still strange to hear it.
“For nine weeks,” said Alaric Eisenhardt, “you climbed the Thousand Steps in spirit-iron.
Fifty kilograms on every limb.
You hated it, and it made you strong.” His grey eyes went down the lines.
“Lord Lucian broke your shackles on the morning you left Frost-Crest.
You have run and fought without them ever since, and some of you have started to think that you are fast.”
Somebody in the Second Lance, who had very definitely started to think that, looked at his boots.
“So we run home,” said the Archduke.
“From the Hollowmere to the gate of Frost-Crest, without stopping.
Two days and two nights.
You will eat on the move and drink on the move and sleep, if you sleep at all, on the move.
We will be at the gate by dawn on the third morning, or I will want to know why.
Everything the Thousand Steps taught you, every morning for nine weeks, you will use now.
You will glide over the snow like the wind does.
You will read the ground and use it: every ridge, every slope, every stretch of hard crust.
The Frozen Land will try to slow you down.
Do not let it.”
He paused.
“And you will not run alone.”
Lord Roderick stepped forward.
He had a sheet of paper in his hand, and he was grinning in a way that made everyone in the front rank take an involuntary step back.
“No more shackles,” said Roderick, with enormous relish.
“Your partner is your weight!”
There was a silence.
“I’m sorry, my lord,” said the Ninth Lance’s tall, anxious leader, very carefully.
“Our…
what?”
“Your partner.
Your weight.” Roderick beamed down at him.
“Every one of you has a partner, on this list.
I made it myself.
Last night.
By the fire.
It took me hours.” He waved the paper.
“One of you runs.
The other one rides.
On the back.
Piggyback, like a little lamb.
When the runner can’t run any more, you swap, and the rider runs, and the runner rides.
Turn and turn about, all the way to Frost-Crest.
Two days.
And whoever’s riding…” his grin grew even wider, “…is the one with their hands free.
So if anything comes at you on the way, the rider fights, and the runner keeps running.
Nobody stops.
Nobody puts anybody down.
Not for wolves, not for drakes, not for anything.”
The silence went on.
“That,” said the Archduke, “is an order.”
Then Roderick began to read the list.
* * *
Afterward, it was generally agreed that Lord Roderick Eisenhardt had not made that list at random.
He said he had.
He said he had drawn the names out of his helmet.
But nobody had ever seen Lord Roderick wear a helmet, and as the names went on, one pair after another, a kind of horrified understanding began to spread through the lines.
“Finn Brannoc,” read Roderick.
“Senna Vaar.”
Finn went pale.
Senna went red.
Neither of them looked at the other.
Somewhere in the Seventh, Rowan made a very small noise.
“Sigurd Kell.
Mira Halvard.”
“What?” said Mira, from the Fourth Lance.
“HA!” said Sigurd, delighted, and then caught sight of her face and stopped.
“Arne Stenvik.
Hilde Aarn.”
Hilde opened her mouth.
Arne, who had once gone a whole day on four words, closed his eyes, as if in prayer.
“Tilda Marsh, of the Fifth.
Bram Holloway, of the Ninth.”
The baker’s girl with the bent ladle looked round in bewilderment.
The Ninth’s tall, anxious leader, who it turned out had a name after all, went the colour of his own chili.
“Rowan Thorne,” read Lord Roderick, and paused, and looked up over the top of his paper with a very innocent expression.
“Isolde Frostmere.”
The whole Seventh Lance turned round to look at Rowan.
Rowan Thorne, farmer’s son, leader of the Seventh, the boy who had cut the stone and left the log standing four days ago and had Lord Lucian’s private sword lessons every night since, stood absolutely still with his mouth slightly open, like a man who has been hit very hard on the back of the head and has not yet fallen over.
On the other side of the Seventh’s line, Isolde Frostmere, heir of the fourth-oldest house in the North, turned her head slowly, and looked at him.
It was the first time, as far as anyone could remember, that she had ever looked directly at Rowan Thorne.
She studied him for a long, cool moment, from his boots to his hair, the way she studied a target at two hundred paces.
“Thorne,” she said at last.
“Is it.”
“Yes,” said Rowan.
His voice cracked.
“Yes.
That’s…
yes.
My lady.”
Isolde turned back to face the front without another word.
But the tips of her ears, under the flawless silver crown of her braids, had gone very faintly pink.
Hilde Aarn, who had been watching all this with her slate clutched to her chest and her eyes enormous, began to write.
“And last,” said Lord Roderick, folding the list, “Cedric Eisenhardt.” He looked at his nephew.
Then he looked at his niece.
“Lyra Eisenhardt.”
Cedric’s head came round.
“Wait,” he said.
“Uncle.
Wait.
Everybody else got…” he waved a hand at Finn and Senna, at Rowan and Isolde, at Arne and Hilde, “…that, and I get my sister?”
“Eisenhardts carry Eisenhardts,” said Lord Roderick serenely.
“Family tradition.”
“Since when?”
“Since last night.
By the fire.
It took me hours.”
Lyra, standing beside her brother in the Seventh’s line, said nothing at all.
She was looking at Cedric.
Then she was looking past Cedric, out at the snow on the edge of the camp, where the Hollowmere’s shore ran up into low hills strewn with the great grey boulders the glacier had dropped there ten thousand years ago.
Her face was perfectly calm.
It was the calm that Cedric should have noticed.
He did not.
“Runners first,” said the Archduke.
“Riders up.”
And a hundred young soldiers of the North looked at their partners, and their partners looked at them, and there was a long, long moment of the most profound embarrassment ever experienced on the Frozen Land.
Then Lord Roderick roared, “WELL?
CLIMB ON!” and the morning began.
II.
Am I Heavy?
The boys ran first.
Nobody decided that.
Nobody discussed it.
In every pair down the whole length of the line, at Lord Roderick’s roar, the boy simply turned his back and crouched, and the girl looked at his back for a long, long moment, and then climbed on, with the expression of someone stepping onto a frozen lake that might not hold.
In the pairs that were two boys, or two girls, there was a short and savage game of stone-paper-shears, and the loser rode, and pretended not to mind.
The Archduke raised one hand.
He looked once down the line of a hundred young soldiers with fifty riders on their backs.
Then he turned south, toward the Wall and home, and began to run.
They followed him off the shore of the Hollowmere and into the hills.
It was not like the run north.
On the run north they had been fresh from the citadel, and they had followed the Archduke’s long, loping stride across the snow in a column like geese.
Now they had been in the Frozen Land for weeks.
They had learned it.
And the first thing they learned, in the first mile, with someone else’s weight on their backs, was that they had not learned it nearly well enough.
The ground south of the Hollowmere was glacier country: long, low hills of old ice under new snow, strewn with grey boulders the size of houses that the Kharn had carried down from the mountains ten thousand years ago and dropped there, and then forgotten about.
Between the hills ran the sastrugi, the wind-carved ridges of hard snow, knee-high and sharp as roof-tiles, row after row, all pointing the same way.
Run across them, and every step was a stumble.
Run along them, and the hard crust held you up like a road.
“Along the ridges!” called Senna Vaar from Finn’s back, pointing with her spear.
“Not across!
Along!”
The Seventh turned.
Then the Fourth.
Then, one by one, the whole line, the way a flock of birds turns: and suddenly fifty runners were skimming along the crests of the wind-ridges as if along the edges of a hundred roof-beams, light, quick, never quite letting their weight come down, feet barely kissing the crust.
It was the Thousand Steps.
It was every morning for nine weeks, every step up the great stone stair to the top of the citadel, learning to put the foot down so lightly the stone hardly knew it was there.
They had thought it was a punishment.
It had been a lesson.
They glided.
They ran like the wind runs over snow: following the ground, never fighting it.
For about an hour.
* * *
Then the boys began to scream.
Sigurd Kell started it.
He had been running in silence, with Mira Halvard on his back and his big face set like a door, for nearly two hours, and then, without warning, in the middle of a long uphill slope, he threw back his head and let out a bellow that set the snow sliding off the boulders on either side.
“AAAAAARRRRGH!”
“What?” said Mira sharply, in his ear.
“What is it?
Is it your knee?
I told you about your knee…”
“It’s not my KNEE!” roared Sigurd.
“It’s my EVERYTHING!”
And as if he had given permission, it spread down the line like fire.
Bram Holloway of the Ninth screamed.
A boy in the Second, who had never in his life made an undignified sound, screamed.
Arne Stenvik did not scream, but he began, very quietly, to growl, a low steady rumble like a bear in a cave, which in its way was worse.
The hills south of the Hollowmere rang with it: the war-cry of fifty young men of the North discovering, all at the same moment, exactly how heavy another human being is after two hours uphill.
Only Finn Brannoc did not make a sound.
He ran with his eyes fixed straight ahead and his jaw locked and his arms hooked under Senna’s knees, steady as a cart-horse.
He had not said a word since they set off.
“Finn,” said Senna, from his back.
“Finn.
You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking.
Let me…”
“I’m fine.”
Rowan Thorne, running just ahead of them, did not scream either.
But that was because he no longer had the breath to.
He had gone from red to purple to a sort of mottled plum colour, and his breath came in great tearing gasps, and his eyes were fixed on the snow in front of him with the glazed look of a man who has seen the face of death and found it was carrying a bow.
Isolde Frostmere rode on his back in perfect silence, with her bow across her knees and her arms folded lightly round his shoulders and her chin held high, looking out over the hills like a queen on a parade horse.
Inside her head, she was doing arithmetic.
Fifty-four kilos.
At the last weighing, before we left the citadel.
That was before the Twelfth Tower’s porridge.
Fifty-five, then.
Perhaps fifty-five and a half.
She glanced down at the back of Rowan’s neck, which was scarlet.
The bow is two.
The quiver, full, is two and a half.
The coat…
She closed her eyes briefly.
The coat is frost-bear lined.
The coat is at least four.
Gods.
Sixty-four.
I am sixty-four kilograms on this boy’s back and he is going purple and he has not said a word.
She felt her face begin to go hot.
She did not know why.
It was simple arithmetic.
“Thorne,” she said, very coolly.
“Hhhh,” said Rowan.
“Am I…” She stopped.
She started again.
“Is the weight…
acceptable?”
Rowan did not answer for six full strides.
Then he said, in a voice that sounded as though it had been dragged up out of a well: “You’re…
very…
light…
my lady.”
It was the most obvious lie Isolde Frostmere had ever heard in her life.
She looked at the back of his purple neck for a long moment.
Then she turned her face away, out over the hills, so that he could not possibly see it, and was very glad that he could not.
* * *
Some of the girls did their arithmetic in silence.
Some did not.
“Am I heavy?” said Hilde Aarn, on Arne Stenvik’s back.
“I’m heavy.
Am I?
I’m not.
I’m not heavy, I’m just…
dense.
Hakon says I’m dense.
That’s different.
That’s muscle.
Am I heavy?
You can tell me.
No, don’t tell me.
Arne.
Arne.
Am I…”
“No,” said Arne.
Hilde was silent for almost a whole stride.
“You paused,” she said.
“Before you said no.
You paused.”
Arne closed his eyes for a moment, as though asking the Frozen Land for strength, and kept running.
Further back, Mira Halvard was doing the calculation out loud, because Mira did everything out loud.
“Fifty-one kilograms,” she announced, into Sigurd’s ear.
“Plus the satchel, which is eight, because I won’t leave it, so don’t ask.
Fifty-nine.
Your spirit-iron cuffs were fifty on each limb, Kell, two hundred in total, you’ve run in them every day since the Rimefang, so purely in terms of mass I am less than a third of what you are used to, and I would like to know why you are screaming.”
“BECAUSE YOU’RE TALKING!”
And from the very back of the line, from the Ninth, where Bram Holloway was screaming steadily with Tilda Marsh on his back, there came a voice that carried across the hills like the Kitchen General’s dinner bell.
“DON’T YOU DARE!” shrieked Tilda Marsh.
“Don’t you DARE think I’m fat, Bram Holloway!
I’m a BAKER!
It’s the FLOUR!
I’m FULL of FLOUR!”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“You were THINKING it!”
“I was thinking about DYING!”
The whole line heard it.
The whole line nearly fell over laughing, which, with fifty people on fifty backs, would have been a disaster.
Lord Roderick, running at the rear, laughed so hard he had to stop and hold on to a boulder.
At noon, Lord Kenneth called the first swap.
They did not stop.
Nobody stopped.
The Archduke kept running at the front, and the swap was done on the move, the way Roderick had ordered: the rider dropped lightly off, ran three strides alongside, and the runner crouched, and…
And nobody crouched.
Not one of the boys.
All down the line, fifty young men of the North, purple, soaked in sweat under their furs, trembling in every muscle, looked at the girls who were now running beside them and holding out their hands, and said, as one man, some version of:
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine,” said Senna Vaar.
“Finn.
You’ve been shaking for an hour.”
“I’m fine.”
“Get on my back.”
Finn Brannoc looked at her.
Then he looked straight ahead.
A dull, deep red came up his throat and over his narrow face to the roots of his hair.
“No,” he said.
Very quietly.
“Thank you.
No.”
“Why not?”
But he would not say why not.
None of them would.
Sigurd Kell said that he would rather die on the Frozen Land and be eaten by wolves than be carried home by an alchemist, and Mira said that could certainly be arranged.
Bram Holloway said nothing at all, but simply picked Tilda Marsh up again and ran on with tears streaming down his face.
Rowan Thorne, who was beyond speech, merely shook his head at Isolde, once, and crouched for her again.
Isolde Frostmere looked at him.
At his plum-coloured face, at his shaking legs, at his outstretched hand.
“You,” she said, “are an idiot, Thorne.”
Then she climbed back on.
And she said nothing else for an hour.
But her arms, round his shoulders, were very slightly tighter than before.
On the ridge above them, Lord Roderick wiped his eyes.
“Pride!” he said happily, to Lord Lucian.
“Best fuel there is.
They’ll run on that for a day at least.”
Lucian said nothing.
But he had been watching the Seventh.
And he was watching, in particular, two people near the front of the Seventh who did not seem to be suffering at all.
* * *
Cedric Eisenhardt had run all morning with his sister on his back, and for the first two hours he had been, privately, a little smug about it.
She was not heavy.
That was the thing.
She was tall, and she was strong, and she was the most dangerous person in the North under the age of a thousand, but she was built like their mother, long and fine-boned, and on his back she weighed about as much as a full pack.
He had run with heavier packs up the Thousand Steps.
He had carried Sigurd out of a snowdrift once.
He had settled into the long, easy stride that their father ran at, and listened to the boys behind him begin to scream, and thought, rather pleased with himself: amateurs.
Lyra rode on his back with her arms loosely round his neck, and looked at the boulders going by.
She was having the time of her life.
She could not remember the last time anyone had carried her.
Her father, perhaps, when she was very small.
It was warm on Cedric’s back, and he smelled of snow and woodsmoke and cleaver-oil, and the hills were going by in the bright noon sun, and the boys were screaming, and somewhere behind them Tilda Marsh was explaining at the top of her lungs about the flour.
And Lyra Eisenhardt, sixteen years old and the hidden sovereign of the sword, found that she was grinning like a child.
And then she had an idea.
It was not a good idea.
She knew that at once.
That was what made it so tempting.
Should I, thought Lyra, add some weight?
They passed a stone.
A loose, round, grey stone the size of a loaf of bread, lying on the snow at the foot of a boulder.
As Cedric’s stride carried them past it, Lyra leaned down from his back, light as a hawk dipping for a mouse, and scooped it up in one hand, and straightened up again.
Cedric did not notice.
She tucked it into the crook of her arm, against his back.
A mile later, Cedric’s stride shortened, very slightly.
Lyra smiled to herself.
More, she thought.
She found the next one in a gully: the size of a sheep.
That one, she had to think about.
She leaned down as they passed and took it with a hand under it, and a thread of frost went out from her fingers and wrapped round the stone and bound it neatly to her own back, under her cloak, where Cedric would never see it.
A Sword Monarch can lift a great deal with one hand.
She did not have to strain at all.
Cedric’s breathing changed.
“Lyra,” he said, after another mile, in a careful voice.
“Mm?”
“Have you…
I don’t mean anything by this.
But have you…
eaten something?”
Lyra let a long, dangerous silence go by.
“Cedric,” she said, very sweetly.
“Are you saying I’m heavy?”
“No!
No.
Gods, no.
Never.” He shifted his grip under her knees.
“It’s just, the ground’s…
softer here, I think.
Softer snow.
Makes it harder.”
“Yes,” agreed Lyra.
“That must be it.”
Behind them, Rowan Thorne, who had a perfect view of Lyra’s back and everything bound to it, made a noise like a kettle and nearly fell into a snowdrift with Isolde on top of him.
It went on all afternoon.
By the third hour after noon, Lyra had added a stone the size of a lamb, and Cedric had stopped talking.
By the fourth, she had added one the size of a calf, and Cedric had begun, very quietly, to scream, and every soldier in the Seventh Lance who had a view of her back had been sworn to silence with a single look.
Finn’s shoulders were shaking.
Senna had both hands over her mouth.
Arne Stenvik had turned his face to the sky and was moving his lips silently, possibly counting, possibly praying.
And then, in the last of the afternoon light, they came round the flank of a long ice hill and there it was, lying in the snow at the foot of the slope as though it had been waiting for her for ten thousand years: a great, round, grey glacier-boulder, rough and lichen-spotted and glittering with frost, the size of a full-grown frost-boar.
Lyra looked at it.
She should not.
She knew she should not.
Cedric was already purple.
Cedric was already screaming.
Ahh, thought Lyra Eisenhardt.
Should I add more weight?
She did.
She dropped the calf-stone and the lamb-stone and the sheep-stone off the back of her cloak into the snow, one, two, three, so neatly that Cedric’s stride did not even falter, and in the same movement she leaned down and wrapped one arm round the boulder, and lifted it, and settled it on her back.
Frost bound it there, thick and tight.
Her knees closed round her brother’s ribs.
Cedric Eisenhardt’s legs very nearly gave way under him.
He staggered.
He caught himself.
He took one step, and then another, and then, with a sound like a frost-boar being slowly sat on, he kept running.
Lyra rested her chin on the top of his head, and smiled, and watched the sun go down.
* * *
The Archduke called the second swap at dusk.
Cedric stopped.
He could not have done anything else.
He stood swaying in the snow, steaming like a winter horse, with his hands on his knees, while Lyra slid lightly off his back.
Then he straightened up, and turned round, and opened his mouth to say your turn…
…and saw it.
It sat on his sister’s back, under her cloak, bound with a net of glittering frost: a boulder the size of a frost-boar.
A whole, round, grey, lichen-spotted glacier-boulder.
It was bigger than she was.
Cedric looked at it for a long time.
The whole Seventh Lance, which had slowed to a jog round them, looked at Cedric looking at it.
“You,” said Cedric.
Lyra smiled at him.
“You!” said Cedric.
His voice rose.
His face, which had been purple, went through several new colours that nobody had a name for.
“You!
YOU!
How dare you!
How DARE you!
No wonder I was so heavy!
No wonder I…
I thought I was dying!
I thought it was my legs!
I thought I was getting old!
Why did you bring that bloody stone with you?”
“Training,” said Lyra serenely.
“It’s a BOULDER!”
“It’s a very good boulder.”
“It’s the size of a FROST-BOAR!”
And the Seventh Lance broke.
All of them.
Rowan went down on his knees in the snow, and Isolde fell off his back, and did not even mind; she sat in the snow where she had fallen with both hands over her face and her shoulders shaking.
Senna howled.
Finn wheezed.
Sigurd Kell laughed until he had to lie down.
Hilde wrote on her slate with tears streaming down her face.
Arne Stenvik looked at the boulder, and looked at Cedric, and said, with deep feeling: “Ha.”
The Archduke of the North, who had dropped back to see what the noise was, looked at the boulder on his daughter’s back for a long, thoughtful moment.
“That,” he said, “is good weight.”
And he ran on.
Lyra set the boulder down in the snow, gently, beside the track.
Then she crouched in front of her brother, and turned her back, and held out her hands behind her.
“Up,” she said.
“Your turn to ride.”
Cedric looked at her back.
He looked at the boulder.
He looked at his sister’s back again, and an expression came slowly over his scarlet face that anybody who had grown up with him would have recognised at once, and run from.
He climbed on.
Lyra rose, and set off south into the dusk at their father’s long, loping stride, with her brother on her back, light as a pack.
She did not look round.
So she did not see Cedric, as they left the long ice hill behind, look back over his shoulder at the frost-boar-sized boulder lying in the snow by the track.
And she did not see him smile.
III.
The Rider Fights
Night came down over the Frozen Land like a lid.
There was no moon.
There were stars, enormous and close and white, and under them the snow gave back just enough light to show the next ridge and the back of the person in front.
The Archduke did not slow down.
He lit nothing.
He ran at the head of the line as he had run all day, and they followed the sound of his steps and the faint grey shape of his coat, and the hills went by in the dark.
Lyra ran with her brother on her back.
She ran easily.
She would have run easily with three brothers on her back.
The cold air was sweet in her lungs, and her feet found the crests of the wind-ridges in the dark without her having to think about it, and Cedric was warm and heavy and blessedly, for once in his life, quiet.
Too quiet, she thought, after the first hour.
Then she heard the soft crunch of large feet in the snow beside her, and a low, delighted chuckle she would have known anywhere, and something enormous passed from one pair of hands to another, just behind her head.
The weight on her back doubled.
Then it more than doubled.
Her stride shortened by a hand’s breadth before she caught it.
Behind her, on her back, she felt her brother shift his seat and settle something heavy and round and cold between his own back and the night, and heard the faint crackle of frost being drawn tight round stone.
Cedric’s frost.
The new frost he had found on the shore of the Hollowmere, eight days ago, which he had used that same noon to split eleven frost-boars along the spine.
Now he was using it to tie a boulder to himself.
The large feet went away into the dark at a jog, chuckling.
Lyra ran on.
She did not say anything.
She did not turn her head.
She did not need to.
She knew the shape of that weight the way she knew the shape of her own sword.
It had been on her own back for two hours that afternoon.
Uncle Roderick had carried it after them.
All the way from the ice hill.
Under one arm.
For hours.
Just so that he could give it to Cedric.
On her back, very quietly, her brother began to shake with silent laughter.
Lyra Eisenhardt lengthened her stride, and settled the weight of one brother and one frost-boar-sized boulder more comfortably on her shoulders, and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice: “Comfortable, Ced?”
“Very,” said Cedric.
“Thanks.”
“Good,” said Lyra.
And she did not say another word about it for the rest of the night.
If her brother wanted her to notice, he was going to have to wait a very long time.
* * *
They passed the Twelfth Tower a little before midnight.
They did not go to it.
It stood a mile off to the east along the dark line of the Wall, a black shape against the stars with the red eye of its three-hundred-year-old roof-fire burning on top.
But someone on its battlements must have been watching for them, because as the line of runners came over the last ridge and into its sight, a horn sounded from the top of the tower.
One long note.
Low and steady, rolling out across the snow.
Senna Vaar, on Finn’s back, lifted her head.
“One long,” she said.
Her voice had gone thick.
“That’s friends at the gate.” She swallowed.
“That’s my da.
He’s the one who blows the horns.
He knew we’d come past.”
Finn did not say anything.
But he turned his head a little, as he ran, so that his cheek brushed her wrist where her arm lay over his shoulder, and kept it there.
And on the end of the line, on Arne Stenvik’s back, Hilde Aarn had twisted right round to look at the tower, with her slate forgotten and her hand lifted.
There was a figure on the battlements beside the horn.
Too far to see a face.
Too dark to see anything at all.
But it had one arm in a sling, and with the other it was waving.
Hilde waved back until the tower was gone behind them, and then she put her face down on Arne’s shoulder and stayed that way for a long time, and Arne, who had perhaps thirty words to his name, did not use a single one of them, and was right not to.
* * *
The snowmoths came an hour after midnight, on the edge of a blizzard.
Nobody saw the blizzard coming.
It was a small one, a squall off the Kharn that came rolling south along the line of the Wall in the dark like a grey wave, and the Archduke turned the line away from its heart and they ran along its edge instead, with the wind tearing at their furs and the snow coming sideways.
And on the edge of it, riding the wind the way gulls ride a storm, came something pale.
It looked like snow falling upward.
Thousands of them.
Tens of thousands.
Pale moths a hand across, with wings dusted in frost-scale that glittered faintly in the starlight, pouring out of the storm in a great slow, silent, shimmering cloud, and settling.
On furs.
On hoods.
On shoulders.
On the warm backs of the runners, where the riders’ bodies kept them warmest of all.
“Snowmoths!” Lord Kenneth’s voice cracked out of the dark from somewhere in the middle of the line.
“Riders!
Wake your runners!
Keep them awake!”
It was already happening.
Sigurd Kell was the first.
He had been screaming, on and off, for fourteen hours.
Then the moths came down on him, settling on his hood and his collar and in his hair, and their frost-scale dust drifted down over his face in a fine glittering powder, and Sigurd Kell stopped screaming.
He began to smile.
It was a lovely smile.
Slow and warm and peaceful, the smile of a boy lying in a meadow in summer.
His stride, which had been a desperate stagger, became light and easy.
He was not tired any more.
He was not cold any more.
He was warm all the way through, and the night was beautiful, and over there, away to the left, away from the line, the snow looked so soft and so deep and so inviting…
He turned left, smiling, and began to run away into the dark.
“Kell!”
Mira Halvard had been riding on his back for fourteen hours, and for most of them she had been explaining to him in detail why he was screaming wrongly.
She knew snowmoths.
She knew frost-sleep.
She had read every page in the citadel library on it when she was eleven, because she had wanted to know how her grandfather had died.
She did not waste breath on shouting.
She reached into her satchel, still riding, with one arm locked round his neck, and came out with a twist of waxed paper, and ripped it open with her teeth.
Sun-pepper root.
From the Southern Caldera.
Two silver marks a pinch.
She had been saving it for eight years, and she had already spent half of it in the Rimefang.
Mira reached round, pried Sigurd Kell’s smiling mouth open with her thumb, and shoved the whole root in.
There was a pause of about one heartbeat.
Then Sigurd Kell woke up in the most complete and total way that anyone on the Frozen Land had ever woken up.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!”
He turned right.
He turned right so hard and so fast that Mira nearly came off his back.
He came pounding back toward the line with his eyes streaming and his mouth wide open and steam pouring out of it into the freezing air, howling like a wolf with its tail on fire.
“WHAT,” bellowed Sigurd, “WAS THAT?”
“Sun-pepper,” said Mira.
“You’re awake.
Keep running.
Don’t swallow it, it’ll burn a hole in your stomach.”
“IT’S BURNING A HOLE IN MY FACE!”
“Yes,” said Mira.
“That’s how you know you’re awake.” And then, louder, with her arm up and her voice cracking across the line like a whip: “Riders!
Bitter herbs!
Anything strong! This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
Put it in their mouths!
Don’t let them stop smiling!” She stopped.
“I mean…
don’t let them start…
oh, you know what I mean!”
All down the line, the riders went to work.
They were the weapons.
Roderick had said so: the runner runs, the rider fights.
And so, in the dark, in the blizzard, with tens of thousands of moths settling on their runners’ shoulders, the riders fought.
Not with swords.
With everything else they had.
Senna Vaar had no bitter herbs.
She had something better: she had walked the Kharn passes since she was nine, and every pass-walker knew what you did when someone on the rope started smiling in the snow.
When Finn’s stride went light and easy and his head began to turn, she took his ear between her finger and thumb, and twisted it, hard, the way her grandmother had once twisted hers.
Finn yelped and came awake all at once.
And then, when the moths came back for him, she did it again.
And again.
And she talked to him, steadily, the whole time, low in his ear: about the Kharn, about her little brothers, about the goat that had once eaten her father’s boots, about anything at all, so that there was always a voice in his ear that was not the warm, sweet, deadly silence of the snow.
Finn ran through the snowmoths with his ear scarlet and his face scarlet and Senna Vaar’s voice in his head, and did not once turn left.
Tilda Marsh had a pocketful of raw ginger, which she had been planning to put in a cake.
Bram Holloway ate all of it, under protest.
Hilde Aarn had nothing at all, so she simply sang, at the top of her voice, directly into Arne’s ear, every song she knew, very badly, and Arne Stenvik later said, in one of the longest speeches of his life, that he had not been able to fall asleep because he had been too busy wanting to throw her into a snowdrift.
And Isolde Frostmere, on Rowan Thorne’s back, did not need any of it.
Because the moths were drawn to warmth.
And the warmest thing in the dark, she had realised, was not the runners’ backs.
It was fire.
She drew her bow.
She drew it on the empty string, the way she had at the Hollowmere, and reached for the silver there.
And this time she did not make it cold.
She made it bright.
A small arrow, no longer than a finger, burning white and warm as a candle-flame.
She loosed it out into the blizzard, away from the line, high and far.
It hung there in the dark.
A tiny silver star, burning.
And the snowmoths turned toward it.
Not all of them.
But enough.
A great pale river of them peeled away from the line and went pouring out across the dark toward that little star, the way moths always went toward a lamp.
Isolde loosed another.
And another.
A row of small warm stars hanging out over the snow on the windward side of the line, a hundred yards out, pulling the swarm away from the runners like a hand drawing a curtain aside.
“Keep going, Thorne,” said Isolde, in his ear.
Quite gently, for her.
“I’m awake,” said Rowan.
His voice was rough.
“I’m awake.
I was…
for a moment I was…”
“I know.
I saw.” A pause.
“You smiled.”
“Did I?”
“Yes,” said Isolde Frostmere.
Another pause.
“You should do it more often.
When you aren’t dying.”
Rowan Thorne ran on into the blizzard with his ears burning, very wide awake indeed.
And near the front of the line, Lyra ran through the moth-cloud carrying her brother and a boulder, untouched.
Not a single moth settled on her.
They came, and they hovered over her shoulders for a moment, and then they turned away, as though there were something about her that was not warm at all, or not in any way they understood.
On her back, Cedric was swatting at the moths with one hand and laughing.
“Lyra,” he said.
“Lyra, they don’t like you.”
“No,” said Lyra quietly.
“They don’t.”
She did not tell him why.
She was not entirely sure herself.
But under her grandmother’s net, at the bottom of her, something old and patient opened one eye at the pale, glittering, frost-dusted swarm, and the swarm, very sensibly, left her alone.
By the time the blizzard had blown itself out and the stars came back, the riders had not lost a single runner.
Lord Kenneth went down the line in the dark, counting, and then he came back up it, counting again.
“All of them,” he said to the Archduke.
His voice was not quite steady.
“Every one.
Snowmoths, at night, in a blizzard, and every one.
Alaric, do you know how many Wall patrols…”
“I know,” said the Archduke.
He looked back once down the long line of runners and riders in the starlight.
Then he turned south again, and ran on.
IV.
The Gate at Dawn
On the second morning, the ground itself got up and walked across their path.
They were running east along the Wall-road, at the foot of a long white slope, with the Wall a grey line on their right and the sun just clearing the mountains, when the slope moved.
Not an avalanche.
Something much slower, and much worse.
The whole hillside ahead of them, a quarter of a mile of it, heaved, and lifted, and a great blue shape rose up out of the snow like an island rising out of the sea, shedding drifts from its sides in long white waterfalls.
It was a shell.
A shell as large as a house: no, larger, as large as the great hall at Frost-Crest, built up in layer on layer of blue glacier-ice, clear as glass, so that the low morning sun went into it and lit it from within like a cathedral window.
Under it, four legs like the pillars of a bridge.
In front of it, on a neck as thick as a tower, an ancient, wrinkled, patient head with eyes the colour of deep water, looking at absolutely nothing.
It took one step.
The ground shook.
On the slope above, with a long, soft roar, a whole field of snow broke loose and began to slide.
“Glacier warden!” Lord Roderick’s voice, from the rear, sounded almost reverent.
“Haven’t seen one cross the Wall-road in eleven years.
Don’t touch it, children!
It’s not hunting!
It’s just going somewhere!”
The warden took another step.
It was crossing their path from left to right, unhurried, unstoppable, heading for the Wall, and nothing in the Frozen Land was going to make it turn.
Behind it, the avalanche it had woken was coming down the slope toward the line in a long white wave, picking up speed.
The Archduke did not stop running.
He looked at the avalanche.
He looked at the warden.
He looked at the long, low, glittering slope of its shell, rising gently from the ground on the near side like a ramp of blue glass.
“Over it!” he called.
And fifty runners, with fifty riders on their backs, ran up the side of a living mountain.
It was the strangest thing any of them ever did.
The shell was ice, and it was alive, and it was moving: rocking slowly under their feet with every one of the warden’s great steps, like the deck of a ship.
It was smooth as a frozen lake and slicked with melt where the sun touched it.
A Wall soldier in boots would have gone flat on his face in three steps.
But they had climbed the Thousand Steps every morning for nine weeks, and they had learned to put a foot down so lightly the stone hardly knew it was there.
So they ran on the warden’s shell the way they had run on the crests of the wind-ridges: light, quick, never letting their weight come down, gliding up the long blue slope with the morning sun blazing up through the ice beneath their feet.
For a long moment they were running on light.
Every face in the line was lit from below, blue and gold.
Then they were over the crest of it, and sliding down the far side, and leaping off its edge into the deep snow beyond.
Behind them, the avalanche hit the warden’s flank and broke against it like a wave against a sea-wall, and the warden did not even notice.
Hilde Aarn, on Arne’s back, twisted round to look as the great blue shape plodded away behind them toward the Wall, scattering snow.
“We ran on it,” she said.
“Arne.
Arne.
We ran on a glacier warden.”
“Yes,” said Arne Stenvik.
And then, because some things deserve more than one word: “It was beautiful.”
Hilde was so astonished that she forgot to write it down.
* * *
The wolves found them at noon.
A big pack: twenty at least, grey-white, running down off the hills to the west in a long silent line to cut them off, the way frost-wolves always hunted, driving their prey toward broken ground.
They had smelled tired legs.
They had smelled a column that was carrying half its own number.
To a frost-wolf, that smelled like an easy meal.
They were wrong.
“Riders!” called the Archduke.
And he did not slow down.
Nobody slowed down.
That was the order.
So the line ran on, and the wolves ran in, and the riders fought.
Isolde Frostmere had her bow up before the first wolf reached the line.
She was riding on Rowan Thorne’s back, with her knees locked round his ribs and nothing to hold on with, and she was shooting.
She had never shot from a running horse.
She had certainly never shot from a running farmer’s son.
Every stride he took jolted up through her spine, and the ground was rising and falling under him, and her first arrow went a foot wide and she said a word under her breath that the heir of the fourth-oldest house in the North was not supposed to know.
“Wait,” said Rowan.
He was breathing hard.
“Wait.
Don’t shoot on the stride.
Shoot between.
When both my feet are off the ground, I’m steady for a heartbeat.
I’ll tell you.”
Isolde drew.
Rowan ran.
One stride.
Two.
She felt him gather himself under her, and spring.
“Now,” said Rowan.
She loosed in the air, in the instant when both his feet left the snow, in that one perfect heartbeat of stillness at the top of the stride.
The arrow went straight through the lead wolf’s eye.
She did not say anything.
She drew again.
He ran.
“Now.”
Another wolf.
And another.
Now.
Now.
Now.
They found the rhythm in four strides and then they did not lose it, his voice and her bow, the runner and the rider, as if they had been doing it all their lives.
Isolde did not look down at him.
Rowan did not look up at her.
But every time he said now, she was already loosing, and every time she loosed, he was already gathering for the next stride, and by the end of it neither of them could have said whose rhythm it was.
Six wolves.
Six arrows.
“Thorne,” said Isolde, when it was done, in a strange voice.
“My lady?”
A pause.
“Isolde,” she said.
“Just…
Isolde.
When you’re telling me when to shoot.
It’s quicker.”
Rowan Thorne ran ten strides in total silence.
Then he said, “Rowan,” very quietly.
“It’s…
it’s quicker too.”
“I know your name,” said Isolde Frostmere.
“I’ve always known your name.” And she looked away over the snow, and her ears were scarlet, and Rowan’s were scarlet, and neither of them said anything else for a mile.
All down the line, it was the same.
Senna Vaar rode Finn Brannoc’s back with her mithril spear held low along his side, and she did not need to tell him anything.
He swung left when the wolf came from the left, and she took it through the chest, and he swung right without being told when the next came from the right, and she took that one too.
They had been reading each other since the Rimefang.
He ran, and she struck, and they did not say a single word.
Mira Halvard broke a fog-breaker across the snout of a wolf going for Sigurd’s legs, and the wolf went head over heels sneezing, and Sigurd, who had a wolf of his own hanging off his sleeve, smashed it away with his free elbow without breaking stride and roared: “I DON’T NEED THE CUFFS!
I’VE GOT AN ALCHEMIST!” and Mira, on his back, put her face in her hands and said, “Oh, gods,” but she was laughing.
Hilde Aarn shot frost-arrows from Arne’s back that burst like thunder in a jar, and called her own shots out loud, and hit every one.
Tilda Marsh, who had nothing to fight with but a badly bent ladle, hit a frost-wolf on the nose with it from the top of Bram Holloway’s back so hard that the wolf sat down in the snow and stayed there, looking betrayed, as the whole line ran past it.
“That’s TWO!” screamed Tilda.
“Bram!
Bram, that’s TWO!”
“I know,” sobbed Bram Holloway, running.
“I know, Tilda, you’re amazing, please stop kicking me…”
Nobody stopped.
Nobody put anybody down.
The wolf pack hit the line at a run and came apart against it like snow against the warden’s shell, and the line ran on over what was left, and the survivors went back into the western hills with their tails down and did not come out again.
Near the front, carrying her brother and a frost-boar-sized boulder, Lyra Eisenhardt did not take a single wolf.
Not one.
One came at her, and she simply stepped round it without breaking stride, and Cedric, on her back, leaned out with the Dragon-Spine Cleaver and laid frost along its spine and split it the way he had split the boars at the Hollowmere, laughing.
She let him.
It was his kill.
She had been ordered.
And behind them, on the ridge above the line, the Archduke of the North looked down at a hundred young soldiers running two by two over the snow, the riders fighting and the runners running, nobody stopping, nobody falling, every pair moving as one, and for a long moment his tired grey eyes were very bright.
* * *
They came to the great gate of the Wall at sunset on the second day.
The Frost Legion was waiting for them, as it had been when they went north: two lines of grey furs and steel on either side of the long tunnel through the Wall, spears grounded.
But this time, when the Archduke ran in under the arch, the soldiers did not strike their spears once against the stone.
They struck them again, and again, and again, a great rolling thunder of steel on stone that went on and on down the whole length of the tunnel as the line came through, runner after runner, rider after rider.
Some of the old soldiers were grinning.
Some of them were not, and were wiping their eyes, and pretending it was the wind.
And on the far side of the Wall, the world turned green.
They ran out of the tunnel and through the shimmering curtain of the Ten-Fold Formation, and the cold fell away from them like a cloak dropped on the ground.
The air was soft.
It smelled of earth and water and blossom.
Under the great azure dome, in the last of the sunset, the valley of the Eisenhardts lay spread out before them in its eternal spring: the orchards white with flowers, the Winter-Lily Lake gleaming, the valley road running away south between the trees toward the far, high, shining towers of Frost-Crest.
Half the line burst into tears.
Nobody knew why.
They ran on down the valley road in the dusk, and then in the dark, under the Formation’s soft starlight, past sleeping farms and blossoming orchards.
Somewhere in the night, the girls offered one last time, all down the line, to take a turn.
And all down the line, for the last time, the boys said I’m fine, and crouched, and picked them up again, and ran on.
Nobody had ever expected anything else.
So the riders who had fought for two days and two nights fell asleep, one by one, on their partners’ backs.
Isolde Frostmere slept with her cheek on Rowan Thorne’s shoulder and her bow still in her hand, and he ran the last nine miles more carefully than he had ever done anything in his life, so as not to wake her.
Senna slept on Finn.
Mira Halvard slept on Sigurd Kell, and snored, and Sigurd, who had a great deal he could have said about that, said nothing at all, and let her.
And Lyra carried Cedric, and a boulder, the last few miles home.
* * *
They reached the gate of Frost-Crest at dawn on the third morning, exactly as the Archduke had said.
The sun came up over the eastern peaks as they came up the last long rise of the valley road, and it lit the citadel’s frost-white towers gold and rose, and it lit the great gates, which were standing open.
There were people in front of them.
A great many people.
Sir Magnus Hale, with his one hand on his sword-hilt and his empty sleeve pinned across his chest.
The Kitchen General, Master Haldor Emberly, in a white apron, with an enormous ladle in his remaining fingers.
And in front of them all, very straight, in a blue gown with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes fixed on the road, the Archduchess Genevieve.
And at the top of the steps behind them all, Master Osric Vellane, long and narrow and silver-haired, stood beside Mistress Agathe Rennick and her great ring of keys.
The Archduke slowed, at last.
And stopped.
And the hundred came up behind him, two by two, and stopped too, at the foot of the gate, swaying on their feet in the dawn light.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Master Emberly lifted his ladle, and his scarred old face split into a grin, and he said, loudly enough for the whole valley to hear:
“You came back alive!
Everyone!”
And the cheer that went up from a hundred hoarse throats at the gate of Frost-Crest was heard, it was later claimed, at the top of the Thousand Steps.
* * *
Lyra set her brother down on the flagstones in front of the gate.
Gently.
Then she reached up behind her and loosened the frost that bound the boulder to her back, and lifted it off, and set it down too, very carefully, on the flagstones beside the great gate of her family’s house, where it sat, round and grey and lichen-spotted and enormous, glittering with frost in the sunrise.
Cedric stared at it.
Then he stared at her.
His face, which had been triumphant, began slowly to fall.
“You knew,” he said.
“Since the first hour,” said Lyra.
“You knew, and you carried it anyway?
For a day and a half?
And you didn’t say anything?”
“You wanted me to notice,” said Lyra Eisenhardt serenely.
“So I didn’t.”
Cedric opened his mouth.
He closed it again.
He looked at the boulder, and at his sister, and at the boulder.
And then he began to laugh: helplessly, hopelessly, bent double on the flagstones of Frost-Crest with his hands on his knees and tears running down his face, and Lyra began to laugh too, and they leaned on each other in front of the whole citadel and laughed until they could not stand.
The Archduchess Genevieve looked at her two children, filthy and frost-burned and weeping with laughter at the foot of her gate.
Then she looked at the boulder.
“Alaric,” she said, in her soft Western voice.
“Why is there a boulder at my gate?”
The Archduke of the North considered the question.
“It’s good weight,” he said.
And for reasons that nobody in the citadel ever entirely understood, it was never moved.
It sits beside the great gate of Frost-Crest to this day: a round grey glacier-boulder the size of a frost-boar, carried two days and two nights from the shore of the Hollowmere on the backs of the Archduke’s children.
And every intake of candidates who has gone north since has had to touch it, on the morning they leave, for luck.
All down the line, the pairs were coming apart in the sunrise.
Some of them very slowly.
Finn set Senna down, and kept hold of her hand to steady her, and forgot to let go, and she did not remind him.
Rowan Thorne knelt and set Isolde Frostmere on her feet as gently as if she were made of glass, and she woke, and realised where her head had been for the last nine miles, and looked at him.
Rowan went scarlet all the way down to his collar.
Isolde said, “Good morning, Rowan,” very coolly, and walked away toward the citadel with her braids still perfect and her ears the colour of a sunrise.
Sigurd Kell set Mira Halvard down on the flagstones, and she woke and said, “Did we win?” and he said, “You snored for nine miles,” and she said, “I do not snore,” and he said, “Like a frost-bear, Halvard,” and she hit him with her satchel, and they were both laughing.
Bram Holloway set Tilda Marsh down, very carefully, and then lay down on his back on the flagstones and did not get up again for some time.
Tilda presented the Kitchen General with his bent ladle, weeping, and he looked at it for a long moment, and then he kissed her on the forehead and said it was the finest ladle he had ever owned.
Arne Stenvik set Hilde down, and she turned round and hugged him without warning, and he went the colour of a frost-boar roast and said nothing at all, which Hilde wrote down, with great satisfaction, as ARNE: SPEECHLESS.
1.
And Lyra stood at the foot of her family’s gate in the spring dawn, with her brother’s arm round her shoulders and her mother coming down the steps toward them both with her arms already open, and thought that she had never in her life been so tired, or so happy.
The subjugation of the Hollowmere was over.
End of Chapter 17.