I.
The Rooms
The lists went up in the Great Hall eight days after the gryphon left, and by noon every candidate in the citadel had read them at least three times.
Twenty-five sheets of heavy cream paper, pinned in a long row beneath the tapestry of the Founding Campaigns.
Twenty-five rooms.
Four names on each.
Sir Magnus Hale had written every one of them in his own square, careful hand, and there was not a single name on any sheet that had been put there by accident.
Lyra found hers on the ninth sheet.
West Wing, Room Nine.
Lyra Eisenhardt.
Mira Halvard.
Senna Vaar.
Hilde Aarn.
She read it twice.
Then she read the sheet beside it, which was the east wing, and felt her mouth twitch.
East Wing, Room Four.
Cedric Eisenhardt.
Rowan Thorne.
Finn Brannoc.
Sigurd Kell.
Somewhere behind her in the crowd, someone who was very large and very blond said a word that was not allowed in the Great Hall.
“Four months,” murmured Rowan at her shoulder, reading over her head.
“In one room.
With Sigurd.” He sounded almost cheerful.
“Your father is a very frightening man.”
“My father,” said Lyra, “has put Isolde Frostmere at the far end of the west wing from Mira Halvard.
He isn’t frightening.
He’s wise.”
She had moved out of the family wing that same afternoon.
Nobody had suggested she could do otherwise.
No candidate receives better treatment than any other.
She had heard her father say it to Master Osric, and she had heard what he said after it: Especially them.
Room Nine was at the end of a long corridor on the second floor of the west wing, behind a tall door of nightoak with the number set into it in black iron.
Nightoak grew only in the sheltered valleys below the Wall, and it was dark as old ink, so dense that it drank in the cold and gave it back as warmth.
Most of the west wing had been built from it.
When Lyra pushed the door open, the first thing that met her was the smell: resin, woodsmoke, and something faintly sweet, like pine needles warmed in the sun.
The second was the warmth.
The room was long and high-ceilinged, the walls paneled in the same black nightoak from floor to beams, polished until the firelight moved across them like water.
At the far end, beneath a tall arched window that looked straight out at the white shoulders of the Dragon-Rib Mountains, a fireplace of glacial basalt had already been lit.
Someone, on the orders of Mistress Agathe Rennick, the small, round, bespectacled and wholly terrifying Head Maid whose great ring of keys could be heard three corridors off, had laid it with split pine and a single log of smokewood, which burned slow and blue and smelled of cedar.
A copper kettle hung from an iron hook over the flames, and beside it, on the hearthstone, sat a clay jar of Kenneth’s winter tea and four plain cups.
The beds stood along the two long walls, two on each side, each one with space enough around it that nobody need ever step over anyone else’s boots.
They were single beds, narrow and neat, but there was nothing plain about them.
The frames were carved from nightoak, and on each headboard a craftsman had cut a spray of frost-lilies so fine that the petals seemed to curl.
The mattresses were thick, layered wool and down, and on top of each lay a quilt that would not have looked out of place in the Archduchess’s own chambers: white frost-bear down, stitched into deep squares under a cover of midnight-blue silk, embroidered at the hem with a single running line of silver frost.
At the head of every bed lay two pillows filled with snow-goose down, so soft that when Lyra pressed one with her hand it took a long moment to rise again.
Tucked inside each pillowcase, where no one would see it but the sleeper, was a small linen sachet of dried lavender and pine.
Mother, Lyra thought, and felt her throat go warm.
Nobody else in the North would have thought of the sachets.
At the foot of every bed stood a nightoak chest with iron corners.
Lyra lifted the lid of the nearest one.
Three sets of sleeping clothes lay folded on top: soft grey wool flannel, loose at the wrist and ankle, with the Eisenhardt frost-sword stitched small over the heart in thread of the same grey, so that you could feel it more than see it.
Beneath them lay three sets of training clothes: close-fitting tunics of padded dark blue beast-silk, reinforced at the shoulders and elbows; trousers of the same cloth; a wide belt of oiled leather; wool-lined gloves; and, at the very bottom, a pair of fur-lined boots that had clearly been made to measure, because when she held one against her foot it fit exactly.
They had measured all one hundred of them.
She had not even noticed it being done.
Between the two pairs of beds, the middle of the room had been left open, with a thick white frost-bear rug laid across the floorboards.
And beneath the tall window, in front of the fire, was the best thing in the room: a deep window seat, as long as a bed, piled with cushions in blue and grey, with a low nightoak table in front of it and two wide armchairs on either side.
A shelf ran along the wall above it, and someone had already filled it: a Bestiary of the Northern Reaches, a battered Primer of Common Herbs, three volumes on sword forms, and a book of northern stories with a cracked red spine.
It was a room built for four people to sit together at the end of a long day, with their feet to the fire, and argue about everything.
Which, Lyra suspected, was exactly what Magnus Hale had in mind.
The door opened behind her.
Mira Halvard stood in the doorway with a cauldron strapped to her back and a herb satchel over each shoulder.
She saw Lyra.
Her expression did not change at all.
“Of course,” said Mira.
“Good afternoon, Mira.”
“Good afternoon, Lady Lyra.” Mira walked in, unstrapped the cauldron and set it very precisely on the nightoak table by the window, where it sat like a declaration of war.
“I’ll take the bed by the fire.
For the herbs.
They need the warmth.”
“Of course,” said Lyra, pleasantly.
Mira looked at her sharply, as if she suspected a trap.
There wasn’t one.
Lyra had wanted the bed by the window.
Hilde Aarn came next, in a rush, talking before she was through the door.
She was small and round-faced and freckled, with a bow case on her back and a voice that seemed to arrive several seconds before she did.
“Oh, look at it!
Hakon’s room is on the east side and he says theirs has a bear rug and I said ours would have one too and it does.
Which bed is mine?
Can I have the one near the door?
I like to know where the door is.
Is that Kenneth’s winter tea?
Can we drink it?
Are we allowed?”
“We’re allowed,” said Lyra.
“Oh, good.”
The last to arrive was Senna Vaar.
She was a thin, dark, quiet girl with windburned cheeks and a spear that was too old for her, and she had walked four days alone through the Kharn passes to get here because her father was on the Wall and could not leave it.
She stopped just inside the door with her pack still on her shoulders, and she did not move.
She was looking at the beds.
“Senna?” said Lyra gently.
“It’s mine?” Senna said.
Her voice was very low.
“The whole bed?” She swallowed.
“At home there’s five of us.
In one.
My brothers kick.”
Nobody laughed.
Even Hilde, for once, said nothing.
Lyra crossed the room and lifted the blue silk quilt on the last empty bed, the one opposite hers, so that Senna could see the white down beneath it.
“The whole bed,” she said.
“Nobody kicks.”
Senna put down her pack.
She sat on the very edge of the mattress, as though it might be taken back, and then, slowly, she put her hand flat on the quilt and left it there.
From somewhere across the courtyard, faint but unmistakable through the thick nightoak walls, came the sound of Sigurd Kell and Cedric Eisenhardt shouting at each other about which of them was going to sleep by the fire.
II.
The Kitchen General
Breakfast was served in the Lower Hall at the first bell after dawn, and it was the loudest room in the North.
One hundred candidates at ten long tables of scrubbed pine, under iron chandeliers still lit against the dark winter morning.
The high windows were furred with frost.
The two great hearths at either end of the hall roared.
And down the center of every table, on platters and in pots and in steaming earthenware bowls, lay the work of Master Haldor Emberly.
The candidates had heard of him before they ever arrived.
Everyone in the North had.
For twenty years he had been quartermaster of the Wall, the man who kept eleven thousand soldiers fed through blizzards that buried the supply roads for weeks.
He had lost an ear to a dread-beast and two fingers to frostbite, and he said, to anyone who would listen, that he had never lost a soldier to hunger.
When the Archduchess had asked him to come to the citadel and run her kitchens, he had refused twice.
The third time, she had sent him the recipe for her grandmother’s Western seafood stew.
He had arrived the next week.
In the kitchens, they called him the Kitchen General.
Not where he could hear.
He stood now by the kitchen doors with his arms folded, a huge man in a spotless white apron with a brass ladle hanging from his belt like a sword, and watched one hundred children eat his breakfast with the expression of a general watching a successful siege, and beside him stood the Archduchess Genevieve, murmuring now and then to him in her soft Western voice.
It was, Lyra had to admit, a very successful siege.
There was porridge of mountain oats, cooked slowly overnight until it was thick and silky, served with a jug of pale snow-honey and a bowl of frost-berries so cold they cracked between the teeth.
There were spirit-hen eggs, scrambled soft with chives and a pinch of warming root, the yolks so orange they glowed.
Smoked trout from the Winter-Lily Lake, pink and flaking.
Dark rye loaves still hot from the oven, with crocks of salted butter.
Clear bone broth in wide bowls, simmered with snow-ginseng and a slice of ginger, which Kenneth had apparently insisted on for everyone’s meridians.
And pitchers of warm goat’s milk, and pots of Kenneth’s winter tea, and more of everything the moment any dish ran low.
“It’s healthy,” said Hilde Aarn, in the tone of someone making an accusation, and then ate three helpings of it.
Senna Vaar did not say anything at all.
She ate her porridge very slowly, with total concentration, as though it might be the last bowl in the world.
When she finished it, a serving boy put another in front of her without being asked.
She looked up at him in pure astonishment.
“Master Emberly’s orders, miss,” the boy said.
“Nobody leaves his table hungry.”
Across from them, Mira Halvard was dissecting a frost-berry with the tip of her knife.
“Hoarfrost variety,” she said, to no one.
“Picked before the first snow and packed in ice.
That’s why they crack.” She looked at Lyra.
“Correct?”
“Correct,” said Lyra.
Mira looked faintly disappointed.
At the table beside theirs, the East Wing’s Room Four had arrived last and looked it.
Cedric had a bruise along one cheekbone.
Sigurd Kell had a matching one on his jaw.
Rowan Thorne looked well rested and extremely pleased with himself.
Finn Brannoc, the quiet spear-boy, sat between the two bruised ones, eating steadily and saying nothing.
“Who won?” Lyra asked her brother across the gap.
“Nobody won,” said Cedric darkly.
“Finn won,” said Rowan.
“While those two were rolling around on the rug, he put his pack on the bed by the fire and went to sleep in it.” He grinned.
“Nobody wanted to wake him.
He sleeps with his spear.”
Finn shrugged and reached for more bread.
All down the hall, it was the same: one hundred children who had been strangers or rivals a month ago, now bound in fours by walls and beds and firesides, arguing and boasting and trading bread and insults.
At the far end of the hall, Isolde Frostmere sat as far from Mira as the room allowed and managed to glare at her across nine tables.
Mira pretended not to notice, and dissected another frost-berry with great care.
Then the great doors at the top of the hall swung open, and the noise stopped as if someone had cut it with a blade.
Archduke Alaric Eisenhardt walked in.
Behind him came the three Elders of House Eisenhardt.
Lord Lucian, lean and wild-haired, a sword at his hip and snow still in his hair from the peaks.
Lord Roderick, enormous, in a sleeveless tunic in the middle of winter, grinning like a man about to enjoy himself very much.
And Lord Kenneth, in his soot-streaked apron, a ledger under one arm and a look on his face that Lyra had seen before, usually just before one of his towers lost its roof.
One hundred spoons went down on one hundred plates.
The Archduke did not go to the high table.
He walked down the center aisle between the candidates until he stood in the middle of the hall, and then he turned slowly and looked at them all: every face, one after another.
Lyra had seen him do it to soldiers on the Wall.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning, Your Grace,” said one hundred voices, raggedly.
“In four months, you will walk south,” said Alaric.
“You will walk into the trial zones of Aethelgard alone.
No family.
No clan guards.
No one to pull you out if you fall.
You will face beasts that have killed grown soldiers, and cauldrons that have blown the hands off grown alchemists.
And you will face the children of the South, who have been prepared for this since they could walk, by tutors who cost more than your families’ farms.”
The hall was utterly silent.
Somewhere, a log shifted in the hearth.
“You will not be less prepared than they are,” said the Archduke.
“Not by one hour.
Not by one breath.”
He glanced at the three men behind him.
“My brothers will train you.
Lord Roderick will temper your bodies.
All of you.
Every morning.
Lord Lucian will take the blades in the afternoons.
Lord Kenneth will take the cauldrons.
Each of them has been waiting a very long time to be allowed to do this properly.” Roderick’s grin grew wider.
“Every day of the next four months will be the hardest day of your lives.”
He let that sit.
“And every night,” he went on, more quietly, “you will sleep in the best beds in the North, and eat Master Emberly’s cooking, and sit by your own fires.
Because I will not have it said, in the South or anywhere else, that the North made its children strong by starving them.”
At the kitchen doors, Master Haldor Emberly unfolded his arms and gave a single, satisfied nod.
The Archduke looked around the hall one last time.
Then something at the corner of his mouth moved, very slightly: the ghost of the same look Cedric wore just before he said something outrageous.
“Finish your porridge,” said Archduke Alaric Eisenhardt.
“Then, kids: to the training ground.”
III.
The Thousand Steps
Lord Roderick Eisenhardt believed in starting the day gently.
His idea of gentle was the Thousand Steps.
They were cut into the mountainside behind the citadel, a single staircase of rough granite that climbed from the lower training yard all the way to the Sword-Pond terrace, one thousand and eleven steps in all.
Nobody had ever been able to explain the eleven.
Most of the citadel guards had climbed them exactly once, on their first day, and then spent the rest of their careers finding reasons not to.
One hundred candidates stood at the bottom in their new blue training clothes, breath smoking in the grey light, and looked up.
The top of the staircase was in the clouds.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Roderick happily.
He had a cart beside him, pulled by two very patient mules.
It was full of iron.
“Spirit-iron shackles,” he announced, lifting one in a hand the size of a shovel.
It was a plain dull cuff, as thick as a finger.
“One for each wrist.
One for each ankle.
They weigh five kilos apiece now.
Every week, they’ll get heavier.
By the time you leave for the South, you won’t remember what it felt like to move without them.” He beamed at them all.
“Line up!”
They lined up.
The cuffs closed with a small, final click and did not open again.
Lyra felt hers settle on her wrists: cold at first, then oddly warm, as the spirit-iron began slowly drawing on her mana to hold its weight.
That was the point, she realized.
Not the kilos.
The drain.
“Up to the Sword-Pond,” said Roderick.
“Touch the steles.
Back down.
Three times.” He paused.
“Before lunch.”
Someone near the back laughed, uncertainly, as if it were a joke.
It was not a joke.
The first two hundred steps were almost pleasant.
The candidates went up in a laughing, jostling crowd, the tower captains’ sons racing each other, Hilde Aarn chattering to anyone in range.
By the four hundredth step, the chatter had stopped.
By the six hundredth, the only sound was breathing: a hundred ragged, rasping breaths, and the scrape of boots on stone, and the faint clink of iron.
By the eight hundredth step, the first candidate was sick over the side of the staircase.
It was Sigurd Kell.
To his credit, he wiped his mouth and kept climbing.
Lyra climbed in the middle of the pack.
It was the hardest part of the whole morning, and nobody knew it but her.
Her body wanted to go faster.
Her legs had been tempered on the Dragon-Rib glaciers since she was seven; five kilos on each ankle meant almost nothing to her, and the spirit-iron’s small, steady drain was a trickle against the ocean beneath the new seal.
She could have been at the top before the tower captains’ sons were halfway.
But Sword Masters of sixteen did not do that.
So she did not.
She let herself breathe hard.
She let her legs slow on the steep turns.
And behind her ribs, she felt her grandmother’s net hold, fine and steady, gathering the power that rose to meet the effort and quietly setting it back down.
It did not squeeze like the old fist.
It simply held.
For the first time in three years, holding back did not hurt.
Cedric and Rowan passed her on the ninth hundred, shoulder to shoulder, neither one willing to be a single step behind.
“Race you,” panted Rowan.
“We’re already racing,” gasped Cedric.
Senna Vaar passed her on the thousandth.
The thin Kharn girl climbed the way she must have climbed the passes, head down, steady, not wasting a breath on anything, and she reached the top of the Thousand Steps as the fifth candidate of a hundred, and the first girl.
She touched the ancestral stele, turned around and started down again without a word.
Lyra heard Roderick’s delighted roar all the way from the bottom.
The second climb was worse.
The third was the worst thing that had happened to most of them in their lives.
Halfway up the third, Lyra came around a turn in the staircase and found Mira Halvard sitting on the step.
She was grey-faced and shaking, her hands wrapped around her knees, her iron cuffs dull against the stone.
Alchemists did not climb mountains.
Alchemists stood beside cauldrons.
It was obvious that Mira had never done anything like this before in her life.
It was also obvious that she would rather die on the step than ask for help.
Lyra stopped.
She did not offer a hand.
She knew better.
She simply sat down on the step beside Mira, as if she too needed to rest, and began to breathe slowly and loudly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, the way Kenneth had taught them both to breathe over a long infusion.
After a moment, without looking at her, Mira began to breathe the same way.
They sat there together for twenty breaths.
Then Lyra stood up.
“Three hundred left,” she said.
“The top smells like snow-ginseng.
Somebody’s brewing broth.”
Mira looked up at her with narrowed eyes.
Then she dragged herself to her feet.
“I didn’t need that,” she said.
“I know,” said Lyra.
They climbed the last three hundred steps side by side, and neither of them said another word.
At the bottom, Roderick was waiting with a ladle and a vast steaming cauldron of bone broth, and a slate on which he had written every candidate’s times in chalk.
As Lyra passed him, he leaned down and spoke into her ear, very quietly, in the enormous rumbling voice that the family had long ago learned meant he was being serious.
“You’re holding back, niece.”
“I’m pacing myself, Uncle.”
Roderick straightened up.
He looked down at her for a long moment, and then, very slowly, he winked.
“Good,” he said.
“Keep doing it.”
IV.
Lunch, Blades and Cauldrons
They came into the Lower Hall for lunch like survivors of a shipwreck.
Nobody talked.
Several people were walking in ways that suggested their legs belonged to someone else.
Then the smell reached them, and one hundred heads came up at once.
Everyone in the North knew that the Roaring Drake & Iron Skillet served the finest food in three provinces.
Master Haldor Emberly knew it too.
He had apparently decided, sometime in the past week, to settle the matter.
There was frost-drake brisket, but not the way the Roaring Drake did it.
Emberly’s had been braised for eighteen hours in dark ale and juniper until it fell apart at the touch of a fork, then glazed at the last moment over smokewood coals until the edges crackled.
There were golden pies of barley and wild mushroom with crusts so flaky they shattered, and a thick stew of mountain lamb and red lentils fragrant with Eastern spices.
There were roasted roots glistening with honey and thyme, flatbreads still blistered from the clay oven, bowls of pickled frost-onions sharp enough to make the eyes water, and a whole wheel of smoked northern cheese carried in by two kitchen boys.
And at the end, when nobody could possibly eat anything more: dishes of hot apple and snow-pear crumble, with jugs of cold sweet cream to pour over the top.
Finn Brannoc, whose father owned the Roaring Drake, took one bite of the brisket and stopped chewing.
He sat very still for a long moment.
Then he swallowed, set down his fork, and looked across the table at Rowan with an expression of genuine horror.
“I can never tell my father about this,” he said.
It was the longest sentence anyone in Room Four had heard him speak.
Rowan laughed so hard he had to put his head down on the table.
The afternoons belonged to the Elders.
The archers went down to the long range under a grizzled captain from the Wall, and Isolde Frostmere’s arrows began splitting each other before the sun had moved a finger’s width.
The spear-fighters and the axe-fighters went to the Wall veterans in the lower yard.
The swords, forty-one of them, went up to the Sword-Pond, where Lord Lucian was waiting.
He had hung a single dead branch from a rope between two of the ancestral steles, still covered in dry brown winter leaves, dozens of them.
“Cut one leaf,” he said.
“Just one.
Without moving any of the others.”
Forty-one sword candidates tried it.
Forty-one branches of dry leaves exploded into brown confetti.
Cedric’s cleaver took off the whole branch, the rope, and a sliver of the stele.
Sigurd Kell tried eleven times and grew so angry that he cut through the rope on the eleventh without touching a single leaf.
Lucian watched all of it without comment.
When they had finished, he closed his eyes, drew his sword, and moved.
Nobody saw the blade.
They heard a single faint whisper, like a breath through the teeth.
When Lucian opened his eyes and sheathed his sword, one brown leaf was drifting slowly down toward the granite, and every other leaf on the branch was perfectly still.
“Again,” he said.
“Until you can.”
They tried until the light began to go.
On his fortieth attempt, Rowan Thorne closed his eyes the way Lucian had, stood very still with his plain steel longsword held low, and cut.
When he opened his eyes, a single leaf was drifting to the ground.
Three others were trembling on the branch.
But the rest were still.
Lucian, who had not spoken a word in two hours, turned his head and looked at the farmer’s son for a long, long moment.
“Again,” he said, and there was something new in his voice.
In the Alchemy Tower, meanwhile, Lord Kenneth had lined up one hundred small clay pots on a long bench, each with a lid, and blindfolded his eleven alchemy candidates.
“Smell,” he said.
“Name it.
The type, the drying, the age, the region.
You lose a point for every mistake.
You lose three points for every guess.” He smiled.
“You lose everything for lying.”
By the end of the afternoon, nine of the eleven had given up somewhere in the forties.
Two were left.
Mira Halvard and Lyra Eisenhardt, still blindfolded, stood at opposite ends of the bench, each with one hundred correct.
“A tie,” said Kenneth thoughtfully.
“We can’t have that.”
He set down one more pot between them.
The hundred and first.
He lifted the lid.
The scent drifted up: soft, mossy, faintly bitter, like snow melting off a stone in the first days of spring.
Lyra went very still behind her blindfold.
“Thaw-moss,” said Mira briskly.
“Dried in shade, not sun.
Given to students who can’t relax during meditation.” A pause.
“Not a very hard one, my lord.”
“No,” said Kenneth.
“Not for everyone.”
Lyra said nothing at all.
That night, the dinner bell rang, and one hundred aching candidates dragged themselves down to the Lower Hall, too tired to talk, too tired to argue, certain that nothing in the world could make them feel human again.
They were wrong.
Master Emberly had been saving the best for last.
At the center of every table stood a great copper tureen, and when the lids came off, the steam that rose out of them smelled of the sea.
It was the Archduchess’s grandmother’s Western seafood stew: the recipe that had brought the Kitchen General to the citadel in the first place.
Sea-pearl scallops and white fish and tiny sweet shrimp, shipped north on ice through the Western ports, in a deep golden broth of saffron and fennel and cream.
There were medallions of venison with a sauce of wild blackcurrant, roasted squash with brown butter and sage, and soft rolls with crusts that crackled.
And for dessert: slabs of warm spiced honey cake, still steaming, with scoops of snow-cream so cold it hurt your teeth, and dark mountain honeycomb dripping over the top.
Halfway through her stew, Hilde Aarn put down her spoon and burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed, when everyone stared.
“It’s just so good.”
Nobody laughed at her.
Half the table understood completely.
V.
The Window Seat
Room Nine had kept its fire in while they were gone.
Someone had banked it with smokewood and set the copper kettle back on its hook, and when the four of them stumbled in after dinner, the whole long room was warm and dim and smelled of cedar.
For a while, nobody spoke.
They changed into the soft grey sleeping clothes from the chests at the foot of their beds, moving like very old women.
Hilde groaned every time she bent over.
Senna held her new flannel sleeve against her cheek for a moment, when she thought no one was looking.
Then, without anyone deciding it, all four of them ended up in front of the fire.
Hilde claimed the window seat, a heap of cushions and a quilt pulled off her bed.
Senna folded herself into one of the big armchairs with her knees tucked up.
Lyra made the tea, because she was nearest the kettle.
Mira took the other armchair and sat very straight in it, as though she had not quite decided whether she was part of this.
Lyra poured four cups of Kenneth’s winter tea and passed them round.
Nobody thanked anybody.
Nobody needed to.
Outside the tall window, the stars had come out, sharp and clear above the black mountains.
“My legs,” said Hilde, to the ceiling, “are never going to forgive me.”
“You’ll get used to it,” said Senna.
It was the most she had said all day.
“The passes are worse.
In the passes, there’s no broth at the bottom.”
They all looked at her.
“What’s it like?” Hilde asked.
“Walking them alone?”
Senna thought about it for a long time, turning her cup in her hands.
“Quiet,” she said at last.
“You can hear the Wall, some nights.
Up on the high ridge.
The horns, when there’s a tide coming.” Her eyes went to the dark window.
“My father’s on the Twelfth Tower.
I count the horns.
If there’s three, it’s a small tide.
If there’s five…” She stopped.
“There haven’t been five in a long time.”
Nobody said anything.
The fire cracked.
“The Twelfth Tower has the best captain on the Wall,” said Lyra quietly.
“Captain Orsa.
My father says she’s never lost a single soldier to a tide she saw coming.
And she sees all of them coming.”
Senna looked at her.
Something in her thin, windburned face eased, just a little.
Hilde, who could not bear a silence for more than three breaths, reached up and pulled the book with the cracked red spine off the shelf above the window seat.
“Stories of the Northern Reaches,” she read.
“Oh, I know this one.
Hakon and I had it when we were little.
Shall I read?
I do all the voices.”
She did do all the voices.
She did them very badly, especially the dragon, and by the time the first story was half over, even Senna was laughing into her knees.
It was Mira who spoke to Lyra, finally, under the sound of Hilde’s terrible dragon.
“I beat you today,” she said.
Her voice was low and flat.
“At the herbs.
The hundred and first.”
“You did,” said Lyra.
“I’ve never beaten you before.
Not once.
Not in eight years.” Mira’s dark eyes were fixed on her over the rim of her cup.
“And you knew it.
You knew what it was before I did.
I saw your face.”
Lyra looked into the fire for a long moment.
“It made me feel sick,” she said at last, which was true.
“The smell.
I had a bad night with it once.” Which was also true.
“I didn’t want to open my mouth.”
Mira studied her.
Lyra could see her weighing it: the alchemist in her looking for the lie, the rival in her wanting to find one.
“That’s a terrible reason to lose,” said Mira finally.
“I know.”
“I’m still counting it.”
“I’d be insulted if you didn’t.”
Mira made a small sound that might, in someone else, have been the beginning of a laugh.
She turned back to the fire.
But after a moment she reached out, without looking, and refilled Lyra’s cup before her own.
They went to bed when the fire burned low.
Hilde fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, and a few minutes later murmured, quite clearly, “More honey cake,” and rolled over.
Mira slept flat on her back with her hands folded, like an effigy on a tomb.
Senna curled up in the exact center of her bed, as far from every edge as it was possible to get, and her breathing went slow and deep almost at once.
Lyra lay awake a little longer.
She could feel her grandmother’s net behind her ribs, soft and steady, holding.
Not a fist.
A hand holding water.
She listened to the three girls breathing in the warm dark, and the night breeze brushing the window, and the fire ticking as it cooled.
Through the tall window, across the dark courtyard, a single figure stood alone under a lantern, a plain steel longsword held low, eyes closed.
As she watched, it moved: one short, whispering cut, then stillness.
Then again.
Then again.
Rowan.
And in the deep shadow of the colonnade behind him, where Rowan could not possibly see, a second, taller figure leaned against a pillar with his arms folded and snow in his wild hair, watching every cut.
Lyra smiled into her snow-goose pillow and closed her eyes.
One hundred and forty-two days until spring.
End of Chapter 5.