I.
The Third Phase
They were not allowed to go to their beds.
That was the first cruelty of the morning, and every one of them felt it.
They had run for two days and two nights.
They had come up the valley road in the dawn with their partners on their backs and their legs gone to water and the towers of Frost-Crest blazing gold above them, and they had stood at the great gate while the Kitchen General wept into his ladle, and every single one of them had been thinking of exactly one thing: the narrow beds in the west and east wings with the frost-bear quilts on them, and twelve hours of sleep.
Instead, Sir Magnus Hale had said, “Training ground.
All of you.
Now,” and turned on his heel.
So they went.
They went through the gate and across the outer court and up the long ramp to the Sword-Pond Training Grounds, the great granite terrace on the citadel’s northern shoulder where they had spent nine weeks in spirit-iron, with the ancestral kata steles standing round its edge like silent judges and the three-thousand-foot drop to the glacier falling away beyond the parapet.
The sun was just clearing the eastern peaks.
The granite was still blue with shadow.
They stood on it in their lances, swaying, filthy, frost-burned, with the boulder still sitting at the gate behind them and the dust of the Frozen Land still in their hair.
And they were not alone.
The Archduchess Genevieve stood at the head of the terrace in her blue gown, with her hands folded in front of her.
She had come up from the gate ahead of them, and she had not had time to change, and somehow she still looked as though she had just stepped out of a portrait.
Beside her, a little apart, stood a slender woman in grey silk with a veil of the same grey thrown back from her face.
Her hair was black and fine as smoke, and her face was calm, and if she was older than the Archduchess she did not look it.
She looked like no age at all.
Most of the hundred had never seen her up close.
All of them knew who she was.
Lady Seraphina Eisenhardt.
The Veiled Lotus of the North.
The former Archduchess, the Sword Emperor’s wife, the Matriarch of the house: the woman whose smile, it was said, could stop a quarrel between four sons who could level mountains in the middle of a sentence.
She was smiling now.
Gently.
Looking at them.
Behind the two ladies stood the household of Frost-Crest.
At its head, the Head Butler: a long, narrow, silver-haired man in black, Master Osric Vellane, who had served the house for sixty years and had never once in living memory been seen to hurry.
Beside him, the Head Maid, Mistress Agathe Rennick, small and round and terrifying, with a ring of keys at her belt the size of a dinner plate.
And behind the two of them, in three long, perfectly straight lines across the back of the terrace, the servants and maids of the citadel: footmen in grey, maids in blue and white, every one of them standing with their hands folded and their eyes front, as still as the kata steles.
The hundred looked at all this.
Then they looked at each other.
“Oh, no,” whispered Hilde Aarn.
“Oh, no.
That’s a lot of towels.”
She was right.
Every footman and every maid in those three lines had something folded over one arm.
White.
Soft.
Thick.
The Archduke and the three elders came up the ramp behind them and took their places at the side of the terrace, and the Archduke gave his mother a short bow.
Lady Seraphina inclined her head to her son.
Then she stepped forward, and the terrace went quiet.
* * *
“Welcome home,” said Lady Seraphina.
Her voice was soft, and low, and it carried to the back of the terrace without any effort at all, the way the sound of water carries.
“You went north as candidates.
You have come back as something else.
I have heard everything from my sons.
I have heard about the Rimefang, and the Sleepers, and the Hollowmere, and the run home.” Her eyes moved, very briefly, toward the gate and the boulder beside it, and something at the corner of her mouth deepened.
“And I have seen a few things for myself.”
Lyra, in the Seventh’s line, kept her face perfectly still.
“You have finished the first phase of your training, which was to make your bodies strong.
You have finished the second, which was to learn, on the Frozen Land, what that strength is for.” Seraphina folded her hands.
“From this morning, you begin the third.”
A stir went down the lines.
A third phase.
Nobody had said anything about a third phase.
“The third phase,” said Lady Seraphina, “is…”
The air cracked.
There was no other word for it.
In the middle of the terrace, ten paces in front of the Matriarch, a line appeared in the air, perfectly straight and perfectly black, a hand’s breadth long, as though someone had drawn a pen-stroke across the morning.
Then it grew.
It ran upward and downward at the same time, silently, until it was taller than a man, and it opened, the way a wound opens, and through it came a breath of air so cold and so old that every soldier on the terrace felt it in their teeth.
And a man stepped out of the dark.
He was very tall.
Taller than the Archduke.
Midnight-black hair fell past his broad shoulders, and he wore a plain dark coat with no device on it at all, and on his forehead, faint as a scar, a sword-crest glowed crimson and azure and faded.
His eyes were the deep, bottomless blue of the sea under ice.
Nobody needed to be told who he was.
There was only one man in Aethoria who opened the air like a door.
Kaelen Eisenhardt.
The Void-Severing Sword Emperor.
The man who had raised the Wall.
A hundred young soldiers of the North forgot how to breathe.
But he was not alone.
Behind him, out of the dark, stepping carefully over the edge of the cut in the air the way people step down off a cart, came three more figures.
Three young people in travel-stained Frostweave.
One of them had his left arm bound in a sling, and was very pale.
One of them had a black patch over his left eye.
And one of them, a girl with dark braids, was leaning on a crutch and trying, very hard, to look as though she was not.
Hilde Aarn made a sound that was not a word.
It was Hakon.
It was Emrik Stahl and Ylva Brenn.
The three of them who had stayed behind at the Twelfth Tower, wounded, who were supposed to be coming home slowly, by sledge and by road, with a Legion escort, in a week, perhaps two.
They stood blinking on the granite of the Sword-Pond in the morning sun, with the Sword Emperor of Aethoria standing behind them like a cliff, looking exactly as dazed as people look who were on the battlements of a tower on the Wall a moment ago, and are not now.
Then Master Osric Vellane moved.
For the first time in living memory, the Head Butler of Frost-Crest hurried.
He crossed the terrace in six long strides with Mistress Agathe at his side, and the Head Butler put his arm under Hakon’s good one and the Head Maid took Ylva’s elbow and the crutch from her hand all at once, and between them, with Emrik walking carefully beside, they brought the three of them across the granite to the Seventh’s line.
Hilde did not wait for them to arrive.
She broke out of the line and ran, and hit her brother so hard that the Head Butler had to catch them both.
The Sword Emperor watched this for a moment.
He did not say anything.
He did not look at the hundred, or at his sons.
He looked, once, at his wife, across the terrace: and the cold, stoic, terrifying face of the First Blade of Aethoria softened, for the space of one heartbeat, into something that nobody in that crowd would ever have believed if they had not seen it with their own eyes.
Then he turned his head and looked at Lyra.
It was only a glance.
It went over the hundred like a cold wind and found her in the Seventh’s line and rested there, for one heartbeat, with those bottomless blue eyes.
Lyra felt it all the way down to the bottom of her, to the place under her grandmother’s net where something old and patient slept.
She did not look away.
Her grandfather’s mouth moved.
Very slightly.
It might have been a smile.
And then he was gone.
Not through the cut in the air.
The cut was already closing behind him, silently, from both ends at once, like a seam being sewn.
He simply was not there any more.
One moment the Sword Emperor stood on the granite of the Sword-Pond, and the next there was only the morning sun on the stone where he had been, and a faint smell of snow from somewhere very far away.
Nobody moved.
A hundred young soldiers stood on the terrace with their mouths open.
Lord Roderick was grinning.
Lord Lucian was looking at the place in the air where the cut had been, with an expression of deep professional envy.
The Archduke had closed his eyes, briefly, as a man does when his father has done something entirely typical of him in front of a great many witnesses.
Lady Seraphina cleared her throat.
“Ehem,” she said, delicately.
Every head on the terrace snapped back to her.
“As I was saying,” said the Matriarch of House Eisenhardt, exactly as though nothing whatever had happened, “you begin today the third phase of your training.
And I will tell you only this about it.” Her soft voice did not change.
But something behind it did.
“In this phase, you will see things, and hear things, that are not spoken of outside this house.
What you do with what you see and hear is yours to choose.
Nobody will ask you to swear an oath.
Nobody will threaten you.
We trust you.” She let that sit.
“That is the third phase.
To be trusted.
And to choose.”
Her eyes went slowly down the lines, one face at a time.
“And one thing more,” she said, “so that nobody can say afterward that they were not told.
Where I am taking you this morning, you will go seven times.
Together.
All of you, every one.
Today is the first, and it will be the gentlest.
Each time after it will go deeper, and each time it goes deeper it will hurt more.
By the seventh, some of you will wish you were back on the Frozen Land with the Beast King.”
The soft voice did not rise at all.
“You will not leave the water.
You will not ask to be taken out.
Whatever it does to you, you will endure it.” A pause.
“That is not a request.”
Nobody on the terrace breathed.
Somewhere in the Ninth Lance, Bram Holloway made a very small sound.
She smiled at them again, gently.
“And now,” she said, “everyone, to the Starwell.”
Nobody knew what the Starwell was.
But behind her, in their three perfect lines, every footman and every maid in Frost-Crest stepped forward at once, with the towels over their arms.
II.
The Starwell
The footmen came for the boys.
They did it the way the servants of Frost-Crest did everything, with perfect courtesy and absolute efficiency and no possibility of argument.
Two footmen to each boy, one on either side.
A polite bow.
If the young gentleman would permit.
And before the young gentleman had worked out what he was being asked to permit, he had been lifted off his feet by both elbows and was being carried across the terrace with his boots dangling, like a parcel.
“Wait,” said Sigurd Kell, rising into the air between two footmen half his size.
“Wait, I can walk, I can walk…”
“Of course, sir,” said the footman on his left, not putting him down.
“I ran for two days…”
“Quite so, sir.
Mind your head on the arch, sir.”
All across the terrace, the young warriors of the North, who had killed a Beast King’s pack and run over the back of a glacier warden, were being carried off by the household staff like so much laundry.
Rowan Thorne went without a word, with his eyes shut, apparently past caring.
Finn went red to the ears.
Bram Holloway, who had carried Tilda Marsh across half the Frozen Land, burst into tears of pure relief at being carried by somebody else and thanked both his footmen individually, at length.
Cedric Eisenhardt was carried by Lord Roderick personally, upside down, over one shoulder, and was laughing too hard to protest.
The girls were escorted.
The maids of Frost-Crest did not lift anyone.
They simply appeared, one on each side of each girl, and slipped an arm through hers, and walked.
It was very gentle.
It was impossible to get out of.
Isolde Frostmere tried, once, to stop, and found that both her arms were going in the same direction as the maids’ arms whether she liked it or not, and that the maids were smiling at her with enormous kindness, and that she was still walking.
Mistress Agathe Rennick walked at the head of them all with her great ring of keys, and did not look back.
She did not need to.
* * *
They went down.
Through the inner court, through a door in the oldest wall of the citadel that most of them had walked past every day for nine weeks and never seen open: a low, round-topped door of black stone, no taller than a man, with no handle and no lock, only a single star cut into the lintel.
Mistress Agathe touched the star with one of her keys, and the door swung inward without a sound.
Beyond it, a stair went down into the rock.
It was a long stair.
It turned, and turned again, spiralling down through the heart of the mountain the citadel was built on, and the walls of it were not stone but ice: old, blue, glacier ice, so clear and so deep that as they went down they could see things frozen in it, very far in.
Shapes like trees.
Shapes like bones.
Something that might have been a great curved rib, as long as a ship.
Lamps hung on the walls every few steps, but they were not lit, and they did not need to be: there was light coming up the stair from below, faint and silver and moving, like light on the bottom of a river.
And the air got warmer.
That was the strangest thing.
They were going down into a glacier, under a mountain, in the far North, and with every turn of the stair the air grew softer and warmer and sweeter, until it was like the air of a spring morning, and smelled of snowmelt, and green things, and something else, something sharp and bright and clean, like the air just after lightning.
Lady Seraphina walked at the front, beside Mistress Agathe.
Halfway down, without turning round, she began to speak, in that soft voice that carried like water.
“Before the Empire,” she said, “before the Wall, before the Temple and its Dawn, before there were Sword Emperors or Archdukes or houses of any kind in the North, there was this place.
Nobody knows who first found it.
Nobody knows how old it is.
The oldest story says that a star fell here, once, before the first morning of the world, and that its heart did not go out.
It sank down into the rock, and melted, and became water.”
The stair turned.
The silver light grew stronger.
“Twelve hundred years ago, a young swordsman came north alone to fight the things on the ice.
He fought for a long time, and then one winter he lost.
He crawled into a cave on this mountain to die.
He found the water.
He went into it, because there was nothing else to do.” A pause.
“In the morning, he came out of it whole.
And he looked at the mountain, and the ice, and the things that were still out there on the Frozen Land, and he thought: someone should guard this.”
Nobody said anything.
Nobody needed to ask who the young swordsman had been.
“So he built the Wall to the north of it,” said Lady Seraphina.
“And he built his house on top of it.
And when he laid the Ten-Fold Formation over this valley, he anchored it here.
That is why it is always spring in the valley of the Eisenhardts.
It is not the Formation’s warmth you feel when you come through the curtain.
It is this.”
They came round the last turn of the stair.
* * *
It was a cavern.
That was the first thing.
A cavern so large that for a moment none of them understood what they were looking at, because the eye kept trying to find the far wall and failing.
The walls were ice, the same old, clear, glacier-blue ice as the stair, rising up and up and curving inward overhead into a great dome.
And at the very top of the dome, high above, there was a hole.
A perfect round opening, like the eye of a needle, through which the morning sky showed: a single coin of pale, clear blue.
A shaft of real sunlight came down through it, slanting, golden, and fell all the way to the floor of the cavern, and lit the mist.
Because there was mist.
Soft and white and slow-moving, drifting in long veils across the cavern floor, rising off the water.
And the water.
It came down the cavern in terraces.
Nine of them: nine pools, one below another, like a great wide stair of mirrors descending into the heart of the mountain.
Each was ringed with a lip of pale stone worn smooth as glass, and the water spilled over each lip into the next in long, thin, silver curtains that made a sound like very distant bells.
The topmost pools were wide and shallow and clear as air.
The lower ones grew deeper and darker and more still.
And the last, the ninth, at the very bottom, under the shaft of sunlight, was small and round and perfectly black, and perfectly calm, and did not reflect the sky at all.
All of it was lit from within.
That was why they called it the Starwell.
Deep down in the water, in every pool, there were lights.
Thousands of them.
Tiny points of silver and white and pale violet, drifting slowly up through the water from somewhere far below, like stars rising, like sparks going up from a fire in slow motion.
When they reached the surface they did not burst.
They simply faded, and more came up behind them, endlessly, so that the whole stair of pools glowed softly from beneath, and the light moved on the ice walls of the cavern in long slow ripples, silver and blue and violet, as though the whole mountain were breathing.
On the stone lips between the terraces, Moon-Frost Lotus grew: the same pale flowers that bloomed on the Winter-Lily Lake, but larger, and open, glowing faintly in the dim.
Ice hung from the dome above in great still chandeliers, and every one of them caught the light from the water and threw it back, so that the cavern was full of slow, drifting points of brightness above and below.
The air was warm and sweet and so full of mana that it prickled on the skin.
Breathing it felt like drinking cold water when you are very thirsty.
Nobody said anything at all.
Hilde Aarn, standing at the foot of the stair with Hakon’s good arm locked in both of hers, was the first to find her voice.
And all she said, very softly, was: “Oh.”
“The Temple heals with the light of the Dawn,” said Lady Seraphina quietly, beside them.
“It is a fine light.
It closes wounds from the outside, the way a bandage does.
It gives you something you did not have.” She looked out over the terraces.
“The Starwell does not give you anything.
It remembers you.
It remembers what your body was meant to be, and your blood, and your spirit, before anything hurt them.
And it puts you back.”
She turned to them, and smiled her gentle smile.
“Bathing robes are behind the screens,” she said.
“Gentlemen to the left.
Ladies to the right.
Mistress Agathe will help anyone who needs it.”
* * *
The bathing robes were white linen, long-sleeved and ankle-length, belted at the waist, and much heavier than they looked: woven, Mistress Agathe informed them, with a thread of frost-mithril, so that they would not float up round anyone’s ears.
They changed behind tall screens of carved white wood, and came out again, barefoot on the warm stone, in two awkward groups on either side of the uppermost pool, not looking at each other.
The water lapped at the lip of the first terrace, a step below their feet, silver and glowing and very, very clear.
“So,” said Sigurd Kell.
“We just…
get in?”
“Ah,” said Lord Roderick, from behind him, with enormous happiness.
“Not quite.”
And he put one enormous hand flat between Sigurd’s shoulder blades, and pushed.
Sigurd went into the Starwell with a noise like a frost-boar falling off a cliff.
That was the signal.
All along the edge of the terrace, the footmen of Frost-Crest stepped forward with their perfect courtesy, and bowed, and said, If the young gentleman would permit, and threw the young gentlemen in.
Two at a time, by the arms and the ankles, in long, graceful arcs, like sacks of grain being loaded onto a barge.
“I can’t swim!” shrieked Bram Holloway, in mid-air.
“You won’t need to, sir,” called his footman after him, kindly.
On the other side, the maids did not throw anyone.
They did not need to.
They simply walked each girl to the edge of the pool, very gently, arm in arm, smiling, and then let go, and stepped back, and Mistress Agathe Rennick walked along behind the line and tapped each girl once, lightly, between the shoulder blades, with her great ring of keys.
They went in like dominoes.
Isolde Frostmere was the only one who saw it coming, and turned round to say something cutting.
Mistress Agathe looked up at her, and smiled like a grandmother, and tapped her on the breastbone instead, and Isolde went in backward, with her mouth still open, braids and all.
Cedric was thrown in by Lord Roderick, who did not use his arms, but simply took him by the back of the robe and the belt and spun round twice like a hammer-thrower and let go.
Cedric went thirty feet across the cavern, shouting, and hit the second terrace, and came up laughing and spitting silver water.
Lyra Eisenhardt stood alone at the edge of the topmost pool, the last one left on the stone.
Nobody threw her.
Nobody tapped her.
Her grandmother was watching her from the foot of the stair, with her hands folded, and her uncles were watching her from the side, and her father was watching her from behind them all with that tired, quiet face.
She looked down at the water, at the slow silver stars rising through it.
Then she stepped off the edge, and let the Starwell take her.
III.
What the Water Remembers
The first thing the Starwell took was the tiredness.
They felt it go before they had even come up for breath.
Two days and two nights of running, nine days on the Hollowmere, weeks on the Frozen Land: all of it had been sitting in their bodies like wet sand, in their legs and their backs and behind their eyes, and the water simply reached in and lifted it out.
It went the way snow goes off a roof in spring, all at once, in one long soft slide.
One moment a hundred young soldiers were sinking into the glowing water with their bones aching.
The next they were floating, and the ache was gone, and they could not remember what it had felt like.
The water was warm.
Not hot.
Warm like a hand.
It held them up, gently, the way salt water does, so that nobody sank, not even Bram Holloway, who was floating on his back in the second terrace with his arms out, staring up at the coin of blue sky in the roof of the dome, tears running sideways into his ears, saying, “Oh.
Oh.
Oh,” over and over again.
That was what it felt like.
The tiny lights rising through the water did not stop when they reached a body.
They went through it.
They went in at the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands, cool and bright and tingling, and rose up through bone and blood and breath, and came out at the crown of the head and the tips of the fingers and went on up to the surface, and faded, and more came behind them.
Every soldier in the Starwell could feel them, thousands of them, going through like cold sparks, like the first breath of air after a long time underwater.
Mira Halvard, floating in the third terrace with her eyes wide open, said in a stunned, faraway voice that it was like being rinsed from the inside.
Then the stars began to gather.
Not everywhere.
They gathered where things were wrong.
* * *
The footmen had carried the three from the Twelfth Tower down the steps into the uppermost pool very carefully, one at a time, and laid them on the water as gently as if they were made of paper.
Ylva Brenn first.
Then Emrik.
Then Hakon, with his arm still in its sling, which the Head Butler unbound with his own long hands and lifted away and folded over his arm as though it were a napkin at dinner.
The stars found them at once.
They came streaming through the water from every side, hundreds of them, thousands, the way sparks fly to a draught, and gathered round the three in clouds of soft white light.
Round Ylva’s thigh, where the goblin’s black-ice arrowhead had shattered into forty or fifty splinters and Lord Kenneth had spent two hours with his tweezers and his soul-flame taking them out, and missed, he had always believed, at least three.
Round Hakon’s left arm, above the elbow, where the arrow had gone straight through and broken the bone on its way.
And round Emrik Stahl’s face.
Round his left eye, under the black patch, where a goblin’s ice-axe had cut the nerve that let him see.
Ylva made a small sound and put her hand down under the water to her thigh.
Three tiny black slivers rose out of the skin there, one after another, and drifted up through the water, and dissolved into nothing before they reached the surface.
The ragged pink scar where they had come out went pale.
Then it went white.
Then it was simply not there, and there was only smooth skin under her hand, as though nothing had ever happened to it at all.
She stood up in the shallow water, on both legs, without her crutch.
She put her weight on the left one.
And then she jumped, straight up, with a shriek, and came down with a splash, and burst into tears.
Hakon Aarn did not jump.
He lay in the water with his eyes closed and the stars swarming round his arm, and they could all hear it: a sound, very faint, very clear, like ice settling on a lake on a winter night.
Tick.
And again, tick.
The bone knitting.
Not the way Kenneth had splinted it, straight and stiff and aching, a bone that would work but would ache in the cold for the rest of his life.
The way it had been before.
The way it had been when he was born.
He opened his eyes.
He lifted his left arm out of the water, slowly, and looked at it.
Then he made a fist, and opened it, and made a fist again.
He bent the elbow all the way.
Then he reached across with it, and took his sister’s hand.
Hilde did not say anything.
She had not been able to say anything since the Sword Emperor stepped out of the air.
She held on to her brother’s left hand with both of hers and cried silently, and he let her.
And Emrik Stahl.
The smith’s son from the southern valleys, who had carried a hammer before he carried an axe, had taken off his black patch when the footmen laid him in the water, because Mistress Agathe had told him to.
He lay on his back in the Starwell with his eyes closed.
He did not dare open them.
The stars had gathered on his left eyelid so thickly that it glowed white, like a lamp behind paper, and he could feel something happening behind it: a long, fine, cold thread of feeling, running back from the eye into the dark of his head, very slowly, like a stitch being drawn through cloth.
Then it stopped.
And the stars drifted away.
Emrik opened his eyes.
Above him, through the round hole in the roof of the dome, the sky was blue.
He could see it.
He could see it with both eyes: one blue coin of sky, not half of one, and the ice chandeliers hanging round it catching the light, on the left as well as the right.
On the left.
He turned his head to the left, and there was the wall of the cavern, and the silver light moving on it, and his leader from the Fourth Lance standing waist-deep in the water a few yards away, staring at him with his mouth open, who had spent five weeks calling left for him in every fight.
“Left,” said Emrik Stahl.
His voice cracked into pieces.
“Danel.
Danel, I can see you.
On the left.”
On the stone at the edge of the pool, Lord Kenneth Eisenhardt, who had told a sixteen-year-old boy five weeks ago that the nerve was cut, not torn, and had gone outside afterward and stood in the snow by himself for a long time, sat down very suddenly on the warm stone with his spectacles in his hand, and put his face in his other hand, and did not move for a while.
All through the Starwell, the stars went on gathering.
Smaller things.
Older things.
Senna Vaar’s bruised side, that had been bruised and bruised again since the Rimefang, went from purple to yellow to nothing.
The red rings round Sigurd Kell’s wrists and ankles where the spirit-iron cuffs had rubbed him raw for weeks faded and vanished.
Mira’s fingertips, scarred from eight years of burns over the cauldron, went smooth.
The chilblains on everyone’s toes.
The cracked lips.
The old white seam on Finn Brannoc’s palm from a butcher’s knife when he was nine.
The Starwell found every one of them, and remembered what had been there before, and put it back.
It was as though none of it had ever happened.
* * *
And then the water began to move.
It was very gentle, at first.
A current, where there had not been one: a slow, warm drift, flowing through the terraces like a breath being drawn in.
It moved the floating bodies, softly, this way and that.
Most of them it simply turned in slow circles and let be.
But some of them, it carried.
Rowan Thorne felt it take him.
He was floating on his back in the second terrace with his eyes shut, half asleep, and he felt the water close round him like a hand and draw him, slowly, steadily, across the pool.
He opened his eyes.
He tried to swim against it, and could not.
It was not strong.
It simply would not let him go the other way.
It drew him across the terrace, and over the silver lip of it in a long, gentle slide into the third, and on across the third, toward…
Isolde Frostmere was standing chest-deep in the middle of the third terrace, in her white robe, with her silver braids come half undone and floating on the water round her shoulders like strands of light.
She was not moving.
She was watching him come.
And her face, for the first time since anyone had known her, was completely, utterly unguarded: startled and wide-eyed and young.
The current set Rowan on his feet in front of her.
An arm’s length away.
Facing her.
And held him there.
He could not step back.
He tried, once, and the water would not let him.
It was not a trap.
It did not feel like a trap.
It felt like a hand on his back, very gentle, very patient, saying here.
This is where you are meant to stand.
Between them, in the water, the stars were rising.
Not drifting up at random, the way they did everywhere else.
Rising in a column.
A slender pillar of silver light that came up from the deeps of the Starwell and stood in the water between them, between her heart and his, and climbed up into the air, and did not fade.
All across the Starwell, the same thing was happening.
Finn Brannoc came drifting across the first terrace on a slow warm current, red to the ears, to where Senna Vaar was already standing waiting, with her short dark hair plastered to her head and her face doing something very complicated.
The pillar of stars rose between them the moment he stopped.
Sigurd Kell came across the fourth terrace like a log on a river, protesting loudly the whole way, and was set down in front of Mira Halvard, who was standing with her arms folded and an expression of pure scientific outrage.
The pillar rose between them anyway.
Mira looked at it.
Then at him.
And went, slowly, the colour of a Dragon-Blood Orchid.
Bram Holloway, still crying, was floated in front of Tilda Marsh, who was crying too, for no reason she could explain.
Ylva Brenn, still laughing on her two good legs, turned round and found Emrik Stahl in front of her with both his eyes wide open, and the pillar between them.
And Arne Stenvik, who had been standing quite still in the sixth terrace like a large and patient rock, found the current drawing him, slowly and inexorably, across the pool toward a small, ginger, curly-haired girl who had just let go of her brother’s newly mended arm and turned round and seen him coming, and gone white, and then red, and then opened her mouth and for once in her life not said a single word.
Hakon Aarn looked at the pillar of stars rising between his sister and Arne Stenvik.
He looked at Arne Stenvik.
Then he looked up at the roof of the cavern with an expression of profound resignation.
“Oh, no,” said Hakon.
There were others.
More than a dozen pairs, across the nine terraces, from every lance.
The Second’s sharp, practical leader and a quiet boy from the First.
Two of the Fifth.
A girl from the Tenth and the boy who had asked if they were allowed to clap, who looked as though he very much wanted to ask if he was allowed to do this, and did not dare.
Each pair drawn together across the water and set face to face, an arm’s length apart, with a slender pillar of silver stars rising between them.
“What is it?” called Hilde Aarn, in a high, thin voice, not taking her eyes off Arne.
“Lady Seraphina, what’s it doing?”
The Matriarch of House Eisenhardt stood at the edge of the uppermost pool with her hands folded and her grey veil thrown back.
She was smiling.
It was a different smile from before.
Older.
Softer.
“It is remembering you,” she said.
“That is all it ever does.
And some of you, it seems, it remembers together.”
She looked out over the terraces, at the pairs standing in the glowing water.
“Every one of you has mana in your blood.
You have been learning to move it, these nine weeks, round your own bodies, through your own channels.
But mana is like water.
It flows best where it has somewhere to go.
And sometimes there is another person whose channels are shaped to receive yours, and whose mana is shaped to flow into you, as if the two of you were cut from the same piece of cloth.” She paused.
“The Starwell knows.
It is not a command.
It does not make anything.
It only recognises what is already there.
What you do with it,” and there was a ghost of laughter in her soft voice, “is, like everything else today, yours to choose.”
She lifted one hand.
“Raise your hands,” she said.
“Palm to palm.
Do not hold.
Only touch.
And close your eyes, and breathe.”
Rowan Thorne looked at Isolde Frostmere across the pillar of stars.
She looked back at him.
Her ears were scarlet.
So, he was absolutely certain, were his.
She raised her hands.
After a moment, so did he.
Palm to palm, across the light.
Not holding.
Only touching.
And the mana began to flow.
He felt it go out of him first: out of his chest, out of the place under his breastbone where his breath began, down his arms in a warm, slow tide, and out through his palms into hers.
He felt her take it.
And then he felt it come back: not his own mana, not any more, but changed, carried through her and turned and returned, cool and silver and bright, in through his palms and up his arms and down into his chest and round through every channel in his body, the way a river runs round a mill and turns the wheel and runs on.
And out again.
And back.
Round and round, faster and stronger every time, a great slow wheel of light turning between the two of them, through the pillar of stars, through their hands, through their blood.
Every channel it passed through, it widened.
Every knot it met, it loosened.
It went into places in his body he had never been able to reach, places the Thousand Steps had never touched and Lord Lucian’s lessons had only hinted at, and opened them, gently, like someone opening a shutter onto the morning.
All across the Starwell, the wheels of light were turning.
And then, in the first terrace, with a sound like a sheet of ice cracking on a lake, Senna Vaar and Finn Brannoc broke through.
They felt it at the same moment.
A wall inside them both, the wall every cultivator knows, the one you push against for months and years and cannot move: and the wheel of light between them turned once more, and the wall was simply not there.
A ring of silver light burst out from the pair of them across the surface of the pool and rolled away to the edges and up the walls of the cavern.
Senna’s eyes flew open.
So did Finn’s.
They stared at each other across the pillar of stars with their palms still pressed together and their mouths open, and neither of them said anything at all, because there was nothing in either of their languages for it.
A heartbeat later, in the fourth terrace, a second ring of light burst out across the water: Sigurd Kell, with his eyes screwed shut and his big face blazing red, and Mira Halvard opposite him with her green-gold soul-flame suddenly burning, of its own accord, in the hollow of her joined palms, bright as a little sun.
“Oh,” said Mira, staring at it.
“Oh.
That’s…
that’s the next realm.
Kell.
Kell, that’s the next realm, I wasn’t supposed to reach that for years…”
“Is that good?” said Sigurd, not opening his eyes.
“Yes, you idiot!”
“Then why are you crying?”
“I’m NOT!”
The rings of light went on, here and there across the terraces, one and then another, like stones dropped into still water.
Not everyone.
But more than anyone on the stone had dared to hope.
Lord Roderick, watching from the edge with his arms folded, was grinning so widely it looked painful.
Lord Kenneth was writing in his ledger with a shaking hand.
Lucian stood very still with his eyes half closed, as though listening to music.
* * *
Two people in the Starwell had not been moved by the current at all.
Cedric Eisenhardt floated alone in the middle of the second terrace, turning slowly round and round, watching his friends being drawn away from him across the water one after another.
Rowan.
Sigurd.
Finn.
Even Arne.
He watched the pillars of stars go up, and the wheels of light begin to turn, and the rings of light burst out across the pools.
No current came for him.
The water lapped round him, warm and patient and perfectly still.
“Well,” said the heir of the North, to the roof of the cavern, “that’s insulting.”
A few yards away, Lyra floated on her back with her black hair spread round her on the water like ink, and looked up at the coin of blue sky.
No current came for her either.
She had not expected one.
She was not sure what she would have done if it had.
But for one heartbeat, just one, as she lay there, the water round her changed colour.
Not silver.
Not violet.
Gold.
A thin, faint thread of gold, running away from her through the water toward the south wall of the cavern, as though pointing at something very far away, beyond the mountain, beyond the Wall, beyond the whole long length of the Empire.
It was there.
And then it was gone, so quickly that she was not sure she had seen it.
She was the only one who had.
Except for her grandmother, standing at the edge of the uppermost pool.
Lady Seraphina had seen it.
And she said nothing at all.
But she looked south, for a moment, toward a capital where the sun always shone, and the corner of her mouth deepened, very slightly, the way it had when she looked at the boulder.
IV.
Awakening
Cedric was still floating alone, feeling insulted, when the Starwell came for him after all.
Not with a current.
With the stars.
They came up from beneath him all at once, out of the deep water of the second terrace, not drifting this time but rushing: a great upward torrent of silver light that hit him from below like a wave and went into him and did not come out again.
He gasped.
He doubled up in the water.
And all across the Starwell, every head turned toward him, because the light round the heir of the North had gone from silver to blue: a deep, hard, glittering blue, the colour of the heart of a glacier, the colour the mithril on his cleaver had gone on the shore of the Hollowmere when he laid it along the frost-boar’s spine.
“Ah,” said Lord Roderick, on the stone, very softly, and unfolded his arms.
“There it is.”
Cedric could not hear him.
Cedric could not hear anything except his own blood.
It was roaring.
That was the only word.
The blood in his veins, the Eisenhardt blood that their grandfather had carried down from the dragons of the Kharn, that was not blood at all but liquid mana alloyed with primordial iron, had been running quietly through him all his life like a river under ice.
And now the ice was breaking.
He could feel it go: a crack, deep in his chest, and then another, and another, racing outward down every vein in his body, and the river underneath woke up and roared.
He felt the acupoints open.
He had been opening them one at a time for years, the way every Eisenhardt child did, the hard way: sitting cross-legged in the cold with Uncle Roderick bellowing at him, driving mana into one dormant node after another until it gave, one point every few months if he was lucky.
The thirty-six Mortal Acupoints of the Terrestrial Gate, in the limbs and the shoulders and the spine.
He had opened twenty-two of them in nine years.
Now the rest went off like a string of fireworks.
Twenty-three, in his left wrist: a crack of cold light.
Twenty-four, the right.
Twenty-five and twenty-six, the elbows, together.
Up the arms, across the shoulders, crack, crack, crack, down the long ladder of his spine one vertebra after another like someone running a stick along a railing.
Each one hit him like a hammer of ice, and each one, as it opened, poured cold fire down into the bones round it.
He could feel his bones changing.
Feel them grow heavier and denser and harder, the way iron changes in the forge under Brunhild Ashanvil’s hammer, from grey and brittle to blue and bright and impossible to break.
He could feel his sinews draw tight as bowstrings.
Feel his skin go cool and smooth and hard as tempered star-iron.
Thirty-five.
Thirty-six.
The Terrestrial Gate stood open.
And the water round him went black.
It came out of him through his skin: a thick, dark, grey-black stain, like ink, like soot, like smoke, pouring out of every pore at once and spreading through the glowing water in great slow clouds.
Impurities.
Everything his body had ever taken in and not been able to use.
Every bad meal and every winter cold and every bruise that had healed crooked, every drop of poison from every beast he had ever butchered, every scrap of stale old mana that had clogged his channels since he was a baby.
The Starwell drew all of it out of him, and it hung in the water round him in a dark cloud that smelled faintly of iron and old smoke, and then the silver stars came streaming into the cloud from every side and ate it, the way morning eats fog, until the water was clear again.
Cedric came up out of the water with a gasp.
And everyone on the stone saw it.
On his forearms, where the white linen sleeves had fallen back, there were scales.
Faint.
Translucent.
Ice-blue and glittering, in long overlapping rows from the wrist to the elbow, like frost on a windowpane, like the hide of the primal ice drakes in the Sword Emperor’s high aerie.
They were there for three heartbeats, gleaming.
Then they sank back into his skin and were gone.
But his eyes, when he opened them, were not the grey of his father’s any more.
They were the deep, clear, burning blue of glacier ice, with a pupil like a slit of black; and that lasted a heartbeat longer, and then they were grey again.
Then he roared.
He did not mean to.
It came up out of him from somewhere much deeper than his chest, and it was not his voice.
It was a sound nobody in that cavern had ever heard a human throat make: huge and cold and ringing, a dragon’s sound, the sound the drakes of the aerie made at dawn when they shook the frost from their wings.
It rolled up through the dome of the Starwell and shook the ice chandeliers so that they chimed, and every Moon-Frost Lotus on every terrace closed its petals at once.
The air round Cedric went still.
And the drops of water falling from his hair stopped in the air, all round him, in a perfect circle that went on widening: three paces, five, eight, and on out across the water, twenty yards in every direction, every drop hanging there glittering in the starlight, every one of them sharp-edged, like a cloud of tiny blades.
The circle held.
It did not flicker and die, the way it had on the Hollowmere.
It held, steady and glittering, while Cedric Eisenhardt stood in the middle of it, breathing hard, staring at his own hands.
“Domain of the Blade,” said Lord Lucian.
He said it quite quietly.
But every Eisenhardt on that stone turned to look at him, because Lucian did not say things he was not sure of.
“Grand Sword Master,” said Lucian.
And then, after a moment, in a slightly different voice: “He’s twenty yards across, Roderick.
Twenty.
On his first day.”
Lord Roderick did not answer.
Lord Roderick was standing on the edge of the terrace with both fists clenched and tears pouring openly down his enormous face, and he was not even trying to hide it.
“That’s my NEPHEW!” he roared.
And this time, nobody laughed.
* * *
In the third terrace, between Rowan Thorne and Isolde Frostmere, the wheel of light had been turning for a long time.
It had been silver, at first, like all the others.
Nobody noticed when it changed.
It happened slowly, the way dawn happens, and by the time anyone on the stone looked, the pillar of stars rising between the two of them had become two colours, wound round each other like two strands of a rope.
One was silver.
Not the cool, soft silver of the Starwell, but a harder, brighter, whiter silver, the colour of the moon on a cold night, the colour of the arrow that had come out of nothing on an empty string in the Rimefang Gorge.
And the other was green.
A deep, living, golden green, the colour of sunlight through new leaves, the colour that nobody in the Frozen North had any reason to have in their blood at all.
Isolde felt it first.
She had always known there was something wrong with her silver.
Her family’s mana was frost.
The Frostmeres had been frost for nine hundred years: pale, blue, cold, the frost of the fourth-oldest house in the North.
But when the arrow came to her on the ledge in the gorge, it had not been frost.
It had been silver.
And she had never told anyone how much that frightened her.
Now she felt where it came from.
It came from very far down.
Below her family.
Below the nine hundred years.
From somewhere so old that it had no name she knew, from a time before there were houses in the North at all, when someone with her eyes had stood on a hill under a sky full of stars and drawn a bow with no arrow on it, and the moon had answered.
She felt it wake.
It went through her the way the stars had gone through her: from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head, but slowly, deliberately, as if it were taking its time to look round at what she had become.
Her blood went cold, and then bright.
Her channels widened under it, and widened, until she felt as though someone had opened every window in a house that had been shut up for a thousand years.
Her eyes burned.
She knew, without seeing, that they had gone from silver-grey to silver, pure silver, with no grey left in them at all.
And on her brow, between her eyes, something faint and cool and shining sketched itself into her skin: a thin crescent, like a new moon, like a bow seen edge-on, glowing softly, and stayed.
And the darkness came out of her too.
The same black cloud that had come out of Cedric, out of every pore, the impurities of a whole lifetime drawn out of her skin and bones and blood and spread through the water round her.
She felt her body lighten as it went.
Felt her bones grow fine and hard and light as a bird’s, and her sinews draw taut as a bowstring, and her sight sharpen and sharpen until she could see every single star rising through the water in the deepest pool at the bottom of the cavern, and count them.
Across the pillar of light, with his hands still pressed to hers, Rowan Thorne was going through the same thing.
But his was green.
He had never known anything about his blood.
He was a farmer’s son.
His father was a farmer’s son, and his father’s father, all the way back, as far as anyone in the barley fields had ever cared to count: Thornes, in the same valley, on the same thin soil, for as long as there had been a valley.
He had learned the sword in the citadel because the Archduke took in farm boys who could swing a stick, and he had been good at it because he worked harder than anyone else, and that was all.
That was all there had ever been to it.
Except that he could cut through things without touching them.
And nobody had ever been able to tell him why.
Now he knew.
It woke under him like a root waking in spring.
Something old and green and patient, that had been sleeping in the blood of a long line of barley farmers who had never once picked up a sword, waiting.
It came up through him slowly, the way sap rises, and everywhere it went it grew.
His channels did not widen the way Cedric’s had, cracking open under the ice.
They branched.
They put out new shoots, fine as hair, running into every corner of his body, places that had never had mana in them at all, until the whole of him was laced through with a living green network like the veins of a leaf held up to the light.
His bones grew dense and supple and strong as heartwood.
And when he finally understood what was happening, and stopped being afraid of it, and laughed, softly, with his eyes shut, the way he always did when he stopped trying, a faint green-gold light rose up round his head and settled there, like a circlet.
Like a crown of leaves and thorns, woven out of sunlight.
The black cloud of his impurities poured out of him into the water, and the stars ate it, and he was clean.
On the stone at the edge of the pool, Lord Lucian had gone very still.
He was looking at the green-gold circlet of light round the head of the boy he had been teaching to cut the stone and leave the log standing.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he said, very quietly, to nobody in particular:
“The leaf behind the leaf.
Of course.” And then, even more quietly: “Of course it was.”
Beside him, Lady Seraphina was looking at the pair of them too.
At the silver crescent on Isolde’s brow, and the crown of thorned light round Rowan’s head, and the two colours of mana wound round each other in the pillar of stars between them, turning and turning.
Her serene face did not change.
But her folded hands had tightened, very slightly.
“Mother,” said the Archduke, in a low voice.
“Do you know what those are?”
“Yes,” said Lady Seraphina.
“Will you tell them?”
“When they ask,” said the Matriarch.
“If they ask.” She did not take her eyes off the two of them.
“I did tell them, this morning, that they would see things today.
I did not say that some of those things would be themselves.”
In the third terrace, the wheel of light slowed, and settled, and the pillar of stars sank gently back into the water.
Rowan Thorne opened his eyes.
Isolde Frostmere opened hers: pure silver now, shining, with the new moon on her brow.
They were still palm to palm.
Neither of them had noticed.
“Rowan,” said Isolde.
Her voice was not quite steady.
“Your…
there’s a…” She lifted one hand off his, finally, and touched the air just above his hair, where the circlet of green-gold light still hung, very faintly.
“There’s a crown on your head.”
Rowan stared at her.
Then he reached up, slowly, and touched her forehead, very lightly, with one fingertip, just below the crescent of light.
“There’s a moon on yours,” he said.
They looked at each other for a long moment, in the glowing water, two people who had been rivals a week ago and were now, quite clearly, something else entirely, and had no idea what.
Then Isolde Frostmere took her other hand away from his, and turned round, and walked away through the water to the far side of the pool with great dignity, and stood there with her back to everyone and both hands pressed over her face.
And Rowan Thorne sank slowly down into the Starwell until only his eyes were showing, and stayed there.
* * *
And then, one by one, it was over.
The wheels of light slowed and stopped.
The pillars of stars sank back into the water.
The currents let go.
All across the nine terraces, the pairs stood looking at each other, or not looking at each other, and then began to drift apart, slowly, dazed, and climb out onto the warm stone at the edges of the pools, where the footmen and maids were waiting with their great soft towels.
Nobody spoke much.
Senna and Finn sat side by side on the lip of the first terrace with their feet in the water and their shoulders touching, not saying anything.
Mira Halvard wrapped herself in a towel and sat down beside Sigurd Kell and began, in a small dazed voice, to explain to him exactly what had happened to his meridians, and Sigurd listened to every word, which had never happened before.
Hilde Aarn sat between her brother and Arne Stenvik, holding Hakon’s mended hand on one side, and on the other side, not holding anything, sitting very straight, very carefully not looking at Arne at all, while Hakon looked at the ceiling and sighed.
The Starwell went quiet.
The stars went on rising softly through the empty pools, as they had for longer than anyone knew.
And only one person was still in the water.
* * *
Lyra had drifted, without noticing, all the way down.
She did not remember doing it.
She had been lying on her back in the second terrace, watching the gold thread vanish, and then watching her brother roar, and then watching Rowan and Isolde light up like two lamps.
And somewhere in there the water had taken her, gently, over one silver lip and then another and another, down the long stair of mirrors, past the deepening pools, until she was floating in the ninth.
The last pool.
The small, round, perfectly black one at the very bottom of the cavern, under the shaft of sunlight from the roof, that did not reflect the sky.
It was colder than the others.
Not cold.
Only cooler.
And it was still, so still that she could not feel herself floating, only lying in darkness with the shaft of sunlight falling on her face from far, far above.
And then, deep beneath her, the ninth pool began to light up.
Not silver.
It came up out of the dark in three colours, slowly, from very far down.
The first was blue: hard and clear and bright, the blue of glacier ice, the blue of her father’s house, the dragon-frost of the Eisenhardts.
The second was violet-black, so dark it was almost not a colour at all, the colour of the space between stars, the colour of the hidden blood her grandmother had carried out of the Nightshade clan five hundred years ago.
And the third…
The third had no colour.
Or it had all of them.
It was the colour of light before light had been divided into colours.
It hurt to look at.
It moved like something alive.
On the stone above, the Archduke took one step forward.
So did all three of his brothers, at once.
Lady Seraphina put out one hand without looking, and they stopped.
She walked to the edge of the ninth pool, alone, and stood there with her grey silk trailing on the wet stone, and looked down at her granddaughter.
“It’s all right,” she said softly.
To Lyra, or to her sons, or to the water itself.
“Let it look at her.
It has been waiting a long time.”
The three colours rose up through the black water, wound round each other, and came up into Lyra from beneath.
She felt the net first.
Her grandmother’s net, woven of light and frost and old Nightshade craft, stretched across the bottom of her over the thing that slept there.
She felt the Starwell find it.
Felt the water go into every strand of it, the way it had gone into Hakon’s bone and Emrik’s eye, and remember it.
Remember what it had been meant to be.
And the net did not break.
It did not open, the way it had opened on the Hollowmere.
It changed.
The strands that had been stretched tight, holding, straining, aching, softened, and lengthened, and wove themselves down into her, into her blood, into her bones, until they were not a net laid over her any more but part of her: a living thing, that breathed when she breathed.
The ache went away.
She had not even known it was still there.
It had been there so long, behind her ribs, since she was thirteen, the cold, clenched ache of holding, that she had forgotten what it was like without it.
And now it was gone, all at once, like a hand opening, and for one long moment Lyra Eisenhardt lay in the black water at the bottom of the Starwell and simply breathed, and felt nothing but her own breath, and cried, a little, without making a sound.
Then her body began to change.
It went deeper than it had for the others.
She was further along the road than they were, and the Starwell had further to go.
The impurities came out of her first, as they had for everyone: but not black.
Grey, and fine as smoke, and very little of it, because her uncle Kenneth had been purging her blood with his zero-toxin pills since she could walk.
The stars ate it in a heartbeat.
Then the acupoints.
She had finished the Terrestrial Gate years ago, in secret, under the old seal.
The thirty-six Spirit Acupoints of the Meridian Gate, in the chest and the diaphragm and the core arteries, she had been opening ever since, one by one, slowly, painfully, behind her grandmother’s fist.
Thirty of them.
Thirty in three years.
The last six opened in a single breath.
The Heart-Altar first, under her breastbone, with a sound inside her like a bell being struck very softly.
Then the Dan-Tian below it.
Then the four great arteries, one after another, one, two, three, four, and as the last of them opened she felt the whole Meridian Gate swing wide, all thirty-six points at once, and her blood surge through them like a tide coming in.
Her mana reservoir, already deep, went deeper, and deeper, and deeper, until she could not feel the bottom of it.
Until she knew, with absolute certainty, that she could fight for three days without stopping and not be tired.
And then, for the first time in her life, the Celestial Gate.
The first of the thirty-six Divine Acupoints.
The one at the back of the neck, where the spine meets the skull.
It opened with a feeling like cold water poured down her spine from the inside, and the world shifted.
She could see it.
Not with her eyes.
Behind them.
The air of the cavern, the water, the ice walls, the light: she could see the grain of them.
The fine invisible threads that everything was woven out of, the warp and weft of the world, stretched taut in every direction.
And here and there, very small, very faint, the places where those threads had worn thin, or frayed, or torn.
Micro-tears in reality.
The places a Void-Sword could go through.
She saw, for one dizzying instant, the long black seam in the air above the Sword-Pond terrace where her grandfather had cut open the air that morning, slowly healing.
Then the stars swept up through her body for the last time, from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head, and her whole spiritual body, the shape her mana made inside her, the thing the Temple called a soul and the Academy called a core and the Eisenhardts called simply the blade, settled into a new shape.
Longer.
Clearer.
Brighter.
Like a sword drawn from its sheath, and held up to the light, and found to be whole.
The three colours in the ninth pool flared, once, so bright that the whole cavern lit up blue and violet and that colour that was no colour, every ice chandelier blazing, every Moon-Frost Lotus on every terrace flung open at once.
Every soldier on the stone threw up their hands against it.
And then it went out.
The ninth pool was black and still again.
The shaft of sunlight fell through the roof onto the water.
And in the middle of the pool, Lyra Eisenhardt stood up.
The water came to her waist.
Her black hair hung down her back, soaked, past her waist, and in the shaft of sunlight it shone with a faint violet sheen that had never been there before.
Her eyes were open.
The violet-frost of them was clearer than it had ever been, and the silver rings round the pupils were bright as new coins, and when she turned her head to look up at the terraces above her, at her friends standing wrapped in towels along the edges of the pools staring down at her, her eyes caught the light and flashed like starlight on snow.
She was the last.
She had always been going to be the last.
On the stone at the edge of the ninth pool, Lady Seraphina held out a towel.
Not a footman’s towel.
Her own: grey, soft, folded over her arm, the same grey as her silk.
Lyra waded to the edge and climbed out onto the warm stone, and her grandmother wrapped the towel round her shoulders and drew it close under her chin with both hands, the way she had when Lyra was very small and had come in from the snow.
“There,” said Lady Seraphina.
“There.” She looked into her granddaughter’s eyes.
“How does it feel?”
Lyra tried to answer, and found she could not.
She shook her head.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said at last, very quietly.
“Grandmother.
It doesn’t hurt any more.”
Something passed over the Matriarch’s serene face, very quickly, and was gone.
“No,” she said.
“It won’t.
Not for a while.” She smoothed a wet strand of black hair off Lyra’s forehead with one finger.
“It has given us time, little star.
Not forever.
But time.” Her finger rested a moment longer on Lyra’s brow.
“And that was only the first of seven.
The gentlest.
Remember how this felt, when the others come.”
Then she turned Lyra round by the shoulders, gently, and pointed her up the long stair of pools toward the others.
They were all waiting at the top.
A hundred young soldiers of the North, scrubbed clean of the Frozen Land and of a great deal else, wrapped in white towels, with their hair dripping and their eyes very bright.
Cedric stood at the front of them, with frost still faintly glittering on his forearms.
Rowan beside him, with the last ghost of a green-gold circlet still fading from his hair.
Isolde, with a new moon on her brow.
Senna and Finn.
Mira and Sigurd.
Hilde and Hakon and Arne.
Emrik, with both eyes open, and Ylva, standing on two good legs.
Nobody said anything.
Nobody asked her a single question.
They had been told, that morning, that they would see things today, and that what they did with what they saw would be theirs to choose.
They had chosen.
Lyra climbed the stair of the Starwell toward them, with her grandmother’s towel round her shoulders and the stars rising softly through the water on either side of her, and for the first time in three years, nothing behind her ribs ached at all.
“Now,” said Mistress Agathe Rennick, at the top of the stair, rattling her great ring of keys.
A hundred young soldiers turned toward her with the light of pure, desperate hope in their eyes.
Beds.
At last.
The narrow beds in the west and east wings, and the frost-bear quilts, and twelve hours of…
“The dining hall,” said Mistress Agathe.
“All of you.
Dressed, combed, and in your seats before the bells.”
The groan that went up from the top of the Starwell set every ice chandelier in the dome chiming.
* * *
But nobody groaned for long.
Because they came up the long stair out of the mountain and through the black door with the star on its lintel, and dressed, and combed, and came along the corridor toward the great dining hall of Frost-Crest, and halfway down the corridor the smell reached them.
It stopped them dead.
All of them.
A hundred people, standing frozen in a stone passage, with their noses in the air like hounds.
And they discovered, all at once, that they were starving.
Not hungry.
Starving, in a way none of them had ever been, not after the Thousand Steps, not after two days and two nights on the Frozen Land: a deep, roaring, bottomless hunger, coming up from bones that had been broken down and built again, from blood that had been washed clean, from channels that had been opened wide and were now empty and clamouring to be filled.
“That’s the Starwell,” said Lord Kenneth, behind them, sounding enormously pleased.
“Your bodies just rebuilt themselves.
They’d like to be paid for it.
Go on.
Go.”
They went.
The great dining hall of Frost-Crest was a long vaulted room of white stone and dark oak, with the banners of the house hanging down from the beams and tall windows down one side full of the soft, eternal spring of the valley.
Fires burned in the hearths at either end, though nobody needed them.
And down the whole length of it, on three long tables, the kitchens of Frost-Crest had laid out a feast.
Roast frost-boar with juniper and thyme.
Drake brisket from the Roaring Drake, sent up from the town that morning by Finn’s father with a note that just said WELCOME HOME, BOY.
Barley bread still hot from the ovens.
Honey cakes.
Pickled cloudberries.
Butter in great yellow slabs.
And in the middle of each table, steaming, in a cauldron so large that two footmen had carried each one in on poles, the thing that had been promised on the morning they left for the Wall and every single time since: the Kitchen General’s seafood stew.
Master Haldor Emberly stood at the head of the hall in his white apron, with his ladle in his remaining fingers, and his scarred old face was very red.
“Tonight week,” he said.
“I said tonight week.
Five weeks ago.
And every week since, they told me, not yet, Haldor, they’re still out there.” He swallowed.
“Well.
It’s tonight.
Sit down, the lot of you, before it gets cold.”
They sat down.
What followed was not dinner.
It was a siege.
A hundred young warriors of the North, freshly reforged, fell on the tables of Frost-Crest the way the Rime Ravagers had fallen on the Sleepers, and the kitchens of Frost-Crest held the line.
Footmen ran back and forth with platters.
Maids refilled the cauldrons.
Sigurd Kell ate four bowls of stew and half a frost-boar and then looked round, puzzled, for more.
Isolde Frostmere, the heir of the fourth-oldest house in the North, with a new moon on her brow, ate with perfect manners, at tremendous speed, without speaking to anyone, and did not look up once at Rowan Thorne, who was sitting directly across from her and not looking at her either, with great concentration, over the top of his third honey cake.
Emrik Stahl kept turning his head to the left, every few mouthfuls, just to see things there.
Hakon Aarn ate with his left hand, on purpose, and grinned every time.
Tilda Marsh’s bent ladle hung on a nail over the kitchen door.
Somebody had tied a blue ribbon round its handle.
And at the high table, under the great banner of the house, the Archduke and the Archduchess sat side by side and watched their children eat, and Lord Roderick told the story of the boulder for the third time, louder, and Lord Lucian ate in silence with the air of a man who had not had anything worth eating in weeks, and Lord Kenneth wrote in his ledger between mouthfuls and did not seem to notice that he was smiling.
When the cauldrons were empty, and the platters were bare, and a hundred young soldiers were sitting back in their seats with the dazed, glassy look of people who have eaten more than they believed a human body could hold, Lady Seraphina rose from the high table.
The hall went quiet at once.
“Sleep now,” said the Matriarch of House Eisenhardt, gently.
“As long as you like.
You have earned it.” She smiled at them.
“Tomorrow, before dinner, we go down again.
The second time.”
She did not say anything else.
She did not need to.
A hundred people remembered, all at once, exactly what she had told them that morning on the terrace.
Each time it goes deeper, it will hurt more.
The silence in the great dining hall was absolute.
Then Lord Roderick slammed his enormous hand down on the high table so hard that the plates jumped.
“HA!” he roared.
“Six more!
Isn’t it wonderful?”
Nobody in the hall agreed with him.
But somewhere down the Seventh’s table, somebody started to laugh, helplessly, and then somebody else, and then all of them.
And Lyra Eisenhardt sat in the middle of it, between her brother and Senna, with her grandmother’s grey towel still somewhere in her room and nothing at all aching behind her ribs, and laughed with them.
Six more.
She found, to her own surprise, that she was not afraid.
End of Chapter 18.