I.
The Council
Six weeks after the Thousand Steps, the Archduke called his brothers to the study after midnight, and nobody brought wine.
That was how Sir Magnus Hale knew it was serious.
The Eisenhardt brothers drank at funerals, weddings, beast-tides and dinner.
They did not drink when Alaric closed the study door himself, lit only one lamp, and sat down behind his desk without a word.
Roderick filled the armchair by the fire like a boulder filling a stream.
Lucian stood by the dark window, arms folded, snow still melting in his hair.
Kenneth sat on the edge of a stool with a ledger in his lap and ink on his fingers.
Magnus took his usual place at the corner of the desk.
“Tell me where they are,” said Alaric.
“Honestly.”
Roderick went first, because Roderick always did.
“The cuffs are at ten kilos,” he rumbled.
“Ninety-seven of them can climb the Steps three times before lunch now.
Ninety-seven!” For a moment the old grin flashed through.
“The Kharn girl, Senna, does it four times and then asks if she can carry someone else’s cuffs.
The alchemist, Halvard, couldn’t climb three hundred steps the first day.
Yesterday she did all three runs.
Threw up at the top.
Kept going.” He shook his great head.
“They’re not children anymore, Alaric.
Not the way they were.”
“The blades?”
Lucian did not turn from the window.
“Fourteen can cut one leaf,” he said.
“Not every time.
Most times.
Sigurd Kell manages one in ten, and hasn’t missed a single morning.
Your son manages one in three, and hates it, and comes back every night after dinner to try again.” A pause.
“The Thorne boy cuts one leaf in one stroke with his eyes shut.
Every time.
For the last nine days.”
The room was quiet for a moment.
“And he started nine days ago,” said Lucian, “to cut the leaf behind the leaf.
Without touching the one in front.”
Kenneth’s head came up.
Roderick let out a low whistle.
“That’s not a Master’s cut,” said Magnus slowly.
“No,” said Lucian.
“It isn’t.”
Alaric let that settle.
Then he turned to his youngest brother.
“Kenneth.”
“Eleven alchemists.
All eleven refining clean mid-grade pills now.
Halvard and Lyra refining high-grade.” Kenneth’s thumb moved over the edge of his ledger.
“But that’s not why you called us here.”
“No.”
Alaric opened the drawer of his desk and laid three folded dispatches on the leather, each one sealed in the grey wax of the Wall.
“From the Kharn watchtowers,” he said.
“The last one came this morning.”
Magnus had read them already.
He watched the three brothers read them now: Roderick frowning, Lucian utterly still, Kenneth going slowly pale.
“Frost-wolves,” said Kenneth at last.
“In the Hollowmere.
But not…” He looked up.
“Six eyes?
Spines?”
“Three scouts wounded,” said Alaric.
“One won’t use his arm again.
The Twelfth Tower’s captain says the pack is bigger every week.
Twice the size of a normal frost-wolf.
Their blood froze a scout’s sword to his hand.
And they’re eating.” His voice did not change.
“They’re eating cores.
Other beasts’ cores.
Out of the carcasses.”
Kenneth closed his eyes.
“The golden thread,” he said quietly.
“The Hollowmere is eight miles from where Lyra killed that prowler.” Alaric sat back.
“You still don’t know who refined it?”
“I know it came from a master’s cauldron.
I know it wasn’t made anywhere in the North.” Kenneth’s hands tightened on the ledger.
“And I know it makes beasts hungry.
That’s all.”
“Then that’s where we’re going.”
Nobody spoke for a long moment.
Then Lucian finally turned from the window.
“With them?” he said.
“With one hundred children?
Into a basin of mutant wolves that crippled three of the Wall’s own scouts?”
“With them,” said Alaric.
“And with us.
All four of us, Lucian.
That’s the whole point.” He met his brother’s eyes.
“In fourteen weeks, those children walk into the Aethelgard trial zones alone.
They can climb stairs.
They can cut leaves.
Not one of them has faced a beast that was trying to kill them with a grown man standing close enough to pull them out.
I’d rather they learn what that feels like here, with the four of us beside them, than learn it there, with no one.”
Lucian held his gaze.
Then, slowly, he nodded.
“Then they can’t go with what they carry now,” he said.
“Half of them fight with swords their grandfathers used as fence posts.
The Kharn girl’s spear is older than her father.
Brannoc’s boy has a spear with a crack in the haft he’s taped over and thinks no one can see.” His mouth tightened.
“You don’t take children into the Hollowmere with scrap iron.”
“No,” said Alaric.
“You don’t.”
He put both hands flat on the desk.
“Mithril,” he said.
“Every one of them.”
Kenneth’s ledger slid off his lap and hit the floor.
It was not an exaggeration to say that mithril was the most sought-after ore on the continent.
Common mithril was rare enough that Southern dukes wore it as jewelry: a mithril ring, a mithril clasp, a single mithril arrowhead mounted on a family crest.
It was light as ash-wood and harder than star-iron, it held an edge for a lifetime, and it drank mana the way a sponge drank water, so that a blade of it became part of the arm that swung it.
And frost-mithril was rarer still.
It formed only in the deepest veins beneath the Kharn, where the blizzards never stopped and the cold went down into the rock for a mile.
The mining crews that went after it came back with frostbite, or came back with a fist-sized nugget and frostbite, or did not come back at all.
In a good decade, the whole North might bring up enough to forge five swords.
“Alaric,” said Kenneth carefully, picking up his ledger, “the vault holds twelve centuries of frost-mithril.
Everything Father has ever brought back from the deep veins.
One hundred weapons would take nearly all of it.”
“I know.”
“It’s the House’s entire reserve.
It’s our war reserve.”
“I know.” Alaric’s voice was quiet.
“And every weapon will be made for one hand only.
Balanced to the one who carries it.
Forged in the shape of whatever they fight with now, but better, and truer, and theirs.” He looked at each of them in turn.
“Not lent.
Not the House’s.
Theirs.
When they walk south, it goes with them.
When they come home, it stays with them.
It’s a gift, Kenneth.
From the North to the children who are going to carry it.”
Magnus cleared his throat.
“There’s the Decree,” he said.
“The Absolute Anti-Cheat Decree.
A candidate who accepts weapons from their family or clan is disqualified.
Banned for life.”
“I’ve read the Decree,” said Alaric.
“I’ve read it forty times since the letter came.
It governs the trial zones: help given during the trial, by family or guards or hired swords.
It says nothing about a blade a candidate has owned, and bled with, and trained with every day for three months before the trial begins.” A faint edge came into his voice.
“The Southern houses arm their children the day they can walk.
Nobody disqualifies a duke’s son for carrying his own sword.
The North’s children will carry theirs.”
Magnus nodded, slowly, and wrote something down.
Then Roderick, who had been silent through all of it, leaned forward in the armchair until it creaked.
“Armor,” he said.
They all looked at him.
“Plate’s no good against wolves that fast.
They’ll be dead in it before they’ve turned around.” He held up one enormous hand.
“It has to be something they can move in.
Run in.
Roll in.
Climb in.
Light as a shirt.
And warded.
Proper wards, not a hedge-witch’s scribble.
Something that turns a claw that gets past the blade.” His voice dropped to a rumble.
“I’ve spent six weeks making their bodies strong, brother.
I’m not sending them out to have those bodies opened up because we gave them the wrong coat.”
“Frostweave,” said Kenneth softly.
“Beast-silk, with mithril thread woven through it.
The scraps from the forge would do.
And the wards…” He hesitated.
“Mother could stitch them.
If she’s strong enough, after the seal.”
“She is,” said a voice from the doorway.
None of them had heard the door open.
Kaelen Eisenhardt stood on the threshold, silent and enormous in black.
He must have been standing there for some time.
He looked at his four sons, and then, briefly, at Magnus, who stood up without deciding to.
“You were going to ask me for the vault,” the Sword Emperor said to his eldest son.
“Yes, Father.”
“You don’t need to ask.” He turned to leave.
“It was always meant for them,” said Kaelen.
“I just didn’t know their names yet.”
II.
The Cold Forge
The vault beneath the Frost-Crest Citadel had been opened four times in twelve hundred years.
The fifth time, it took the Sword Emperor’s hand on the door and a full minute of silence before the lock remembered him.
Inside, on shelves of plain black basalt, lay the frost-mithril.
It did not look like metal.
It looked like moonlight that had frozen solid: long, pale ingots, faintly blue, faintly translucent, each one giving off a thin breath of cold that curled along the floor like mist.
When Brunhild Ashanvil, the citadel’s master smith, lifted the first ingot from its shelf, frost bloomed across her leather gloves, and she laughed out loud like a girl.
Brunhild was dwarf-blooded, a head shorter than any man in the forge and twice as broad, with a braided grey beard she tucked into her apron and forearms scarred by sixty years of sparks.
Her great-great-grandmother had helped temper the star-metal of the Wall.
She had forged blades for three generations of Eisenhardts.
She had never, in her whole life, touched this much frost-mithril at once.
“One hundred,” she said, turning the ingot slowly in her hands.
“In three weeks.” She looked up at the Archduke.
“You understand you’re asking for a miracle.”
“I’m asking for you,” said Alaric.
“It’s close enough.”
The problem with frost-mithril, as every smith in the North knew and most would never learn firsthand, was that ordinary fire could not work it.
Put it in a forge and it simply drank the heat and stayed cold.
It had to be softened with something colder than itself.
So Kenneth came down into the forge.
The citadel’s forge-hands would talk about it for years afterward: the Alchemy Maniac standing at the anvil in his soot-streaked apron, opening his hand, and a flame rising from his palm that was not red or gold but a pale, glacial blue.
His Mystic Cold-Flame, the one he usually kept for the most dangerous refinements in his tower.
It did not give off heat.
It gave off a cold so intense that the air around it rang faintly, like struck glass.
And when Kenneth laid it against a bar of frost-mithril, the bar slowly began to glow, and bend, and give.
Brunhild worked beside him for three weeks.
Neither of them slept much.
Lucian came down every night with a leather-bound book.
It had taken him six weeks to fill it.
On every page, in his cramped, impatient hand, was one candidate: the length of their arm, the width of their grip, the way they shifted their weight before a strike, which shoulder they dropped when they were tired, whether they cut from the wrist or from the hip.
He had watched every swing of every candidate every afternoon since the Thousand Steps, and he had forgotten none of them.
“Sigurd Kell,” he would say, opening the book beside the anvil.
“Broadsword.
Holds it too tight.
Give the grip a quarter-inch more and he’ll stop strangling it.
Balance two fingers forward of the guard, he likes a blade that pulls.” Brunhild would grunt, and change the pattern, and Kenneth would bend the flame.
Up in the Glass Conservatory, meanwhile, Seraphina sat among the spirit-tea bushes with the Frostweave coats piled around her.
The beast-silk had come from the Archduchess’s own Western merchant lines, deep blue and strong as rope; the mithril thread had come from the forge, drawn from the offcuts of the blades so that nothing was wasted.
Each coat was light as a shirt.
Each one fastened at the throat with a small clasp in the shape of the Eisenhardt frost-sword.
And into the lining of each, in thread so fine it could hardly be seen, Seraphina stitched the wards: a circle of old runes over the heart, another down the spine, a line along each arm.
Her needle moved slowly.
Every rune cost her something, and Kaelen sat beside her through the long evenings, not speaking, one hand resting on her back.
The Archduchess sat on her other side, sewing names.
She did it herself.
Genevieve de Marigny-Eisenhardt, who had not sewn anything with her own hands since she was a girl in the Western Isles, sat with a lamp and a spool of silver thread and stitched one hundred names inside one hundred collars, small and neat, where only the wearer would see them.
Senna Vaar.
Finn Brannoc.
Hilde Aarn.
When Kenneth asked her why, she did not look up.
“Because they’re children,” she said.
“And someone should.”
The candidates noticed, of course.
It was impossible not to.
For three weeks, the forge chimney poured pale blue smoke into the winter sky day and night, and the whole citadel rang with a faint, cold, bell-like note that set everyone’s teeth on edge.
Rumors went round the Lower Hall like fire through dry grass: the Archduke was forging a new sword for the Emperor; the Elders were making weapons for the Wall; Lord Kenneth had finally blown up the forge and was hiding it.
Only the four of them, and Brunhild, and the women in the conservatory, knew the truth.
On the last night of the third week, a little before dawn, Brunhild Ashanvil set down her hammer for the hundredth time, and did not pick it up again.
She stood looking at the long racks along the forge wall, where a hundred weapons lay in the pale morning light, and a hundred nightoak trunks stood open and waiting.
Then she sat down on an upturned bucket, pulled off her gloves, and wept.
III.
The Trunks
The order came at the end of lunch, carried table to table by Master Osric himself: All candidates to the Sword-Pond.
Now.
In training clothes.
One hundred people abandoned one hundred bowls of the Kitchen General’s venison stew, which Hilde Aarn afterward described as the greatest sacrifice of her life.
They came up the Thousand Steps at a run.
Nine weeks earlier, most of them could not have climbed it at all.
Now they took it in a single charge, cuffs clinking, breath smoking, and came out onto the granite terrace at the top in a jostling, curious crowd.
Then they saw the trunks, and slowed down.
There were one hundred of them, lined up in ten neat rows behind the dais at the north end of the terrace.
Each was made of nightoak, long and low, with iron corners and a lid stamped with the Eisenhardt frost-sword.
The pale winter light fell across them, and a faint cold mist was curling out from under every lid, as though something inside was breathing.
In front of them stood the Archduke and the three Elders.
A little to the side stood the rest of the family: the Sword Emperor and the Matriarch, the Archduchess in a fur cloak, and a short, broad, grey-bearded woman in a scorched leather apron, whom most of the candidates had never seen before.
“What is it?” whispered Hilde, bouncing on her toes.
“What’s in them?
Is it food?
It’s not food.
Is it food?”
“It’s not food,” said Mira.
“The forge,” said Rowan slowly.
He was staring at the trunks as if they might bite.
“Three weeks of blue smoke.
Everyone said it was for the Emperor.”
“They’re coffins,” said Sigurd Kell, not quite as loudly as he meant it to be.
“For after the next stage.”
Senna Vaar, beside Lyra, said nothing at all.
But her hand had gone tight on the haft of her old spear.
The Archduke raised one hand, and the terrace went silent.
“Nine weeks ago,” he said, “I told you that you would not be less prepared than the children of the South.
Not by one hour.
Not by one breath.” He turned slightly, so that the long rows of trunks were behind him.
“Or by one blade.”
A murmur went through the crowd.
“In each of these trunks is a weapon,” said Alaric.
“Forged in the shape of the one you carry now.
The same length, the same weight, the same balance you trust; Lord Lucian has watched every one of you swing it for nine weeks, and he has forgotten nothing.” Lucian, beside him, did not even blink.
“But it is not iron, and it is not steel.
It is frost-mithril, from the deep veins beneath the Kharn.
Forged in the cold-fire by Master Brunhild Ashanvil and Lord Kenneth over three weeks, without sleep.”
The murmur died completely.
Somewhere near the back of the crowd, somebody laughed, once, in disbelief, and then stopped.
Every child in the North knew what mithril was.
Very few of them had ever seen it.
None of them had ever touched it.
“And beneath each weapon,” the Archduke went on, “is a coat.
Lord Roderick asked for armor you can run in, climb in and fall in, and the Matriarch has stitched wards into every one of them with her own hands.”
He paused, and his voice changed.
“Understand me.
These are not the House’s.
They are not on loan.
They are yours.
When you walk south, they go with you.
When you come home, they stay with you.
When you are old, you will give them to your children, or you will be buried with them.” He looked out over the hundred faces.
“They are a gift from the North.
Because you have earned them, and because you are going to need them.”
The silence on the terrace was absolute.
“When your name is called,” said the Archduke, “come forward and receive your trunk.”
Sir Magnus Hale stepped up to the edge of the dais with a list in his hand.
“Hilde Aarn,” he read.
Hilde went forward as if she were walking in a dream.
Two forge-hands carried her trunk to the front of the dais and lifted the lid, and a breath of cold mist rolled out over the granite.
She knelt beside it.
Very slowly, she lifted out a bow.
Its limbs were pale, faintly blue and faintly translucent, like moonlight on ice, curving back in a long, perfect arc.
The string was grey frost-tiger sinew.
When she drew it, experimentally, a single clear note hummed out along the terrace, and the whole crowd heard it.
Hilde Aarn opened her mouth.
Nothing came out.
She closed it again.
“Oh no,” breathed Cedric somewhere behind Lyra.
“She’s broken.”
It was, the West Wing agreed afterward, the first and only time in recorded history that Hilde Aarn had nothing to say.
“Finn Brannoc.”
The quiet spear-boy knelt beside his trunk and lifted out his new spear.
It was exactly the length of his old one, down to the finger-width.
The haft was pale ash bound in bands of frost-mithril, and the head was a long leaf of cold blue metal that caught the light like water.
He ran his thumb slowly down the haft, all the way along, as though feeling for something.
There was no crack.
He looked up, straight at Lord Lucian.
Lucian looked back.
“I saw the tape,” said Lucian.
Finn Brannoc bent forward over his spear until his forehead nearly touched the granite, and stayed there for a long moment.
When he stood up, his eyes were wet, and he did not seem to care who saw.
One by one they went up.
One by one, the trunks opened, and cold mist rolled across the terrace, and the crowd gasped.
Isolde Frostmere drew her new bow and smiled: a small, sharp, astonished smile that transformed her whole face, and that nobody in Frost-Crest had ever seen before.
Mira Halvard found a slim frost-mithril herb-knife, a set of mithril cauldron tongs, and a short defensive blade in her trunk, along with a folded note in Kenneth’s untidy hand.
She read the note, went bright red, and put it inside her coat without showing it to anyone.
Sigurd Kell lifted his broadsword and swung it once, experimentally.
Then he stopped, and looked down at his own hand, frowning.
“It’s not pulling,” he said.
“The grip.
It doesn’t fight me.” He swung it again, and his fingers loosened on the hilt all by themselves.
His whole face changed.
He looked across the terrace at Rowan, and for once in his life could not find anything nasty to say.
“Rowan Thorne.”
Rowan walked up slowly.
He knelt beside his trunk and lifted the lid, and looked down for a long time before he reached in.
The longsword was plain.
No engraving.
No jewel in the pommel.
It was exactly the length and shape of the old, plain steel sword that he had carried for eleven years and refused to trade for anything better.
Only it was not steel.
It was pale frost-mithril, faintly blue, faintly translucent, and when he closed his hand around the grip, it fit as though it had grown there.
“It’s plain,” said Lord Lucian from the dais.
“You’ll like it.”
Rowan’s hands were shaking.
He looked up at the Archduke.
“I can’t,” he said hoarsely.
“Your Grace.
I can’t take…”
“You already have,” said Alaric.
“What do I do with the old one?”
“Keep it,” said the Archduke.
“Hang it over your bed in Thornfield.
Show it to your children.”
Rowan laughed, once, a choked sound.
Then he stood up with his new sword held against his chest like something alive, and walked back to the crowd with his head down so that nobody could see his face.
Cedric thumped him on the back so hard he nearly dropped it.
“Senna Vaar.”
Senna went up with her old spear still in her hand.
She knelt, opened the trunk and lifted out the new one: pale mithril head, dark ash haft, perfectly balanced.
She held it for a long moment.
Then she held up her old spear, the one older than her father, the only thing she had brought through the Kharn passes.
“May I keep this one?” she asked quietly.
“Too?”
“Look at the butt-cap,” said Lucian.
Senna turned the new spear over.
At the very base, where the haft ended in a cap of frost-mithril, someone had engraved two small numerals.
XII.
The Twelfth Tower.
Senna Vaar did not make a sound.
She simply bowed her head over both spears, and her thin shoulders began to shake, and on the far side of the dais the Archduchess turned away and pressed her fingers very hard against her mouth.
Then the whispers started.
It began with the coats.
Someone near the front had lifted theirs out: deep blue beast-silk, light as a shirt, faintly shimmering where the mithril thread ran through it, with the little silver frost-sword clasp at the throat.
Someone else turned their collar inside out, and went very still.
“There’s a name,” they whispered.
“Stitched in.
My name.”
One after another, the candidates turned their collars.
One after another, they found their names, small and neat, in silver thread.
“Who…?”
It was Master Osric, standing at the edge of the terrace with his hands folded, who answered, in a voice not quite as neutral as usual.
“Her Grace the Archduchess,” he said.
“Each one.
By hand.”
One hundred candidates turned to look at Genevieve de Marigny-Eisenhardt.
She lifted her chin, very straight, and did not look at any of them.
“Cedric Eisenhardt.”
Cedric bounded up the steps to the dais, flipped his trunk open and stopped dead.
His own Dragon-Spine Cleaver lay inside it, on top of the coat.
“I knew it was missing,” he said indignantly.
“I thought Lyra had hidden it!”
But it was not quite his cleaver anymore.
The guard, the pommel and the spine had been reforged in frost-mithril, and a thin inlay of it now ran along the whole length of the edge, pale blue against the dark ancestral steel.
When he lifted it, it was a third lighter than it had been that morning.
He swung it once, and the air hummed.
Cedric looked at Brunhild Ashanvil.
Brunhild looked back, arms folded, completely unrepentant.
“You sleep like a dead ox, my lord,” she said.
“It was easy.”
The whole terrace laughed.
“Lyra Eisenhardt.”
She was the last.
She walked up the steps of the dais, the way she had walked up to the seal-crystal, aware of everything: the cold of the granite, the mist from a hundred open trunks, her grandfather’s eyes on her back.
She knelt and lifted the lid.
The sword inside was slender, a little longer than her old blade, with a guard shaped like two curving frost-lily petals.
The blade was frost-mithril, faintly blue, faintly translucent like all the others.
She closed her hand around the grip.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then frost bloomed along the fuller of the blade, from the guard to the tip: not white frost, like her family’s, but frost with the faintest tinge of violet, delicate as the veins of a leaf.
And the blade gave a single, soft, clear note, so faint that no one past the edge of the dais could possibly have heard it.
Lyra slid it into its sheath at once.
She did not look up.
But she knew, without looking, that on the far side of the dais her grandfather had not taken his eyes off her, and that Uncle Kenneth had quietly stopped breathing.
She turned her collar over.
Lyra, it said, in silver thread, in her mother’s small, neat hand.
She stood, and went back to the others.
IV.
The Hollowmere
It took a long time for the terrace to quiet down again.
Nobody wanted to put anything back in a trunk.
Hilde had her bow drawn half the time, just to hear it sing.
Finn was sitting cross-legged on the granite with his spear across his knees, running his thumb along the haft over and over.
Senna had not let go of either spear.
Somebody had already tried on their Frostweave coat and was demonstrating to three friends that they could do a full cartwheel in it, which nobody had asked to see.
Then the Archduke raised his hand again, and the terrace fell silent.
It had learned to.
“Nine weeks,” said Alaric, “you have trained against stairs, and leaves, and pots of herbs.
Tomorrow, you train against something that is trying to kill you.”
The silence changed.
“At dawn,” he said, “all one hundred of you will march north with me and the three Elders to the Hollowmere, eight miles beyond the Kharn Glacier.
Your first beast subjugation.” He paused.
“Lord Lucian will show you what you’ll be hunting.”
Lucian stepped down from the dais.
He was carrying a heavy canvas sack, dark and stiff at the bottom.
He walked to the middle of the terrace, where every candidate could see, untied the neck of the sack, and upended it onto the granite.
Something heavy rolled out, and came to rest on its side.
The front rows took a step back without meaning to.
It was a head.
A wolf’s head, or it had been once.
It was the size of a pony’s, far larger than any frost-wolf’s had a right to be, and it had been severed cleanly at the neck by a single stroke.
Frost was already creeping out from the stump across the granite in slow white fingers, as though the thing were still cold enough to freeze the mountain.
Its fur was the grey-white of an ordinary frost-wolf, but only in patches.
Everywhere else, the fur had given way to plates of something that looked like ice but was not ice: thick, blue-white, faintly translucent, grown out of the skin itself and overlapping like the scales of a fish.
Along the brow and down the back of the neck ran a crest of long crystalline spines, each as long as a man’s hand and sharp as a needle.
“The spines come loose,” said Lucian, quite calmly.
“When it’s angry, it shakes them free, and they fly.
A scout from the Twelfth Tower took three of them through a steel breastplate.”
Nobody said anything.
The jaws hung open.
They were wrong.
A wolf’s jaw is a hinge, top and bottom.
This one split three ways: upper, and then two lower halves that opened sideways, like the petals of some terrible flower.
The teeth inside were translucent too, long and narrow as icicles, set in rows.
Behind the front row, a second row was already growing in.
And the eyes.
There were two where a wolf’s eyes should be: amber, glassy, dead.
Above them, in a curved row across the brow, there were four more.
They were small, round and milky white, like the eyes of a fish left too long on the ice.
“The extra eyes aren’t blind,” said Lord Kenneth quietly, coming down to stand beside his brother.
“We think they see mana.
Not light.
It can hunt you in a blizzard by the heat of your meridians alone.”
“The Wall calls them Rime Ravagers,” said Lucian.
“Frost-wolves, once.
Something changed them.
They run in packs of twelve to twenty, with an alpha twice the size of this one.
They’re fast.
Faster than you are, right now.
And they howl.” His eyes swept across the candidates.
“The howl breaks concentration.
Hold your sword-qi or your spell or your cauldron-fire when one of them howls, and it will fall apart in your hands.
The scouts learned that the hard way.”
Sigurd Kell had gone very pale.
Beside Lyra, Hilde Aarn had stopped bouncing on her toes.
“One more thing,” said Roderick from the dais.
His voice was not cheerful at all now.
“Their blood freezes steel.
Strike one with an iron blade, and the blood gets on it, and the blade freezes solid to your hand.
That’s how the scouts were hurt.
Their swords froze to their fists in the middle of the fight.”
He looked out across the terrace, at a hundred children holding a hundred new weapons, pale and faintly blue and faintly translucent in the afternoon light.
“Mithril doesn’t freeze,” said Roderick.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
Then, one by one, all across the terrace, the candidates looked down at the weapons in their hands, and understood.
“I’d like to go back,” said Hilde, in a very small voice, “to the part with the presents.”
Someone laughed, shakily.
Then someone else.
The tension broke, just a little.
Lyra did not laugh.
The wind had shifted across the terrace, and it was carrying the smell of the head straight toward her.
Under the stink of old blood and the sharp cold of the frost, there was something else.
Faint.
Clean.
Refined.
The kind of sweetness that had passed through a cauldron.
She looked down at the dead thing on the granite.
Beneath the blue-white plates along its throat, where the skin had split, she could see its veins.
They were threaded with gold.
Lyra raised her eyes and found her uncle Kenneth already looking at her.
He did not nod.
He did not need to.
Someone fed you, she thought.
Someone fed all of you.
“Dawn,” said the Archduke, into the silence.
“Eat everything Master Emberly puts in front of you tonight.
Sleep.
And tomorrow, wear your coats.”
End of Chapter 6.