I.
Out of Starfall Hall
Madame Odile de Varenne struck the floor once with her cane.
It was a very small sound.
It went down the length of the Starlit Gallery like a bell, and a hundred and three young soldiers of the North, who had been standing up from their round tables in a slow, dazed rustle of silk and wool with the bathing robes waiting over the maids’ arms, stopped where they stood.
Nobody needed her to say anything.
They remembered.
All down the gallery, without a word, the young lords turned to the ladies seated on their right, and bowed: not too deep, not too fast, from the waist.
May I have the honour?
And the ladies rose, and laid their gloved fingertips lightly on the offered arms.
Lucian, still the Prince of the Blood in his plain grey coat, offered his to Lyra.
Cedric and Hakon, two gentlemen alone, looked at each other, sighed the identical sigh of men resigned to their fate, and offered their arms to the Dowager Marchioness of Velle, who laid a hand on each with tremendous satisfaction and swept out between them with her ostrich plumes nodding.
Madame Odile watched them go, two by two, out through the tall doors and across the silver stars of the entrance hall and down the white steps of Starfall Hall into the long gold light of the late afternoon.
She did not say anything.
She did not need to.
But her cane did not strike the floor again.
* * *
The moment the last couple was through the silver doors and out on the white path between the lilac trees, something happened to all of them at once.
They sagged.
It was like watching a company come off a forced march: a hundred young backs that had been held perfectly straight since six o’clock in the morning, and through breakfast and the promenade and the waltz and the reel and four hours of the Duke of Brassmoor, all suddenly letting go together.
Somebody groaned.
Somebody else laughed, weakly.
Bram Holloway sat down on the bottom step of Starfall Hall and put his head in his hands and said, to nobody, “I said Your Radiance.
To an Eminence.
In front of everyone.”
“I drank a finger bowl,” said Sigurd Kell, sitting down beside him.
“Beat that.”
Bram considered it.
“No,” he admitted.
And the ladies.
The ladies had been in their dancing slippers since the bells struck noon.
Before that, they had been in them for two hours of promenade and waltz.
Mistress Agathe’s mint and Lord Kenneth’s snow-ginseng had soothed the scarlet back to pink in the Lotus Salon, and then the slippers had gone back on, and five hours of standing and sitting and walking and curtsying had brought every bit of the scarlet back again and more besides.
“I can’t,” said Hilde Aarn, standing on the white path on one foot.
“I can’t.
I can’t walk to the dormitory.
It’s half a mile.
It’s all the way across the inner court.
I’m going to die here, on this path, under a lilac tree, and they’ll have to bury me in this dress…”
“It’s a very nice dress to be buried in,” said Tilda Marsh faintly, leaning on a tree.
“It is, isn’t it?”
Mira Halvard had stopped walking altogether and was standing very still with an expression of pure scientific suffering.
Ylva Brenn, who had walked on two good legs for the first time in five weeks only yesterday, looked at the long white path toward the citadel as though it were the Kharn Glacier.
Even Isolde Frostmere was standing with the terrible, rigid stillness of a person for whom moving would be a serious mistake.
And Senna Vaar walked to the stone balustrade at the edge of the path, where it ran along the cliff above the valley, and sat down on it, and pulled off her dancing slippers.
She did it with an expression of undisguised hatred, the same expression every lady on that path was wearing as she looked at her own feet.
And she held the satin slippers with the silver stars on the toes in one hand, at arm’s length, as though they were something that had crawled out from under a stone.
She looked down at her feet.
Her toes were red.
Not pink.
Red, and swollen at the joints, and rubbed raw in two places where the satin had pressed.
Senna Vaar had walked four days alone through the Kharn passes and never once had feet like these.
She looked at them for a long moment.
Then she set her jaw, the way she set it on the ice, and began very carefully to stand up, barefoot, on the cold white stone.
Finn Brannoc saw it.
He had been standing a little way off, with his hands behind his back, the way Master Osric had taught them, waiting for nothing in particular.
He saw her sit down, and he saw her take off the slippers, and he saw her look at her feet.
And he saw her set her jaw.
He knew that look.
He had seen it in the Rimefang, with her ribs bruised black from the champion’s club.
He had seen it at the Sleepers, and on the Hollowmere, and on the first day of the run home, when she had walked on a bruised side for thirty miles and not said a word about it to anyone.
He walked over to the balustrade.
He did not say anything.
He bent down and took the satin slippers out of her hand, gently, and tucked them into the pocket of his midnight frock coat.
Then he turned round, with his back to her, and lowered himself onto one knee on the white stone path, exactly the way he had crouched on the Frozen Land when the Archduke said runners first, riders up.
And he waited.
Nobody on the path said anything.
It went very quiet.
All along the white path between the lilac trees, a hundred young soldiers of the North stopped what they were doing and looked at the quietest boy in the Seventh Lance, down on one knee in his midnight coat in front of the balustrade, with his back to Senna Vaar, waiting.
Senna looked at his back.
She looked at it for a long moment.
Her face had gone red, all the way to the edges of her short dark hair.
The whole path was watching.
And she had walked four days alone through the Kharn passes, and she had never in her life let anyone carry her when she could walk.
She could walk.
She had been about to.
She looked at Finn’s back a moment longer.
Then, all at once, as if something inside her had simply decided it was too tired to argue any more, Senna Vaar stopped caring who was watching.
She leaned forward off the balustrade, and put her arms round his shoulders, and let him take her weight.
Finn stood up.
He settled her on his back, carefully, the way he had on the Frozen Land, with her bare red feet hanging down at his sides.
And he did not run.
He did not hurry.
He simply turned toward the citadel, and the inner court, and the west wing where the girls’ rooms were, and began to walk: slowly, steadily, on the white path between the lilacs, as though he had all the time in the world.
Senna put her forehead down on his shoulder, so that nobody could see her face.
Neither of them said a word.
* * *
The path was silent for perhaps three heartbeats.
Then Sigurd Kell stood up off the bottom step of Starfall Hall.
He walked over to where Mira Halvard was standing very still in her glacier-blue dress, with her face full of scientific suffering.
He looked her up and down: the dancing slippers, the careful way she was not putting weight on her left foot, the one he had trodden on eleven times.
Then, before she could open her mouth, before she could say Kell, what are you, he simply reached down, took her by the arm and the waist, and swung her up onto his back as easily as he had swung her round at the bottom of the reel.
“Kell!” said Mira, outraged, upside down for a moment and then right way up, clutching his shoulders.
“Kell, you can’t just…
you didn’t even ask, Madame said you always…”
“Stay still,” said Sigurd Kell.
That was all he said.
Two words.
Very calmly.
And he set off down the white path after Finn.
Mira opened her mouth.
She closed it again.
She looked at the back of his big sunburned head for a long moment, and the outrage went slowly out of her face, and something else came into it.
“You didn’t ask,” she said again, but much more quietly.
“You were going to say no,” said Sigurd.
“And then you were going to walk half a mile on that foot.
On the foot I trod on.” He shifted her weight, carefully.
“So I didn’t ask.”
Mira Halvard did not say anything else for the whole of the white path.
Which was, Hilde said afterward, the first time in recorded history.
* * *
And then it simply happened, all along the path.
Nobody told them to.
Nobody suggested it.
There was no order, and no Madame Odile, and no rule in any of her twelve laws or her forms of address that said a gentleman carries a lady home when her feet are bleeding.
It was not etiquette.
It was the Frozen Land.
It was two days and two nights on the run home with their partners on their backs and the snowmoths in the dark and the wolves at noon.
It was the Rimefang, and the Sleepers, and the Hollowmere.
It was every single time on the ice that one of them had gone down and somebody else had picked them up.
They did not need to be told what to do with a comrade who could not walk.
They had known that for weeks.
Arne Stenvik went down on one knee in front of Hilde Aarn without a word, and Hilde, for the second time in her life, said nothing at all, and climbed on.
Bram Holloway crouched in front of Tilda Marsh, and Tilda said “Oh, Bram,” and climbed on, and Bram, for once, did not cry.
He was too busy walking very carefully.
Emrik Stahl knelt for Ylva Brenn, and turned his head to the left to watch her climb on, because now he could.
And Rowan Thorne walked up to Isolde Frostmere, who was standing with her terrible rigid stillness on her terrible red feet with her chin held high, and did not say anything clever, because he could not think of anything clever.
He simply turned round in front of her, and knelt, and waited, the way Finn had.
Isolde looked at his back for a very long time.
“I can walk, Thorne,” she said.
“I know,” said Rowan, without turning round.
“You can do everything.
That’s not the point.”
A long pause.
Then the heir of the fourth-oldest house in the North gathered up her white silk skirt in one hand, and put the other on his shoulder, and let herself be carried.
All along the white path between the lilac trees, in the long gold light, the young soldiers of the North went home two by two, the way they had come home from the Hollowmere: one carrying, one carried.
Comrades.
The one who had fought beside them.
The one who would fight beside them again.
Dead or alive, on the ice or in a ballroom, it was them.
Your partner, Lord Roderick had said on the shore of the Hollowmere, is your weight.
They had not understood, then, what he meant.
They understood now.
At the very back of the procession, two young gentlemen in midnight frock coats with no lady to carry walked side by side behind everyone else.
They looked at each other.
“Don’t,” said Cedric.
“I wasn’t going to,” said Hakon.
“You were going to offer to carry me.”
“I was going to ask you to carry me.
My toe’s broken.
Your sister broke it.”
“Your toe is not broken.
You’ve been to the Starwell.”
“It feels broken…”
And in the middle of the white path, a little apart, Lyra Eisenhardt walked on her own two feet in her midnight dress, with her dancing slippers in her hand and her bare feet on the warm white stone.
Her feet did not hurt at all.
They had not hurt all day.
She watched her friends go home ahead of her, two by two, in the gold light, and smiled, and did not say anything to anyone.
* * *
On the steps of Starfall Hall, four people watched them go.
The Archduke of the North stood at the top of the white steps with his hands behind his back.
Beside him, the Archduchess Genevieve had her fan closed in her hand and was not using it.
Lady Seraphina stood a little apart, still in her lavender silk, with the powdered wig of the Dowager Marchioness of Velle held forgotten under one arm.
And at the end, very straight, with both hands on the silver head of her ebony cane, stood Madame Odile de Varenne.
None of them said anything for a long time.
They watched the procession go down the white path between the lilacs, the quiet boy from the Roaring Drake at its head, walking slowly with the girl from the Kharn passes on his back, and all the others following behind him, two by two, into the gold.
“I did not teach them that,” said Madame Odile de Varenne at last, very quietly.
“No,” said the Archduke.
“The Frozen Land did.”
The Archduchess opened her fan, and held it in front of her face, and did not fan herself.
And Lady Seraphina, the Veiled Lotus of the North, who had watched four sons and a daughter and two grandchildren grow up in that citadel, looked down the white path at a hundred young people carrying each other home, and said nothing at all.
But her serene face, in the gold light, was the face of someone watching something she had waited a very long time to see.
“Seven,” said Madame Odile softly, almost to herself.
“Seven times, you said, my lady.
Down into the water.
Each time harder.”
“Yes,” said Lady Seraphina.
Madame Odile watched the last pair vanish through the gate into the inner court.
“They will be all right,” she said.
It did not sound like a question.
“Yes,” said the Matriarch.
“I believe they will.”
II.
Room Nine
Finn carried her all the way to the door.
Across the inner court, through the arch, up the west stair, along the corridor of the west wing where the maids had stood in a line with their boxes that morning.
He did not stop.
He did not set her down at the foot of the stair, or at the top of it.
He carried her the whole half mile, slowly, the way he had carried her on the Frozen Land, and the whole way neither of them said a single word.
He stopped in front of a door with a brass IX on it.
He crouched, carefully, and let her slide down off his back onto her bare feet on the cool stone of the corridor.
Then he stood up, and turned round, and took her satin slippers out of the pocket of his frock coat, and held them out to her.
Senna took them.
They stood there in the corridor.
Behind them, down the length of the west wing, the others were arriving, two by two, and the corridor was filling up with laughter and groans and the creak of doors.
But in front of Room Nine, it was quiet.
“So,” said Finn Brannoc.
He looked at the brass numerals on the door.
“You’re in Room Nine.”
He knew she was in Room Nine.
Everybody in Frost-Crest knew who was in Room Nine; Room Nine’s hair had been a legend in the west wing for nine weeks.
He had walked past this door every single morning on the way to the Thousand Steps.
He said it anyway, because it was the only thing in his head, and because the quietest boy in the Seventh Lance had just carried a girl half a mile in front of the entire Archduchy and had no idea what you were supposed to say afterward.
Senna nodded.
Once.
Finn nodded too.
He looked at the door again.
“Go and change,” he said.
“I’ll come back.
I’ll walk you down to the Starwell.”
Senna looked at him for a moment, with her slippers held against her chest and her face still faintly red from the white path.
Then she nodded again, and opened the door of Room Nine, and went in, and closed it behind her.
Finn stood in the corridor and looked at the brass IX for a long time.
Then Sigurd Kell came past with Mira on his back, and stopped, and looked at him, and looked at the door, and opened his mouth.
Finn turned his head and looked at him, once.
Sigurd closed his mouth again, and walked on, and did not say anything, which was the second miracle of the day.
* * *
The robes were not the same as yesterday.
The maids had laid them out on every bed in Room Nine while they were at luncheon: folded, heavy, waiting.
Yesterday’s had been white linen.
These were dark.
A deep, dense slate-blue, almost the colour of the citadel’s basalt in shadow, woven thick and close with the same fine thread of frost-mithril running through it, so that they hung heavy and straight and would not float.
Long-sleeved.
Ankle-length.
A broad sash of the same dark cloth to tie at the waist.
On the breast of each, very small, embroidered in silver thread, was a single star.
On the pillow beside each robe lay a card in Mistress Agathe’s neat, upright hand.
For the second descent.
Wear this and nothing else.
Leave all jewellery, pins and ribbons in your room.
The water must reach you without anything in its way.
The girls of Room Nine stood round their beds in their beautiful dresses with the stars on them, and looked at the dark robes, and nobody said anything for a moment.
“Darker,” said Mira at last, quietly.
“Yesterday was white.
Today is dark.” She touched the silver star on the breast of hers.
“It’s going deeper.”
Nobody answered her.
They did not need to.
They changed.
They helped each other with the tiny silk-covered buttons down the backs of the dresses, one by one, because nobody could reach them alone.
They took the silver star-pins out of Hilde’s curls and the feather comb out of Senna’s hair and the frost-lily clasp out of Lyra’s, and laid them in a little row on the windowsill.
Isolde took the two thin braids out of her silver hair, and let it fall.
They hung the dresses up very carefully, every one of them, on the hooks along the wall, as if they were afraid they might never wear them again.
Then they put on the dark robes, and tied the sashes, and stood there barefoot on the cold floor of Room Nine, four girls and Isolde, who had brought her robe down the corridor from her own room to dress with them, all in slate-blue with silver stars on their breasts, and waited.
* * *
The knock came, quietly.
“Senna?” said Finn’s voice, through the door.
The others all looked at Senna.
She was standing by the window.
She had been standing there since she changed, very still, looking out at the lilac trees, with her red bare feet on the cold floor and her hands clasped tight in front of her.
She went to the door and opened it.
Finn was standing in the corridor in the same dark robe as hers, slate-blue, long-sleeved, the silver star on the breast, with his narrow face scrubbed and serious and his dark hair, freed from the valet’s brushing, already starting to stick up again at the back.
He looked, Senna thought, like himself.
More like himself than he had looked all day, in the midnight frock coat.
Like the boy from the Roaring Drake who had taped over the crack in his old spear because he thought nobody could see.
She did not say anything.
She stood in the doorway of Room Nine, with her hand on the door, and looked at him.
He did not ask if she was ready.
He did not hurry her.
He simply stood there in the corridor, patient, steady, the way he stood on the ice when she was reading a rift field and needed him not to move.
The silence went on.
Behind Senna, in Room Nine, Hilde Aarn opened her mouth, and Mira, without looking, put a hand over it.
Senna looked down at her own bare feet on the stone.
Red and swollen at the joints and rubbed raw in two places.
The Starwell was at the bottom of the citadel.
The black door, and the long spiral stair of ice going down and down into the mountain: two hundred steps, three hundred, she had not counted yesterday.
She could walk it.
She had walked further on worse.
She had walked four days alone through the Kharn passes and never once asked anyone for anything.
She could walk it.
She looked up at Finn.
“My feet still hurt,” said Senna Vaar.
It came out very quietly.
Almost too quietly to hear.
She stopped.
She made herself go on.
“Will you carry me?”
* * *
Finn Brannoc did not move for a moment.
He looked at her.
And he understood exactly what she had just done, because he knew her better than anybody in the North, better than her lance, better, perhaps, than she knew herself.
He knew that she had never asked anyone for anything.
Not in the Kharn passes, with her grandfather’s spear cracked and four days of ice in front of her.
Not in the gully at the Rimefang, with her side gone black from the champion’s club.
Not on the Hollowmere, not on the run home, not ever.
She did not ask.
She carried.
That was who Senna Vaar was.
She carried, and she carried, and she carried, and she never once let anyone see what it cost.
And she had just stood in the doorway of Room Nine and asked.
He did not say of course.
He did not say you don’t need to ask.
He did not say anything at all that would have made it smaller than it was.
He simply turned round, in the corridor, and went down on one knee on the cold stone, and waited.
Senna stood in the doorway a moment longer.
Then she stepped out into the corridor, and put her arms round his shoulders, and let him take her weight.
And he stood up, and settled her, and began to walk: down the corridor of the west wing, toward the stair, toward the black door with the star on it and the long spiral of ice beneath.
They were halfway down the west stair before she spoke.
“My mother has a saying,” said Senna, very low, into his shoulder.
“In the passes.
When I was little and I wanted to carry the water from the spring by myself, and the wood, and my brothers when they were tired.
She used to say it to me every single time.”
Finn did not say anything.
He kept walking, slowly, steadily, one step and then the next.
“You don’t have to carry it alone,” said Senna Vaar, “just because you carry it best.”
The stair turned.
The light from the high windows fell across them, gold, and moved on.
“I never listened,” said Senna.
“Not once.
I thought it was the kind of thing mothers say.
I thought if I let anyone help, it meant I wasn’t strong enough.
So I carried everything.
All of it.
By myself.” A pause.
“I’ve never said that to anyone.
Out loud.
Not to anyone outside my family.”
Finn walked on down the stair for a while without answering.
When he did speak, his voice was very quiet, and very steady, the voice of a boy who has thought about what he is going to say for a long time and is only now sure enough to say it.
“Senna.”
“Mm.”
“Whenever you need carrying,” said Finn Brannoc, “you only have to ask.
Up the Thousand Steps.
Across the Frozen Land.
Down to the Starwell.
Anywhere.” He shifted her weight, carefully, on the turn of the stair.
“And I’ll never make you feel you owe me anything for it.
Not once.
Not ever.”
It was Master Osric’s lesson.
The one he had given them in the entrance hall at noon, at the foot of the great staircase, before the ladies came down.
Never, by a word or a look, let her feel that she owes you anything for it.
That is all a gentleman is.
Finn had heard it.
He had listened.
And he had known, standing there on the silver stars, that it was not really a lesson about ballrooms at all.
Senna did not say anything for a long time.
Then she put her forehead down on his shoulder again, the way she had on the white path, so that he could not see her face.
But this time, he felt it: a long, slow breath going out of her, all the way, the kind of breath a person lets out when they have been holding something heavy for years and have just, for the first time, set it down.
“All right,” she said into his shoulder.
“All right, Finn.”
And he carried her on down the stairs, through the inner court, and to the low black door in the oldest wall of Frost-Crest with the single star cut into its lintel, where the others were already gathering in their dark robes, waiting to go down.
III.
The Second Descent
The Starwell was not the same.
They felt it on the stair.
Yesterday, going down the long spiral of ancient ice, the air had grown warmer and sweeter with every turn, until it was like a spring morning.
Today it grew warmer, and then it grew close: thick and heavy and humming, the way the air hums before a thunderstorm on the Kharn.
The silver light coming up the stair from below was brighter than yesterday, and it did not ripple gently on the ice walls.
It flickered.
It pulsed.
Like a heart beating, slowly, somewhere deep beneath the mountain.
Nobody talked on the stair.
The boys who had carried their partners down set them on their feet at the bottom, on the warm stone, without a word, and stood beside them.
Then they came round the last turn, and saw the cavern, and stopped.
The nine pools were still there, the great stair of mirrors descending into the heart of the mountain.
The coin of sky was still there in the roof of the dome, gold now, with the late sun.
But the water had changed.
Yesterday it had been silver, and clear, with the tiny stars rising slowly through it like sparks from a fire.
Today the water was deep.
Darker.
The colour of their robes, slate-blue going down into midnight.
And the stars rising through it were not drifting.
They were streaming: thousands upon thousands of them, rising fast and bright from the deeps of every pool, so many and so fast that the surface of the water seethed with light like a pot about to boil.
The Moon-Frost Lotus on the terraces had closed their petals.
Lady Seraphina stood at the edge of the uppermost pool, in a robe as dark as theirs.
Beside her stood the Archduke and the Archduchess, and the three elders, and, a little way up the stair, very straight, with both hands on her ebony cane, Madame Odile de Varenne, who had come down three hundred steps of ice on her own two feet and would not be told otherwise.
“Yesterday,” said Lady Seraphina, “the Starwell remembered your wounds.
Today it will remember you.”
Her soft voice carried over the hum of the water.
“Every one of you has grown crooked somewhere.
Every one.
A bone that set badly when you were small.
A channel you have forced too hard, or not at all.
A habit in the way you breathe, or stand, or hold your sword, that you learned wrong when you were five and have done wrong ten thousand times since.
Your bodies have grown round those faults, the way a tree grows round a nail.” She looked at them.
“Today, the Starwell will take the nail out.”
Nobody moved.
“It will hurt,” said the Matriarch.
“More than yesterday.
A great deal more.
You will want to leave the water.
Do not.
Whatever it does, you will stay in it until it has finished with you.
If you climb out halfway, the work will stop halfway, and you will be more crooked than when you went in.” A pause.
“And you will not be alone.
You were never alone on the Frozen Land.
You will not be alone in here.”
She stepped back from the edge.
“In you go,” she said gently.
And this time, nobody had to be thrown.
* * *
Lyra went down alone to the ninth pool, the way she had the day before, without being told.
Nobody stopped her.
The black water at the bottom of the cavern closed over her shoulders, and she stood in it, and waited, and looked up.
The Seventh went into the third terrace together.
All of them: Senna and Finn, Rowan and Isolde, Sigurd and Mira, Arne and Hilde, and Cedric; for Mira had come back to the Seventh, and Hakon gone to the Fourth, when Sir Magnus re-drew the lances after the Wall.
Nine of them, waist-deep, then chest-deep, in the dark seething water, with the streaming stars rushing up round them so thick and fast that the surface boiled with light.
It did not hurt at first.
At first it was only warm, and heavy, and the stars went through them as they had yesterday, cool and bright, in at the soles of the feet and out at the crown of the head.
They floated in the dark water and looked at each other, and Hilde Aarn said, “This isn’t so…”
Then the stars began to stop.
* * *
They stopped inside them.
In particular places.
Sigurd Kell felt them stop in his left shoulder, the one he had wrenched out of its socket falling off a hay-cart at six, and gather there, hundreds of them, thousands, cold and bright and pressing.
Mira felt them in every joint of every finger, where eight years of cauldron-work had bent them, very slightly, toward the shape of a pestle.
Senna felt them in her left ankle, the one she had cracked on the ice of the Kharn passes at ten and walked on for a week because there was nobody to carry her.
Finn felt them in the hand that had once carried a white seam.
Arne felt them in his spine.
Cedric felt them in his chest, in the place under his breastbone where his frost had always stopped short, like a river at a dam.
And then the pressing became pain.
It was not like a wound.
A wound came from outside, sharp and sudden, and you knew where it was.
This came from inside.
It was slow and deep and it went on and on, a grinding, burning-cold pressure, as though the stars had taken hold of every crooked, broken, badly mended thing in them with a thousand tiny fingers and were pulling it straight.
And the crooked things did not want to be straight.
They had been crooked for years.
They had grown into them, the way a tree grows round a nail.
They fought.
Sigurd’s shoulder made a sound like a green branch breaking.
He went white to the lips and did not scream.
Not yet.
* * *
It went on.
That was the thing nobody had understood, when the Matriarch said more than yesterday.
They had thought she meant harder.
She meant longer.
Yesterday the Starwell had taken them for an hour.
Today the light in the coin of sky in the roof of the dome went from gold to rose, and from rose to the deep blue of dusk, and the first star came out in it, and the pain did not stop.
It did not even slow down.
It simply went deeper, and deeper, and deeper, finding the next crooked thing, and the next, and the one behind that, as if it were digging down through every year of their lives one by one.
In the fourth terrace, Bram Holloway broke first.
He turned in the water with his eyes squeezed shut and his breath tearing in his chest, and began to wade, half blind, toward the stone lip of the pool.
Out.
Just out.
Just for a moment.
And a hand caught his wrist.
It was Tilda Marsh, with her round freckled face as white as flour and her own old wrist, the one she had broken kneading dough at eleven, being ground straight under the water.
“No,” said Tilda.
“You carried me for two days.
You’re not stopping now.”
Bram turned back.
He took her shaking hand in his shaking hand, and stood in the water, and let it hurt.
In the third terrace, Senna Vaar was standing very still with the stars grinding at her ankle, and the pain was enormous, and she was alone in it, the way she had always been alone in everything.
And then she remembered a stair.
A voice saying you only have to ask.
Her mother’s voice, in the passes.
She reached out, without looking, and found Finn’s hand.
Finn’s eyes opened.
He understood at once.
He reached out with his other hand, without looking, and found Rowan’s.
Rowan found Cedric’s.
Cedric found Sigurd’s.
Sigurd found Arne’s, and Arne, without a word, put out his great hand and took Hilde’s, and Hilde took Mira’s, and Mira took Isolde’s, and Isolde, with her silver eyes burning, reached across the dark water and took Senna’s other hand.
A ring.
The nine of them.
Hand in hand in the seething dark, as they had been on the rope across the rift field and in the knot of arms on the red snow of the Sleepers.
Your back is my back.
Your breach is my breach.
And the pain went round the ring.
Out of one, into the next, and the next, and back again: shared, spread thin, carried by nine instead of one.
All down the nine pools, the others saw it.
One lance after another reached out in the dark water and made its own ring, until the whole Starwell was full of them: circles of linked hands, swaying, white-faced, enduring it together.
For a little while, it was enough.
Then the Starwell went deeper.
* * *
Afterward, none of them could say exactly when it changed.
Only that it did.
Only that, somewhere in the dark after the first star came out in the coin of sky, the stars stopped looking for the crooked things in their bones and their joints and their old scars, and went past them.
Down.
Further in.
Into the place none of them had ever been able to reach, not on the Thousand Steps, not on the Frozen Land, not even yesterday in the pillars of stars.
The gate.
Every cultivator has one.
Every house in the North had its own name for it.
The Eisenhardts called it the Meridian Gate: the thirty-six great points of the chest and the diaphragm and the heart’s arteries, the Dan-Tian and the Heart-Altar, the deep reservoir where the body keeps its mana.
Other houses called it the Second Threshold, or the Well of the Breath, or simply the wall: the wall every cultivator pushes against for years and years and cannot move.
The door between the body and the spirit.
The door that, if it is ever forced open too fast, by anything but its owner’s own slow labour, bursts the channels round it and kills.
The Starwell went to the door.
And it began, very slowly, to open it.
Cedric Eisenhardt felt it first.
He was the furthest along of all of them.
He had opened his Terrestrial Gate in the water yesterday, all thirty-six points in a string of fire, and his dragon-blood had woken and roared.
And so the Starwell came to his Meridian Gate first, the way water finds the lowest place first.
He felt it arrive.
He felt the stars gather in the middle of his chest, under his breastbone, in the place where his frost had always stopped short, like a river against a dam.
Thousands of them.
Tens of thousands.
More than he could count, more than there were stars in the sky over the Wall on the clearest night of winter.
And they pushed.
There are no words for what it felt like.
He tried, afterward, to find them, and could not.
It was not like a blade.
It was not like fire, or ice, or the Beast King’s claws, or anything he had ever felt or imagined.
It was as though someone had put both hands into the centre of his chest and taken hold of the door of his heart and begun, very slowly and with infinite patience, to tear it off its hinges.
And it went on.
And on.
And it did not stop, and it did not care that he could not bear it, and there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide from it, no way to make it less, because it was not happening to his body.
It was happening to him.
He had thought, on the Hollowmere, when the Beast King came out of the glass-birch forest, that he knew what it was to be afraid of dying.
Now he understood that there were worse things than dying.
And that this was one of them.
And that if anybody had offered him death in that moment, he would have taken it, gratefully, and thanked them.
The first point opened.
The Heart-Altar.
Under his breastbone.
It went with a sound inside him like a bell cracked in two, and the frost behind it, the frost of his blood that had been dammed there all his life, came through.
And Cedric Eisenhardt screamed.
It tore out of him.
A raw, enormous, animal scream that rang up through the dome of the Starwell and shook the ice chandeliers and set every closed lotus on every terrace trembling.
His hands tore out of Rowan’s and Sigurd’s.
Exploded.
Not his body.
His mana.
His spiritual mana: the dragon-frost of the Eisenhardts, dammed behind the Meridian Gate for eighteen years, burst out of him through the opened Heart-Altar like a river through a broken dam.
It came out of his chest in a single blinding blast of glacier-blue light, so bright that every soldier in the cavern threw up their arms against it, and so cold that the air itself cracked.
The third terrace froze.
The whole surface of the pool, in one instant, from edge to edge: a sheet of blue-white ice spreading out from Cedric in a great ring, with the Seventh caught in it up to their chests, and racing on over the silver lip of the terrace, and down the waterfalls, freezing them in mid-fall into long glittering curtains of ice, and on, into the fourth terrace and the fifth, a wave of frost rolling down the stair of mirrors toward the bottom of the cavern.
Frost raced up the walls.
Frost crawled across the floor of the cavern to the elders’ feet.
Frost bloomed on the ice chandeliers overhead in great feathered ferns.
The temperature in the Starwell fell so far so fast that the breath of everyone on the stone came out in sudden white clouds.
On the stone, Lord Roderick took one step toward the water, with his face gone grey.
Lady Seraphina did not even look at him.
She put out one hand, and he stopped.
“Wait,” said the Matriarch.
And the Starwell breathed in.
That was the only way any of them could ever describe it.
The whole cavern, the whole stair of nine pools, the whole mountain, drew one long, slow breath.
And the frost went back.
It went back into the water.
All of it.
The ice on the surface of the third terrace softened and sank and was simply gone, drunk down into the deeps of the pool like snow falling into the sea.
The frozen waterfalls let go and poured again.
The ferns of frost on the chandeliers faded.
The frost on the walls and the floor drew back across the stone like a tide going out, back into the pools, back down into the dark water, and the stars came streaming up through it again, faster and brighter than before, and every one of them, for a moment, was glacier-blue.
The Starwell had taken Cedric’s burst of frost into itself.
And given it back to him.
The blue stars poured into him from below, into his chest, into the opened Heart-Altar and through it, into the next point and the next, the Dan-Tian, the great arteries, the deep reservoir of the Meridian Gate, one, two, three, four, opening, opening, opening.
He was still screaming.
He could not stop.
But he was standing.
He was standing in the third terrace of the Starwell with his head thrown back and the frost-light pouring out of his chest and back into it in a great turning wheel, and the Gate was opening, point by point by point, all thirty-six of them, all the way.
The cleansing.
That was what the old texts called it, the ones Lord Roderick had read to them on winter evenings in the Sword-Pond, that none of them had understood.
The cleansing of the Meridian Gate.
They understood it now.
Cedric’s scream broke, and went ragged, and went on.
* * *
And then it came for the rest of them.
The ring had broken when Cedric’s hands tore free.
The Seventh stood in the third terrace in the dark water, scattered, gasping, and the stars that had opened Cedric’s gate turned from him, all at once, the way a river turns, and went into the others.
Into their chests.
Into the door that every one of them had been pushing against for years.
Rowan Thorne went second.
He had known it was coming.
He had watched it happen to Cedric, three feet away, and he had braced for it the way he braced for a frost-bear’s charge.
It did not help.
Nothing could have helped.
The stars took hold of the door in the centre of him and began to tear, and the green that had woken in his blood yesterday, the living, branching, patient green of the barley fields and the leaf behind the leaf, rose up against the door from the other side and pushed.
And the door gave.
He screamed.
He did not know he was screaming.
And out of his chest, through the opened gate, came his mana: not frost, but green.
A storm of it.
Green-gold light bursting out of him in a great swirling cloud like ten thousand leaves torn off a forest by a gale, flying out across the terrace, across the cavern, up into the dome, so that for one moment the whole Starwell was full of whirling green and gold, like a wood in autumn with the sun coming through it.
Then Isolde.
The silver had been burning behind her eyes since the descent began.
When the gate opened, it came out of her the way it had come on the empty string in the Rimefang: not a storm but a blaze.
A single shaft of pure white-silver moonlight, so bright that it threw every shadow in the cavern flat against the walls, burst straight up out of her chest into the dome, and broke there into a thousand thin silver needles of light that hung in the air under the ice chandeliers like a rain of arrows that had forgotten how to fall.
She did not scream at first.
She was Isolde Frostmere, and she had never in her life let anyone hear her cry out.
She held it in with her jaw locked and her eyes shut and her whole body shaking.
Then the next point opened, and she screamed too.
Sigurd Kell’s mana came out of him red.
The red of his sword-qi, the red he had carried on his broadsword in the Rimefang and on the shore of the Hollowmere, but a hundred times brighter: a roaring crimson blaze like the heart of a forge, so hot that the water round him hissed and boiled and threw up great clouds of steam.
Mira Halvard’s came out of her green and gold, the colour of her soul-flame, the colour of sunlight through leaves: not a burst but a bloom, a huge slow flower of green-gold fire opening out of her chest across the surface of the pool, and her scream went up with it, high and thin and terrible.
Arne Stenvik did not scream.
Not at first.
He stood in the dark water with his great hands clenched and his jaw locked, and his mana came out of him dark bronze, the colour of deep water at the bottom of a Kharn lake, heavy and slow and enormous, rolling out across the terrace like a tide.
He held it.
He held it for a long, long time, with his eyes shut and sweat running down his face.
Then his gate opened all the way, and Arne Stenvik, who had said perhaps forty words in his whole life, opened his mouth, and the sound that came out of him was louder than all the others put together.
Hilde and Hakon went together.
They were not touching.
The ring had broken, and they were two terraces apart, Hilde in the third and Hakon down in the fifth with the Fourth.
It did not matter.
It had never mattered.
Their gates opened in the same instant, the same heartbeat, and their mana came out of them both at once: pale frost-white, crackling, threaded through with jagged forks of blue-white light like lightning in a winter storm, and the two bursts met in the air between them and joined.
And the thunder of it, when they met, rolled round the dome of the Starwell like a frost-arrow bursting in a jar the size of the sky.
Finn’s was amber.
Deep, warm, golden amber, the colour of a hearth-fire in the Roaring Drake on a midwinter night, with a hundred people round it and the snow outside.
It came out of him slow and steady and unshakeable, the way Finn did everything, spreading out across the water in a warm glowing pool.
And he did not scream until the very end.
He held it in for Senna.
He kept his eyes on her, across the water, the whole time.
And Senna’s.
Senna Vaar’s mana came out of her the colour of the wind on the Kharn passes at dawn.
Pale.
Silver-grey.
Almost white.
Not a burst, not a blaze, not a bloom.
A wind.
A great cold clean rushing wind of pale silver-grey light that came out of her chest and went round the whole third terrace in a single sweeping circle, and gathered up all the others, Cedric’s frost and Rowan’s green and Isolde’s silver, Sigurd’s red and Mira’s gold, Arne’s bronze and the twins’ white lightning and Finn’s amber, and swept them round and round together over the surface of the water, the way the wind on the passes gathers up the snow.
And she screamed.
Senna Vaar, who had walked four days alone through the Kharn and never asked anyone for anything, screamed until she had no breath left, and then screamed again.
* * *
It spread.
From the Seventh, out through the nine pools of the Starwell, the way fire spreads through a dry forest.
The Fourth Lance in the fifth terrace went next, one after another, Danel and Emrik and the rest, and the dark water of the fifth terrace lit up in a dozen colours at once.
Then the Second.
The Ninth.
The First.
The Tenth.
Bram Holloway’s mana came out of him a soft warm brown, like new bread, and Tilda Marsh’s a bright, fierce, startling scarlet, and they were still holding hands when it did.
One lance after another, all down the great stair of mirrors, the gates tore open, and the mana came out.
The Starwell blazed.
It was a sight that nobody who saw it would ever forget, and nobody who had not seen it would ever believe.
The whole vast cavern, from the dome to the deepest pool, filled with light: a hundred colours, a hundred bursts, a hundred blazes and blooms and storms and winds of mana tearing up out of the water and swirling through the air and crashing against the ice walls and rising up through the dome toward the single star in the coin of sky.
Frost and fire.
Green and gold.
Silver and scarlet and bronze.
And the sound.
The sound was the worst of it.
A hundred young voices, screaming.
Not one at a time.
Together.
All of them, all at once, in the dark under the mountain: the raw, torn, endless screaming of people in more pain than they had known it was possible to feel, and still feeling it, and still not leaving the water.
It rang up through the dome.
It rolled down the long spiral stair of ice.
It went on, and on, and on.
On the stone at the edge of the uppermost pool, Lord Kenneth Eisenhardt had dropped his ledger.
He stood with both hands pressed over his mouth and tears pouring down his face, saying the names.
Every one.
Under his breath.
As he heard each voice.
As though saying them would hold them there.
Lord Roderick stood with his great fists clenched at his sides and every muscle in his enormous body locked, as if it were taking all his strength not to throw himself into the water and drag every one of them out.
Lord Lucian had closed his eyes.
The Archduchess Genevieve had turned her face into her husband’s shoulder, and the Archduke of the North had his arm round her, and his own face was set like stone.
And Madame Odile de Varenne, on the stair, with both hands on the silver head of her cane, did not turn away.
She stood very straight, and looked at every one of them, and wept without making a sound.
Lady Seraphina stood alone at the very edge of the water, in her dark robe, with her hands folded.
She did not move.
She did not look away.
She did not speak.
But her lips were moving.
Very slightly.
And anyone standing close enough to hear would have heard that she was counting.
Not names.
Points.
Twenty-nine.
Thirty.
Thirty-one.
As if she could feel, from where she stood, every one of the hundred gates opening.
“Thirty-four,” whispered the Matriarch.
“Thirty-five.”
A pause that went on for ever.
“Thirty-six.”
And the Starwell breathed in.
* * *
All the mana went back.
Every burst.
Every blaze.
Every storm and wind and bloom of light in the cavern, all hundred colours of it, drawn down out of the air in one long, slow, enormous breath, back into the water, down into the deeps of every pool, the way the frost had gone back from Cedric.
The light went out of the dome.
The swirling colours sank.
The screaming stopped, all at once, in the middle of a breath, and a silence fell over the Starwell so deep that they could hear the waterfalls again, chiming softly over the silver lips of the terraces like very distant bells.
And then the water changed.
It had been dark.
Slate-blue going down to midnight, seething with stars.
Now, from the bottom of every pool, it began to clear.
Paler and paler.
Silver, then clear, then lit from within, softly, like the inside of a pearl.
The stars in it slowed.
They stopped streaming.
They began to drift again, gently, the way they had drifted the very first time, rising slow and soft and bright.
And they were warm.
That was what the young soldiers of the North felt, standing in the water, broken open, emptied out, unable to move: the warmth.
The stars rising through them now did not grind, or tear, or press.
They soothed.
They went in at the soles of the feet and rose slowly through every opened gate and every widened channel and every newly straightened bone, and everywhere they went, the pain went out, the way snow goes off a roof in spring, all at once, in one long soft slide.
The healing had begun.
* * *
Rowan Thorne felt his skin crack first.
He looked down at his own hand, lying on the surface of the water, and saw it happen.
Fine lines.
Hairline fractures, running across the back of his hand and up his wrist, like the crazing on old glaze, like the first cracks in the ice on a lake in spring.
They spread.
Up his arm.
Across his chest, under the dark robe.
He could feel them spreading over his face.
And where the lines met, the old skin lifted.
Thin, grey, dry, like the papery bark that peels off a silver birch.
It lifted away from him and floated off on the water, and dissolved, and was gone, and the stars ate it.
Underneath it, he was new.
All across the Starwell, it was happening.
To every one of them, boy and girl, in every pool.
The old skin cracking and lifting and drifting away on the water like the shed skin of a snake, like the husk of a seed, and the stars dissolving it, and underneath it, something else.
And it went deeper than the skin.
They could feel it.
The second body, the old texts called it: the spiritual body, the shape the mana makes inside you, the thing that had just come pouring out of their opened gates in a hundred colours and been drunk back down into the water and given back.
It was settling back into them now.
But not into the old shape.
Into a new one.
Larger.
Clearer.
Each one built round the new opened gate in the centre of the chest the way a house is built round a hearth.
Their mana cores, the small, dim, closed seeds of power that every cultivator carries under the breastbone, cracked open in them like the old skin had, and from inside each one, something rose: brighter, and steadier, and more fully theirs than anything they had ever had.
And their bodies followed.
It was not that they grew taller, though some of them did, a finger’s breadth, two.
It was not that they grew stronger, though they did, enormously; Sigurd Kell would discover the next morning that he had bent the iron latch of his door flat by opening it.
It was that they grew clear.
As if every one of them had been looking out at the world through a dirty window all their lives, and the window had just been washed.
Their skin, under the shed husks, was clean and bright, every old scar and burn and freckle and blemish gone.
They stood straighter in the water, without trying to, as if their bones had always meant to stand like that and had finally been allowed to.
There was a light in all of them now.
Faint.
Steady.
Just under the surface.
As if the stars had not gone out of them on the way through, but stayed.
They looked at each other across the clearing water of the Starwell, and could not stop looking.
The hair changed first.
Cedric’s black hair had a sheen on it now, a deep frost-blue gleam where the light struck it, like ice under starlight.
Rowan’s plain brown hair, which he had cut with a belt knife for eleven years, had threads of green-gold running through it at the temples, so faint that you only saw them when he moved.
Isolde’s silver had gone brighter, purer, like the moon on new snow.
Senna’s short dark hair shone blue-black, like a crow’s wing in sunlight.
Hilde’s ginger had deepened to copper, and so had Hakon’s, two terraces below, exactly the same shade, as if they had been dipped in the same pot.
And Mira Halvard’s hair, the hair that had stood up every morning for nine weeks in the precise and alarming shape of Lord Kenneth’s after one of his towers exploded, lay perfectly smooth and flat and shining down her back, and would never stand up again.
She put up a trembling hand and touched it, and burst into tears, and laughed at the same time, and could not stop doing either.
And the eyes.
Every one of them, when they looked at each other, saw it.
Each pair of eyes, whatever colour they had been, now had a ring round the pupil.
Thin and faint and glowing, the colour of their own mana.
Cedric’s, glacier-blue.
Rowan’s, green-gold.
Sigurd’s, crimson.
Mira’s, green and gold.
Arne’s, deep bronze.
Finn’s, warm amber.
Senna’s, pale wind-silver.
Hilde’s and Hakon’s, crackling white.
And Isolde’s eyes, which had been silver since yesterday, now had a ring round the pupil of something even brighter: the white-silver of a moon so full that it cast shadows.
The mark of an opened gate, the Matriarch told them later.
Every cultivator who had opened their second gate had it.
Most of them waited forty years to see it in a mirror.
The young soldiers of the North stood in the clear, warm, softly glowing water of the Starwell, emptied out and filled up again, shaking, weeping, laughing, new.
Nobody spoke.
Somewhere in the fourth terrace, Bram Holloway was still holding Tilda Marsh’s hand, and had forgotten he was doing it.
Somewhere in the fifth, Emrik Stahl was turning his head slowly from side to side, looking at the world with eyes that each had a ring of bright copper round the pupil, and could not seem to stop.
In the third terrace, the Seventh found each other’s hands again, without anyone deciding to, one by one, until the ring was whole.
They had not left the water.
Not one of them.
Not one in the whole Starwell.
* * *
And then, very far below them, at the bottom of the great stair of mirrors, under the single star in the coin of sky, the ninth pool began to glow.
It was black.
It had been black all through it: through the screaming and the bursting and the blazing colours, a small round perfectly black pool at the bottom of the cavern that had not reflected a single one of them.
Still.
Silent.
Waiting.
It was not black now.
Deep down in it, very far below the surface, something was beginning to shine.
Three colours, winding round each other, rising slowly up out of the dark.
And a fourth, that had no colour at all.
On the stone at the edge of the uppermost pool, Lady Seraphina unfolded her hands.
In the third terrace, the Seventh Lance turned, still holding hands, and looked down the long stair of pools toward the bottom of the cavern.
Toward Lyra.
To be continued.