I.
Room Nine
The dawn bell rang in the west wing an hour before dawn, which Hilde Aarn considered a personal betrayal.
“No,” she said into her pillow.
“It’s still dark.
Bells shouldn’t be allowed in the dark.”
Nobody answered her.
In the long, warm dimness of Room Nine, the fire had burned down to a red glow under its banked smokewood, and the tall window was still black, with the first faint grey only just beginning to show along the tops of the Dragon-Rib Mountains.
For a moment, the only sounds were the bell dying away down the corridor and four girls not wanting to move.
Then, from the bed nearest the fire, came a thin, strangled noise.
Lyra opened her eyes.
Mira Halvard was sitting bolt upright in bed, and something had happened to her head.
At night, Mira wore her hair in a single tight, severe plait, as neat as the rest of her.
Sometime in the night the plait had surrendered.
What remained stood straight up and straight out from her skull in every direction at once: a great frizzing brown cloud, crackling faintly, as though she had leaned too close to one of Uncle Kenneth’s cauldrons at exactly the wrong moment.
One single lock, for reasons known only to the gods, stood perfectly vertical on the crown of her head like a feather in a cap.
Mira did not yet know any of this.
She was blinking at the room with the dignified confusion of a person who has not yet looked in a mirror.
“What,” she said, “is everyone staring at?”
Nobody was staring.
Nobody else was awake enough to stare.
But Lyra, who was, bit the inside of her cheek very hard and said, “Nothing.
Good morning, Mira.”
Mira narrowed her eyes.
The feather on top of her head swayed gently.
Across the room, the lump under Hilde’s quilt heaved, rolled over and sat up.
Hilde pushed the quilt off her face, and Lyra lost the fight with her cheek completely.
If Mira’s hair had exploded, Hilde’s had grown.
Her short, fluffy, ginger-blonde curls had risen in the night into a single enormous upright tuft, gathered at the top of her head as if someone had grabbed it in a fist and pulled, then rounded off into a perfect fuzzy dome.
With her round freckled face and sleep-puffed eyes beneath it, she looked exactly like one of the little carved troll dolls the Kharn peddlers sold at the midwinter fair, the ones with the wool hair that children rubbed for luck.
Hilde put up a hand, felt the top of her head, and sighed the deep, weary sigh of long experience.
“It’s the troll again,” she said.
“Isn’t it.”
“It’s a little bit the troll,” Lyra admitted.
“Every morning.” Hilde flopped back against her headboard, and the tuft bounced.
“Every single morning of my whole life.
Hakon wakes up looking like a prince in a painting, and I wake up looking like something you’d hang over a baby’s cradle to scare off bad spirits.
We’re twins.
We came out on the same day.
Why does his hair lie down and mine stand up and scream?” She glared at the ceiling.
“What did I do?
What did I do to deserve it?”
“Perhaps it’s how you sleep,” said Mira, with great superiority.
Hilde looked at her.
Hilde’s eyes went slowly up, and up, to the top of Mira’s head.
Her mouth fell open.
“Oh,” said Hilde softly.
“Oh, Mira.”
Mira got out of bed.
She walked with enormous dignity to the washstand beside the door, where a tall looking-glass in a nightoak frame had hung since the first day.
She looked into it.
There was a long silence.
“That,” Mira said at last, in a voice of perfect calm, “is static.
From the frost-bear down.
It’s a simple matter of friction and dry air.
Wool and down create a charge, and the charge repels each individual hair from its neighbor, and…” She stopped.
She lifted a hand toward the vertical lock on her crown, very slowly, and touched it.
It crackled, and bent, and sprang straight back up.
“…and I look like I’ve been struck by lightning.”
Hilde made a sound like a kettle and buried her face in her quilt.
“You look,” said Lyra, with care, “like a very distinguished alchemist.”
“I look like Lord Kenneth.”
That did it.
Lyra folded over on her bed and laughed until she could not breathe.
Hilde was shrieking into her quilt.
Mira turned from the mirror with a face of thunder, which was spoiled entirely by the lock on her head waving back and forth like a tiny flag of surrender.
“You needn’t laugh, Lady Lyra,” she said icily.
“Have you seen yourself?”
Lyra stopped laughing.
She had not.
She had, in fact, been quietly confident about it.
Her hair had always been the one thing about mornings she never had to think about: ink-black, heavy, straight as rain, the kind that slid off a pillow and lay down behind her like a well-trained dog.
She had assumed, as a law of nature, that this would continue.
She put up a hand.
Her hand disappeared.
It went into something soft, and enormous, and lighter than air.
She pulled it out and looked at it, then got up and went to stand beside Mira at the mirror, and the girl in the glass looked back at her from the center of a vast black cloud.
Every one of the hundred thousand hairs that usually hung past her waist had risen in the night and spread out around her head and shoulders in a floating, crackling halo, fine as smoke, so wide it brushed both edges of the looking-glass.
It moved when she breathed.
When she turned her head, the whole cloud turned a moment later, like a flock of starlings.
“Frost-bear down,” said Mira, with deep satisfaction.
“Friction.
Dry air.”
Lyra looked at herself for a long moment.
“I look like a dandelion,” she said.
“A black one.
That’s gone to seed.”
“You look like a thundercloud,” said Hilde, emerging from the quilt with tears on her cheeks.
“A very noble thundercloud.
A thundercloud from a good family.”
Someone else was laughing now: a low, hoarse, unpractised sound, as though it had not been used in a long time.
They all turned.
Senna Vaar was sitting cross-legged in the exact center of her bed, where she had curled up the night before, with her hands over her mouth.
Her own hair was as short and dark and flat to her skull as ever.
Senna’s hair had never done anything in its life.
It had never had the chance.
Then she climbed down, came over to the washstand and stood between Lyra and Mira, and looked into the glass, and stopped laughing.
She went very still.
Her eyes went wide.
“Senna?” said Lyra.
“That’s me,” said Senna slowly.
She reached out and touched the cold surface of the looking-glass with one finger, right where her own windburned cheek was.
“Isn’t it.
All of me.
At once.”
The room went quiet.
“At home there’s a piece of tin,” Senna said, to the mirror.
“Polished.
By the door.
You can see one eye in it, if you hold it right.
Or your mouth.” She turned her head a little, one way and then the other, watching the thin, dark girl in the glass do the same.
“I didn’t know my nose went like that.”
“Like what?” said Hilde, getting up to look.
“Up.
At the end.” Senna frowned at it.
“My father’s does that.”
Nobody laughed.
Hilde came and stood on Senna’s other side, and after a moment she put her troll-doll head against Senna’s shoulder, and the four of them stood crowded together in front of the looking-glass in their grey sleeping flannels in the red firelight: an exploded alchemist, a troll, a black dandelion, and a girl seeing her own whole face for the first time.
“Well,” said Mira at last, briskly.
“We can’t go to breakfast looking like this.
The Kitchen General will think we’ve been attacked.”
It took three combs, two ribbons, a jug of warm water and a pot of Uncle Kenneth’s hair balm that smelled of rosemary and had almost certainly been meant for something else.
Mira fought her own head with the grim concentration of a woman refining a difficult pill, and lost twice.
Hilde gave up on the tuft altogether and crushed it flat under a wool cap.
Lyra sat on the floor in front of the fire and let Senna, who had plaited her little brothers’ hair every morning for years, wrestle the black cloud into a single long, heavy braid down her back.
“You’ve got a lot of it,” Senna said, around a mouthful of hairpins.
“I know.”
“Is it always like this?”
“Never,” said Lyra.
“Not once in sixteen years.”
Senna tied off the braid, and for a moment her hands rested on Lyra’s shoulders.
“Then it’s a good sign,” she said.
“In the passes, we say, if something strange happens the morning before a hunt, it means the mountain’s noticed you.”
Lyra did not answer that.
She thought of a column of grey-black light, and the stars bending toward it, and decided that the mountain had noticed her quite enough already.
Then, all at once, there was no more time to be slow.
The corridor outside Room Nine was full of running feet.
Doors banged up and down the west wing.
From the bathhouse at the end of the passage came the hiss of the hot springs through the pipes, a great deal of steam, and a girl’s voice shrieking that someone had used all the rosemary soap, again.
At the far end of the corridor, the Frostmere girl stood in her doorway already fully dressed, her silver-white hair in a flawless crown of braids that had clearly never done anything wrong in its life, watching the chaos with cool disdain.
A pair of Kharn sisters ran past in their sleeping clothes carrying their new bows.
Somebody was crying, quietly, behind a closed door, and somebody else was murmuring to her in a steady voice that it was all right, that it was only a hunt, that the Elders would be there.
On the chests at the foot of their beds, where the forge-hands had set them the night before, the four girls of Room Nine found their new clothes waiting.
They dressed slowly now, and without talking.
The padded blue beast-silk training clothes.
The fur-lined boots.
And over them, last of all, the Frostweave coats: deep blue, light as a shirt, faintly shimmering where the mithril thread caught the firelight.
Senna did up the little silver frost-sword clasp at her throat, then undid it, then did it up again, as though making sure it was real.
Hilde turned her collar inside out, read her own name in silver thread, and turned it back without a word.
The weapons came last.
Mira buckled on her short blade and slid her mithril herb-knife into her boot.
Hilde strung her bow and drew it once, and the clear note hummed through the room.
Senna lifted her new spear from the rack beside her bed and stood holding it, with her old one still leaning against the wall, as if she could not decide which to leave behind.
In the end, she touched the old spear once, gently, on the cracked place near the head.
Then she left it.
Lyra buckled on her sword last.
The frost-lily guard settled at her hip, and through the sheath she felt it: a faint, cool answering hum, like a cat purring in another room.
Not now, she told it.
Be ordinary today.
The hum went quiet.
Through the window, across the dark courtyard, the lamps of the east wing were burning in every window, and a large voice that could only belong to Sigurd Kell was bellowing at someone to give it back.
A moment later, the unmistakable figure of Cedric Eisenhardt appeared in a first-floor window with a boot in each hand and a grin on his face, and threw both boots out into the courtyard.
“Boys,” said Mira, with contempt.
“Brothers,” said Lyra.
The breakfast bell rang.
II.
The Kitchen General
The Lower Hall was full, and it was silent.
Lyra had never heard it silent.
For nine weeks it had been the loudest room in the North: a hundred voices arguing over porridge, benches scraping, the Aarn twins shouting across three tables, Sigurd Kell’s laugh rattling the chandeliers.
This morning, one hundred candidates in one hundred blue Frostweave coats sat at the ten long pine tables under the iron lamps, and the only sound in the whole vast room was the clink of spoons against bowls and forks against plates, and the crackle of the two great hearths.
Nobody had decided to be quiet.
It had simply happened, table by table, as they came in and sat down and saw each other’s faces.
Master Emberly had not been told that anything was different, or had decided to ignore it.
Breakfast was as enormous as always.
There was porridge of mountain oats with snow-honey and cracked frost-berries.
There were spirit-hen eggs, scrambled soft and golden, and thick rashers of smoked boar with the fat crisped at the edges, and rye loaves still steaming from the ovens.
There were bowls of the snow-ginseng bone broth Kenneth insisted on, and a new dish nobody had seen before: small round oatcakes baked hard with dried meat and nuts and berries pressed into them, piled in baskets at the end of every table.
Nobody touched those.
Everybody knew what they were for.
Food you carried.
Lyra ate her porridge and watched the room.
She could read it the way she read a battlefield, or a salon, and this morning it was not hard to read.
At the table by the east hearth, the tower captains’ sons were eating with grim, mechanical determination, the way their fathers had taught them to eat before a tide: fill up now, you don’t know when you’ll eat next.
Beside them, a thin boy from one of the southern valley villages had filled his bowl three times and not lifted his spoon once.
Two tables down, one of the Kharn girls was quietly sharpening her mithril arrowheads under the table, over and over, although they could not possibly get any sharper.
Near the doors, a broad-shouldered axe-boy who had arm-wrestled half the east wing in the first week sat staring at his eggs as though they had personally threatened him, and his hands, Lyra saw, were not quite steady.
Fear, mostly.
Excitement, in some.
Pride, in a few, the way a boy is proud when he doesn’t want anyone to see that he is frightened.
And, in a great many faces, something harder to name: the look of people who had been told for nine weeks that a thing was coming, and had only this morning understood that it was real.
Because most of them had never hunted.
Not really.
Not the way the vanguard hunted on the Kharn, where the beast chose the ground and the hour and whether you lived.
They had trained against beasts, of course.
Every one of them had.
Every week, down in the lower pens behind the barracks, Captain Dorran Voss of the Frost Legion brought out whatever the Wall’s patrols had taken alive that month: a frost-lynx, a pair of rime-boars, once a half-grown six-winged tiger with its wings bound, and every one of them on a chain.
The Captain stood at the end of that chain the whole time, a stocky, silent man with a scarred jaw and a whip he never had to use, and if a beast so much as turned its head toward a candidate in a way he did not like, he said a single word, and it lay down.
The candidates had learned to fight at the end of a chain.
They had learned footwork and timing and where to put the blade.
What they had never learned was what a beast was like when nobody was holding the other end.
Today there would be no chain.
At Lyra’s table, the silence was the same as everywhere else.
Hilde was not talking.
That alone was enough to frighten anyone who knew her.
She sat with her wool cap crushed down over the tuft, cutting her eggs into smaller and smaller pieces and not eating any of them.
Beside her, Senna ate steadily and completely, the way she did everything, eyes on her bowl; she was the only person at the table who looked as though she had done this before, because she had.
Across from them, Mira had tamed her hair at last into a knot so tight it must have hurt, and she was reading a small leather notebook of herb notes while she ate, turning the pages a little too quickly to be reading any of them.
At the next table, Room Four was not doing much better.
Cedric was eating, which meant nothing.
Cedric would eat through the end of the world.
But he was eating without talking, which Lyra had not seen him do since he was nine and their grandfather had first taken him out onto the Kharn.
Rowan sat beside him with his new plain sword across his knees under the table, one hand resting on the hilt the whole time, as though to make sure it was still there.
Finn Brannoc had his spear propped against the bench beside him and was chewing slowly, looking at nothing.
And Sigurd Kell, who had spent nine weeks proving to anyone who would stand still that he was not afraid of anything, had eaten one spoonful of porridge, set down his spoon, and had not picked it up again.
His face was the color of the porridge.
Nobody said anything to him about it.
That was new too.
Lyra felt her brother’s eyes on her across the gap between the tables.
She looked up.
Cedric raised one eyebrow a fraction of an inch: all right?
She gave him the smallest nod.
Fine.
You?
He shrugged one shoulder and went back to his boar.
But under the table, she saw, his knee was bouncing.
The silence stretched on.
The hearths crackled.
Somebody’s fork scraped across a plate with a sound like a sword being drawn, and forty people flinched.
And then, from the kitchen doors, came a noise like the end of the world.
CLANG.
CLANG.
CLANG.
One hundred heads snapped up.
Master Haldor Emberly stood in the doorway to his kitchens in his spotless white apron, with an iron frying pan the size of a war-shield in one hand and his great brass ladle in the other, and he was beating the one with the other as though he were sounding a tide on the Wall.
CLANG.
He stopped.
The last echo rolled away among the rafters.
“Right,” said the Kitchen General.
He hung the frying pan on a hook by the door as if it weighed nothing, tucked the ladle back into his belt like a sword, and walked out into the middle of the hall.
The kitchen boys filed out behind him in a long line, and every one of them was carrying a great wicker basket.
“Listen to me,” said Emberly.
His voice was not loud, but it carried the way the Archduke’s did, the way voices carried that had spent twenty years being heard over blizzards.
“I’ve fed soldiers going out onto the ice for twenty years.
I’ve watched them sit at my tables the morning of a tide, looking exactly the way you lot look right now.” He swept a glance around the room, and his missing ear and his two missing fingers were somehow very noticeable.
“And I’ll tell you what I told every one of them.
You’re frightened.
Good.
Frightened keeps you awake.
Frightened keeps you watching your feet.
It’s the ones who aren’t frightened that I end up burying.”
Nobody moved.
“Now.
You’ll each get three things from my boys on your way out that door, and you’ll keep them, and you won’t lose them, and if you come back without them I’ll know why.”
He held up a thick, battered finger.
The first kitchen boy stepped forward and lifted something out of his basket: a flat, round flask, the size of two hands, wrapped in felted wool and bound with leather, with a stopper on a thong.
“One.
Water.
Spring water from the citadel wells, boiled and cooled and cut with a pinch of salt and snow-ginseng.
Out on the Kharn, you’ll want to eat snow.
Don’t.
Snow steals your heat faster than it gives you water.
The wool keeps it from freezing if you keep it under your coat, next to your skin.
Drink from it every hour.
You won’t feel thirsty.
Drink anyway.”
A second finger.
The second boy held up a small drawstring pouch of oiled canvas, about the size of a fist.
“Two.
Spices and herbs.
Salt, pepper, dried thyme and juniper, a twist of smoke-salt, a pinch of Eastern chili for the cold, and some of Lord Kenneth’s warming root, ground fine.
Enough for a week.” His eyes narrowed.
“Because in my army, nobody eats their meat raw and nobody eats it bland.
Whatever you kill out there, you’ll cook it properly, and you’ll season it, and you’ll eat it like human beings and not like the beasts you killed it from.”
Somebody near the back gave a shaky laugh.
It died quickly, but it had happened.
A third finger.
The third boy lifted something out of his basket, and it caught the lamplight.
It was a knife.
Not a dagger or a fighting blade: a broad, heavy butcher’s knife with a thick spine and a slight curve toward the point, a grip of dark wood worn smooth, and a stiff leather sheath with a loop to hang from a belt.
It was the kind of knife that had been in the Kitchen General’s kitchens for years, cutting through bone and gristle and frozen joints of venison.
Every edge of it had been freshly ground.
“Three,” said Emberly.
“A knife.
Not for fighting.
You’ve got your fine new mithril for that, and I’m told it’s very pretty.” A few people almost smiled.
“This is for after.
For opening a beast and taking out its core without ruining the rest of it.
For skinning.
For jointing.
For cutting a spit, or a tent pole, or a splint for your friend’s leg.
Every one of those knives has fed the Wall.
Now they’re going to feed you.” He looked around the silent hall.
“Bring them back clean.”
He stood there a moment longer, a huge, scarred man in a white apron, looking out at one hundred children.
Something in his face changed.
“I lost an ear on the Wall,” said Master Haldor Emberly, in a different voice.
“And two fingers.
And a good many friends.
I never lost a single soldier to hunger, not in twenty years.
And I’m not starting with you.”
He unhooked the ladle from his belt, raised it high over his head like a general’s baton, and pointed it at the doors.
“So you go out there,” he said, “and you do what His Grace tells you, and you keep your feet dry and your knife sharp.
And every one of you comes back to my table.”
He paused.
“Come back alive, everyone!”
And then, before anyone could answer, before anyone could so much as stand, the Kitchen General turned on his heel and went back into his kitchens, and the door swung shut behind him.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
Then, at the table by the east hearth, one of the tower captains’ sons stood up.
Then all of them, all at once, the whole hall rising with a great scrape of benches and a clatter of spoons.
And the silence broke, and it broke into noise: a hundred voices talking all at once, too loudly, laughing too hard at nothing, the way soldiers do on the morning of a tide.
Hilde picked up her fork and ate all her eggs in four bites.
“I’m hungry,” she said, sounding surprised.
“Why am I suddenly so hungry?”
“Because you’re going to come back alive,” said Senna, and pushed the basket of oatcakes toward her.
“Take six.
You’ll want them by noon.”
They went out through the doors in a long line, and the kitchen boys gave them their three things one by one: flask, pouch, knife.
When Lyra reached the end of the line, the smallest kitchen boy of all, a round-cheeked child who could not have been more than ten, held out her knife in both hands and then, instead of letting go, held on to it for a moment.
“Master Emberly says,” he whispered, “that he’s making the seafood stew tonight week.
For when you come back.
Only he said I mustn’t tell anyone, in case it’s bad luck.”
Lyra took the knife and hung it at her belt beside her sword.
“Then we’d better come back,” she said.
“It would be a shame to waste it.”
III.
The Shackles
They gathered in the lower training yard in the blue half-light, one hundred of them in ten ragged rows, with their breath hanging over their heads in a single low cloud.
The yard looked different in the dark.
The weapons racks along the walls were empty; everything that could be carried was being carried.
The old tally board by the gate, with its two columns of scratches under C and R, was furred white with frost.
Above the citadel, the sky had gone from black to the deep, bruised blue that came just before a northern dawn, and far beyond the valley, over the white shoulders of the Dragon-Rib range, a thin line of gold had begun to show.
At the north end of the yard, where the great gate stood open onto the valley road, waited the House of Eisenhardt.
The Archduke stood in front, in a plain grey Frostweave coat no different from theirs except for its size, the heavy war-blade of the family on his back.
Lord Roderick stood on his left, in a sleeveless tunic, in the dark, in midwinter, rolling his enormous shoulders and grinning.
Lord Kenneth stood on his right with a leather satchel of medicines over each shoulder and a third on his back, looking less like an Elder of a great house than a travelling apothecary who had got lost.
And a little in front of them all, lean and silent, with snow already in his wild hair although none was falling, stood Lord Lucian.
Sir Magnus Hale stood by the gate with his one hand resting on the latch.
He was not coming.
Somebody had to hold the North while its Archduke was out on the ice, and Alaric had told him so the night before in a voice that did not allow argument.
Magnus had not argued.
But he had been standing by that gate since before the bell.
On the gallery above the yard, wrapped in furs against the cold, the rest of the family watched.
The Archduchess.
The Matriarch.
And between them, silent and enormous in black, the Sword Emperor, who had not come down to see anyone off in living memory.
“Stand still,” said Lord Lucian.
It was the first thing he had said all morning.
Behind him, Roderick grinned and added, “This might tickle.”
He did not draw his sword.
He did not shout, or stamp, or so much as raise his voice.
He simply lifted his right hand in front of him, two fingers extended, as though he held an invisible blade: the way he had once stood under a branch of dead leaves on the Sword-Pond.
And then he cut.
The wave hit them from the front.
It was not wind.
The frost on the flagstones did not stir, and not a single hair on anyone’s head moved.
It was something that went through them, from front to back, like the deep boom of a war-drum felt in the chest, or the moment on the Wall when a beast tide strikes the stone and the whole mountain shudders.
Lyra felt it pass through her ribs and her spine and her teeth.
Beside her, Hilde gasped.
Somewhere behind, someone sat down hard on the stones without meaning to.
Then the cuffs broke.
All of them.
All at once.
Four hundred spirit-iron shackles, on two hundred wrists and two hundred ankles, split cleanly down the middle with a single enormous iron crack that echoed off every wall of the yard, and fell.
They hit the ground like dropped anvils.
The sound went on for a full two heartbeats: a great rolling crash of iron on stone that cracked the frozen flagstones, and threw up puffs of old dust, and made the forge-hands on the far wall duck.
When it was over, one hundred candidates were standing in a litter of broken iron, staring down at it.
Lyra looked at the pieces around her own boots.
They lay where they had fallen, half-sunk into cracks they had made in the stone.
“Twenty kilos,” said Roderick happily into the silence, as if announcing the weather.
“That’s what most of you have been carrying on each wrist and each ankle, since the forge.
I’ve been adding a little every night while you were asleep.
Spirit-iron doesn’t mind.” He beamed around the yard.
“Some of you, I added a little more.”
He began pointing, with evident pleasure.
“Fifty kilos.
You.
And you.
The Kharn girl.
Sigurd Kell.
Rowan Thorne.
My nephew, obviously, because he complained.” His finger came to rest, last of all, on Lyra.
“And my niece.
Because she didn’t.”
A murmur went round the yard.
Fifty kilos, on each limb.
Two hundred kilos of iron, and they had been climbing the Thousand Steps in it.
Sigurd Kell looked down at the wreckage at his feet with an expression of dawning, furious understanding.
“I thought,” he said slowly, “I was getting weaker.”
“You were getting stronger,” said Roderick.
“The iron was just getting stronger faster.
Now it isn’t.” He grinned wider than ever.
“Go on.
Try moving.”
Hilde took one experimental step forward, and went a great deal further than she meant to.
She shot across the yard like a startled hare, windmilling her arms, and fetched up against the far wall with a squeak.
Behind her, Hakon Aarn tried a small hop on the spot and rose so high his head came level with the lowest windows of the barracks.
Sigurd swung his broadsword experimentally and nearly spun himself off his feet.
All across the yard, candidates were stamping, jumping, staring at their own hands, laughing out loud in disbelief.
A tower captain’s son did a standing somersault and landed flat on his back and lay there, laughing at the sky.
Even Isolde Frostmere took one light step and then another, very carefully, like someone walking on the surface of a pond, and the faintest look of wonder crossed her face before she put it away again.
Lyra did not jump.
It was the worst moment she had had in nine weeks.
The iron had been her excuse.
Every morning on the Thousand Steps, every afternoon on the Sword-Pond, every time her body had wanted to move the way it truly could, the cuffs had given her a reason not to: something real to push against, weight that slowed her honestly, so that the careful, ordinary Sword Master she showed the world had not been entirely a lie.
Now the weight was gone, and her body sang.
She felt it go through her from her heels to the crown of her head, a sudden terrible lightness, every tempered acupoint of the Terrestrial Gate springing open like shutters in the sun.
She could have crossed the yard in one step.
She could have been on the top of the Thousand Steps before Hilde reached the far wall.
And behind her ribs, where the seal lay, her grandmother’s net shivered: a faint, cool tremor, like a hand on water feeling the current change.
No.
Lyra breathed.
Slow and deep, in through the nose, out through the mouth, the way Kenneth had taught her over a long infusion.
She felt the net steady, and hold.
And then, very carefully, she took one step forward and let herself stumble on it, just a little, the way a girl might who had had fifty kilos on each ankle for weeks and could not yet quite find her feet.
Cedric caught her elbow.
“Easy,” he said, grinning.
“You’ll fly off.”
“I nearly did,” said Lyra, which was truer than he knew.
On the other side of the yard, Uncle Roderick was watching her.
He did not wink this time.
He only gave her the smallest nod, and turned away.
The Archduke let it go on for exactly one minute.
Then he raised his hand, and the yard was silent.
“The Hollowmere lies beyond the Wall,” he said, “at the foot of the Kharn Glacier.
On horseback, with good weather, it’s a day and a half.
On a sledge, two.” He paused.
“We are not taking horses.
We are not taking sledges.
From this moment until we reach it, you are on your own feet.”
A ripple went through the ranks.
Nobody spoke.
“We run,” said Alaric.
“All day, and part of the night, until we reach our first stop.
We keep pace.
We do not stop because it snows, and it will snow.
We do not stop because you are tired, and you will be.
We stop when I stop.
You follow me.” His grey eyes went slowly across all hundred faces.
“The Frozen Land is not the Thousand Steps.
Its snow hides rifts that go down half a mile.
Its wind will turn you around in a whiteout until you walk off a cliff you were facing a moment ago.
The blizzards out there have been blowing without a break for longer than any of you have been alive, and they carry beast-mana in them that will numb your hands and slow your thinking.
Every soldier on the Wall learned to cross it the way you’re going to learn today.
It is the best training ground in the world.
And it doesn’t care who you are.”
He let that settle.
“So you won’t cross it alone.
You’ll cross it in lances.”
Sir Magnus stepped forward from the gate with a list in his one hand, as he had on the day of the rooms, and began to read.
Ten lances of ten.
That was the Wall’s old way: ten soldiers who ate together, marched together and pulled each other out of the snow.
Each had a leader, and each had a pathfinder, the one who read the ice.
The leaders, Magnus said, had not been chosen by realm or by family, but by who the others had followed when nobody had told them to.
More than one head turned in surprise as the names were read.
The First through Fourth Lances would run at the front, behind the Archduke, under the eye of Lord Lucian.
The Fifth through Seventh would run in the middle, where Lord Kenneth could reach anyone who fell ill.
The Eighth through Tenth would take the rear, under Lord Roderick, who would, he announced, personally carry anyone who fell behind, and would talk to them the whole way, which was widely understood to be a threat.
“Seventh Lance,” read Magnus.
“Leader: Rowan Thorne.”
Rowan went very still.
“Pathfinder: Senna Vaar.”
Senna did not move at all.
But Lyra, standing beside her, saw her fingers tighten on her spear.
“Cedric Eisenhardt.
Lyra Eisenhardt.
Finn Brannoc.
Sigurd Kell.
Mira Halvard.
Isolde Frostmere.
Hilde Aarn.
Hakon Aarn.”
There was a pause, of the kind that happens in a room when several people all realize the same thing at once.
Mira turned her head very slowly and looked at Isolde.
Isolde was already looking at her.
Sigurd looked at Rowan, and then at the ground, and his jaw worked.
Cedric looked at Lyra with an expression of pure delight.
“Oh, no,” breathed Hilde, with enormous satisfaction.
“They’ve put all the trouble in one place.”
“Magnus Hale,” murmured Lyra, “is the most dangerous man in the North.”
“I heard that, my lady,” said Magnus, without looking up from his list, and went on to the Eighth Lance.
When the last name had been read, the lances sorted themselves out in a shuffling, muttering scramble across the broken iron.
The Seventh ended up in a loose knot near the gate, looking at each other with the wary expressions of people who have been locked in a room together.
Rowan stood at the front of it, holding his new plain sword, with the stunned face of a farmer’s son who has just been handed the Archduke’s heir to command.
Sigurd broke the silence first.
Of course he did.
“I’m not taking orders,” he said, low and hard, “from a plough-hand.”
Rowan looked at him.
For a long moment the whole lance waited for the fight.
“Then don’t,” said Rowan.
“Take them from Senna.
She’s the one who knows where the rifts are.” He glanced at the thin Kharn girl.
“Right?”
Senna looked from one of them to the other, and something in her face set.
“Step where I step,” she said.
“Don’t step where I don’t.
If I stop, you stop.
If I say down, you drop flat and spread your arms and don’t argue.” Her dark eyes rested on Sigurd.
“And if you fall in a hole, don’t shout.
Shouting brings the snow down on top of you.”
Sigurd opened his mouth.
Then he closed it again.
“Fine,” he muttered.
“Good,” said Rowan, and for the first time that morning, he grinned.
On the gallery above, the Sword Emperor turned and went inside without a word.
Lyra saw her grandmother’s hand rest for a moment on the rail where he had stood, and then her mother lifted one gloved hand toward the yard, and held it there.
The Archduke turned to the gate.
Sir Magnus swung it wide.
Beyond it, the valley road ran away north between the orchards and the frozen lake, pale in the growing light, toward the far, grey, endless line of the Wall.
“With me,” said Alaric Eisenhardt, and began to run.
IV.
The Frozen Land
For the first hour, it was beautiful.
The valley road ran north through the Eisenhardt basin in the first gold light of the morning, and under the great azure dome of the Ten-Fold Formation it was spring, the way it was always spring there.
The orchards on either side stood in crisp white blossom.
The Winter-Lily Lake lay on their right like a sheet of polished silver, with mist rising off it in slow curls and the Moon-Frost Lotus closed up tight for the day.
Farmers leaning on their gates in the villages along the road straightened up as the long column went by, and pulled off their caps, and some of them cheered.
A pack of village children ran alongside the Fourth Lance for half a mile, shrieking, until their mothers called them back.
The pace was easy.
That was the first surprise.
Lyra had expected her father to set off at a sprint and dare them to keep up.
Instead, he ran at the front of the column at a long, steady, loping stride that looked as though he could keep it up for a week, and he did not look back once.
He did not need to.
Behind him, Lord Lucian ran up and down the flanks of the front four lances like a sheepdog, silent, correcting a stride here and a shoulder there with a single touch.
“This isn’t bad,” said Hilde, at the end of the first hour.
She was running between her brother and Lyra, and without the cuffs she was bouncing with every step.
“This is actually nice.
Why did everyone make such a fuss?”
Senna, running at the head of the Seventh Lance, did not turn around.
“We haven’t left yet,” she said.
An hour after that, the Wall rose out of the land in front of them.
Lyra had seen it all her life.
It still stopped the breath in her throat.
It came up out of the valley floor in a single sheer grey cliff of dwarven star-metal and basalt, a hundred and twenty feet high and so long that it did not seem to end so much as fade: east and west, as far as the eye could follow, until it was only a thin dark line drawn across the mountains, and then not even that.
Watchfires burned along its crest at every tower.
Where the valley road met it, a great iron gate was set deep into the stone, twice the height of a man, and above the gate, carved into the metal twelve hundred years ago, was the frost-sword of the Eisenhardts piercing a dragon’s skull.
And just before it, the spring ended.
It ended all at once, in a single line across the road.
On one side, green grass and blossom.
On the other, snow.
The shimmering azure curtain of the Formation stood in the air between them, so faint you could only see it from the corner of your eye, like heat above a summer road.
The Archduke ran straight through it without breaking stride.
The First Lance followed.
Then the Second.
Lyra saw the candidates in front of her hit the curtain one after another, and one after another they flinched, as though they had run into a wall of cold water.
Then the Seventh Lance went through, and she understood.
The cold hit her like a slap.
One step, the soft air of a spring morning; the next, a cold so deep and sudden that it drove the breath out of her lungs and brought tears to her eyes, and her tears began to freeze on her lashes before they could fall.
The warmth of the valley was simply gone, as if a door had slammed behind her.
Hilde gave a strangled yelp.
Mira swore, in the precise, technical language of an alchemist who has touched the wrong end of a cauldron.
Behind Lyra, someone in the Eighth Lance was coughing hard.
“Breathe through your nose,” said Senna, from the front, not turning her head.
“Pull your collar up over your mouth.
It warms the air before it gets to your chest.
Don’t gasp.
Gasping burns.”
They pulled up their collars.
The Frostweave was warm against their faces, warmer than any cloth had a right to be, and Lyra felt the faint thread of her grandmother’s wards stir in it, like a hand laid on the back of her neck.
The soldiers of the Frost Legion were waiting at the gate.
They stood in two lines on either side of the long tunnel through the Wall, in grey furs and steel, spears grounded, and as the Archduke ran past them they struck their spears once against the stone, all together, with a sound like a single great drumbeat that went rolling away through the tunnel ahead.
They struck again for each lance that passed.
Lyra saw a grizzled sergeant at the end of the line looking at the Seventh Lance as it went by, at Rowan and Finn and Senna in their blue coats with their pale mithril weapons, and she saw him smile under his frozen beard.
The tunnel through the Wall was sixty paces long, and dark, and it smelled of iron and old smoke.
At the far end, a second gate stood open onto white.
They ran out into the Frozen Land.
* * *
It was not a landscape.
That was Lyra’s first thought, every time.
A landscape had a shape.
It had near things and far things, and a line where the ground stopped and the sky began.
The Frozen Land had none of that.
It was white, and then it was whiter, and then it went up into the sky and became the sky, and there was no telling where one ended and the other began.
To their right, the Wall ran away east, dwindling into haze.
Ahead, very far off, the Dragon-Rib Mountains rose like the bones of the dead dragon the old stories said they were: long, curved ridges of black rock and blue ice, arching up out of the snowfields in a row, each one a mile high, with the wind tearing white banners of snow off their crests.
Somewhere beyond them, too far to see, lay the Kharn.
And between here and there was the snow.
It was nothing like the snow on the glaciers above the valley.
Out here the wind had been blowing from the north for longer than anyone had been alive, and it had carved the snow into long, hard, frozen ridges, knee-high and razor-edged, running in waves across the whole plain as far as the eye could see.
Senna called them sastrugi, the old Kharn word.
Between the ridges lay hollows of soft powder, deep enough to swallow a leg to the thigh.
Here and there the snow had been scoured away entirely, and the ice underneath lay bare: not white but blue, a deep, clear, ancient blue, like looking down into the sea, and slick as glass.
“Don’t run on the blue,” said Senna.
“Go round it.
And don’t step in the hollows if you can step on the ridges.
The ridges hold.”
So they ran on the ridges.
It was the hardest thing Lyra had ever watched a hundred people learn.
Every step had to be chosen.
Every foot had to land on the hard, narrow crest of a frozen wave and push off again before the snow could crumble, and the ridges were never quite where you expected them.
People fell.
They fell constantly: into the hollows, onto the blue ice, onto each other.
A boy in the Sixth Lance went down on the blue and slid thirty feet on his back before Lord Kenneth caught him by the collar without breaking stride.
Hilde fell into a hollow up to her waist and had to be hauled out by her brother, both of them laughing and then, when they saw how far the column had got ahead, not laughing at all.
But nobody stopped.
The Archduke did not stop, so nobody could.
The sun came up properly.
That was worse.
On the valley side of the Wall, the sun was warm and kind.
Out here it came up white and blinding and bounced off every surface at once, until the whole world was a single glaring sheet of light that stabbed straight through the eyes and into the back of the skull.
“Snow-blind,” said Kenneth, dropping back to run beside the Seventh.
“It happens in an hour, if you don’t cover your eyes.
Here.” He was pulling strips of dark gauze out of one of his satchels and passing them out, lance by lance.
“Tie it across your eyes.
You can see through it.
The glare can’t.” He pressed a strip into Lyra’s hand as he went by, and added, more quietly: “And smear this under them.” A small pot of something black and greasy that smelled of soot and pine.
“Old Wall trick.
Blocks the bounce.”
They tied the gauze on.
The Seventh Lance ran on across the Frozen Land looking like a troupe of very determined bandits.
* * *
By midday, nobody was talking.
The pace had not changed.
That was the terrible thing about it.
It was the same long, steady stride the Archduke had set at dawn, not a hair faster.
But it did not stop.
It did not ever stop.
Every muscle Lyra could see around her was burning with it: the long muscles of the thighs, the calves, the small aching muscles of the feet that had spent five hours landing on frozen ridges. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
Breath came short and ragged behind every collar.
Faces had gone from red to white to a waxy, bloodless grey.
They ate on the move.
Senna had shown them how: you took the oatcake out of your coat, where your body had kept it from freezing solid, and bit off a piece and let it soften in your mouth as you ran.
You drank from the wool flask under your coat every hour, as the Kitchen General had said, although nobody was thirsty.
Lyra watched Sigurd Kell take a mouthful of snow from the top of a ridge as he ran past it, and watched Senna, without looking back, say “Don’t,” and watched Sigurd spit it out.
Mira was suffering.
She was an alchemist, not a runner, and nine weeks on the Thousand Steps had made her strong but had not made her fast.
She ran with her jaw locked and her eyes fixed on the back of the person in front of her, and every few minutes she stumbled, and every time, she got up again before anyone could help.
Lyra ran beside her and did not offer a hand.
Isolde Frostmere, on Mira’s other side, did not offer one either.
But Lyra noticed that she had shortened her own long, easy stride to match Mira’s, and had been running exactly beside her, step for step, for the last two hours.
Neither of them had said a word to the other all day.
It was a little after noon when Isolde broke the silence.
She broke it the way an arrow breaks a pane of glass.
“Your fingers,” she said, without looking round.
Mira did not answer.
“Your fingers, Halvard.
On your left hand.
They’ve gone white.” Isolde’s voice was cold and flat.
“You keep flexing them.
I can see it from here.
If you keep ignoring it, you’ll lose the tips by nightfall, and then you’ll never hold a cauldron-tongs again, and I’ll have to hear about it for the rest of my life.”
Mira stared at her own glove.
Then, without breaking stride, she pulled a small tin out of her coat, and, still running, peeled off the glove with her teeth and rubbed something from the tin into her fingertips, hard, until the white went slowly pink.
It smelled of snow-ginseng and dragon’s-blood orchid: her own blend, Lyra realized.
Something she had made herself, weeks ago, for exactly this.
Mira pulled the glove back on.
They ran in silence for another hundred yards.
Then Mira held out the tin sideways, without looking.
“Your ears,” she said.
“Both of them.
You archers never think about ears.
You’re so busy looking at things a mile away you forget you’ve got a head.”
Isolde looked at the tin.
Then, very slowly, she took it.
Neither of them said anything else.
But the tin went back and forth between them twice more before the afternoon was out, and Hilde, running behind them, looked at Lyra with an expression of such pure delight that Lyra had to look away to keep from laughing.
At the front of the lance, Rowan dropped back until he was running beside Lyra.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, low.
He was breathing hard.
They all were.
“You’re the lance leader.
You can ask anyone anything.”
“That’s what I want to ask about.” He glanced ahead, at Cedric’s broad back and Sigurd’s broader one, at Finn running silent behind Senna with his spear across his shoulders.
“Why me?
You’ve got the heir of the North in this lance.
You’ve got you.
Sigurd would rather eat his own boots than take orders from me, and Isolde doesn’t even know my name.” He shook his head.
“Your father could have picked anyone.”
Lyra thought about it for twenty strides.
“Do you remember the ledger?” she said.
“On the yard wall?”
“Two hundred and fourteen to two hundred and twelve.” He almost smiled.
“I remember.”
“When you were seven and he was seven, and he knocked you flat for the first time, what did you do?”
Rowan frowned.
“I got up.”
“And then?”
“Then I asked him to show me how he did it.” He was quiet for a moment.
“He did.
He showed me the whole thing, and then he showed me three more, and then we were late for supper and Master Osric shouted at us both.”
“That’s why,” said Lyra.
“You’ve spent eleven years losing to the best sword in the North, and getting up, and asking how.
And you’ve never once pretended it didn’t hurt.” She glanced at him.
“Sigurd doesn’t need a leader who’s stronger than him, Rowan.
He’s got plenty of those.
He needs one who knows what losing feels like, and isn’t ashamed of it.”
Rowan ran beside her without answering for a long time.
Then he lengthened his stride and went back to the front of the lance.
As he passed Sigurd, Lyra heard him say something, low.
She could not hear what.
But she saw Sigurd’s head turn, and saw him answer, short and gruff, and saw the two of them run on side by side for the next mile without either of them trying to pull ahead.
* * *
The rift field came in the middle of the afternoon.
Senna felt it before anyone.
Lyra saw her head come up like a deer’s, and saw her slow, and raise one hand: stop.
The Seventh Lance piled up behind her.
Ahead and to either side, the other lances were slowing too, as the lance pathfinders read the same thing.
The snowfield in front of them looked no different from any other.
The same white ridges, the same soft hollows, the same glare.
But the Archduke had stopped at the front of the column, for the first time since the valley gate, and Lord Lucian was standing beside him, looking at the ground.
“There,” said Senna quietly, and pointed.
“See the line?
Where the snow sags a little.
Like a sheet on a bed.” She pointed again.
“And there.
And there.” She turned to the lance, and her thin face was very serious.
“There are rifts under there.
Big ones.
The snow’s bridged over the top of them.
It’ll look solid.
Some of it is.
Some of it’s two fingers thick over a hole that goes down half a mile.”
Nobody said anything.
Hilde had gone very pale under her soot.
“Rope,” said Rowan.
They had it: a long coil of oiled hemp, one for every lance, that Magnus had made them all carry.
They tied it round their waists, one after another, three paces apart, the way the Wall veterans had taught them in the yard and none of them had ever thought they would need.
Senna went first.
Then Finn, with his spear.
Then Rowan, and Cedric, and the rest; Lyra near the back, with Hakon Aarn behind her and Sigurd, the heaviest, as the anchor at the very end.
They went forward into the rift field one step at a time.
Senna led them in a long, crooked, zig-zagging line that made no sense at all to anyone else.
She probed the snow ahead of every step with the butt of her spear, and listened, and sometimes stopped for a long time before going on.
Once she turned them completely around and led them back thirty paces the way they had come, then out along a new line.
Nobody argued.
Nobody even asked.
Lyra walked in Senna’s footprints, and felt the ground.
She had not meant to.
It simply happened.
Out here, in all this silence, with the net behind her ribs steady and soft, something in her had reached down through her boots without her asking it to, the way her eyes would follow movement or her ears would catch her name.
And through the soles of her feet, in the part of her that belonged to her grandmother’s line, she felt the snowfield the way a hand feels the shape of a room in the dark.
The void under the snow.
She could feel them.
Great, long, empty places beneath the white, like missing teeth in a jaw, running away under the ice in every direction: some narrow as a crack, some wide as a street, all of them so deep that her senses slid down their walls and never found the bottom.
The snow over them was a skin.
Here it was thick.
Here it was thin.
Here, just two steps to the left of where Senna had just walked, it was hardly there at all.
And Hakon Aarn, behind her, had just stepped to the left to get around a hard ridge.
Lyra did not think.
She stopped dead, and turned, and fell over.
It was a very convincing fall.
She caught her boot on a ridge and went down on one knee, sideways, and her rope went tight, and it dragged Hakon one step to the right, back into Senna’s line, and he tripped over her and landed in the snow beside her with a yelp.
Where he had been about to put his foot, a patch of snow the size of a door quietly sighed, and sagged, and fell away into the dark.
There was no sound.
That was the worst part.
There was simply a hole where there had been snow, and a breath of cold air came up out of it that was colder than anything on the surface, and far, far below, so faint they almost did not hear it, came the tinkle of falling ice.
The whole lance stood frozen on the rope.
Hakon stared at the hole.
Then he stared at Lyra.
His face was the color of the snow.
“You tripped,” he said.
“I tripped,” said Lyra.
“You tripped and I’d have…” He stopped.
He swallowed.
Senna had come back along the rope.
She looked down at the hole for a long moment.
Then she looked at Lyra, very steadily, with her dark Kharn eyes, and Lyra looked back and did not say anything at all.
“Lucky,” said Senna at last.
“Very,” said Lyra.
“Stay in my prints,” said Senna to Hakon.
“Exactly in my prints.
Not near them.
In them.” She went back to the front of the line.
But before she did, her hand rested for half a second on Lyra’s shoulder as she passed, and pressed, once.
It took them an hour to cross the rift field.
When they came out the other side onto hard, safe, scoured snow, Hilde sat down in it and cried for a minute, and then got up and wiped her face and said she was fine, and was.
The Seventh Lance had been the fifth across.
Behind them, the other lances were still coming, one careful line after another.
The Eighth came last, with Lord Roderick walking unroped beside it, stepping wherever he liked, the snow bridges holding under his enormous weight as though they did not dare do anything else.
* * *
The blizzard came an hour before sunset.
They saw it first: a long, low, grey wall rising off the northern horizon, rolling toward them across the snowfield like a wave coming up a beach.
It swallowed the black ribs of the mountains one after another.
Then they heard it, a deep, rising moan, like the whole Frozen Land breathing in.
And then it hit.
The world vanished.
There was no other word for it.
One moment there was the snowfield and the sky and the long column of runners stretched out ahead; the next there was nothing but white, roaring, screaming white, on every side, above and below.
The wind came in so hard that it pushed Lyra a full step sideways.
The snow did not fall; it flew, horizontally, a million tiny needles of ice that found every gap in her collar and every inch of skin around the gauze.
She could not see Senna at the front of the lance.
She could barely see Cedric, four paces ahead on the rope.
Somewhere nearby, somebody was screaming a name over and over, and the wind tore it to pieces before it arrived.
And there was something in the snow.
Lyra felt it the moment the storm hit her: a heaviness in the air, a dull, dragging ache that seeped through the Frostweave and into her bones.
The beast-mana.
Out here the blizzards carried it the way the valley winds carried pollen, and it clung to everything it touched.
Her thoughts went slow and thick.
Her fingers, even inside her gloves, began to go numb.
All around her, she could feel the other candidates’ mana stuttering in their meridians like candles in a draft.
“Lance!” Rowan’s voice, from somewhere ahead, hoarse and very small.
“Seventh Lance, hold the rope!
Hold the rope and keep walking!”
Which way?
thought Lyra.
Which way is walking?
And then the light came.
It blazed up at the front of the column, far ahead in the white: a single burning point of pale, cold blue, like a star fallen to earth.
It did not flicker.
The wind could not touch it.
It shone straight through the storm as if the storm were not there at all, and every candidate on the Frozen Land looked up and saw it at the same moment.
The Archduke had let go.
Not all of it.
Not even a tenth of it, Lyra knew.
But for the first time in nine weeks, her father had let the frost-mana of a Sword Monarch rise to the surface of his skin and burn there, and it lit him up at the head of the column like a lighthouse on a cliff.
The snow around him turned to glittering diamond dust.
The wind itself seemed to bend around him.
“Follow the light!” That was Lucian’s voice, from somewhere in the white, and it cut through the storm like a blade.
“Keep the light in front of you!
Nothing else!”
They followed the light.
Lyra would remember that hour for the rest of her life.
The white, and the roar, and the ice needles on her face, and the rope around her waist, jerking and tugging and holding.
Cedric’s back ahead of her, a dark shape that came and went.
Hakon’s hand behind her, grabbing the rope every time he stumbled.
Somewhere in the storm to her left, Uncle Roderick’s great bellowing voice, telling a story about a waterfall to a boy from the Ninth Lance whom he was carrying on his back like a sack of grain.
Somewhere to her right, the faint green shimmer of Uncle Kenneth’s soul-flame, as he knelt in the snow beside a girl from the Fifth who had gone down and would not get up, pushing a pill between her blue lips.
And at the front, the light, never faster, never slower, never wavering.
And beneath it, although she could not see it, Lyra knew her father was running at exactly the same steady, loping stride he had set at dawn.
Once, for a moment, the wind dropped.
In the sudden hush, far away to the north, something howled.
It was a long, high, rising sound, and it was wrong.
Lyra had heard frost-wolves howl a thousand times from her window on winter nights.
This was not that.
It started as a howl and went up and up, far too high, and then it split: two notes at once, then three, grinding against each other like ice floes, until it was not a sound at all so much as a pressure behind the eyes.
Every candidate in earshot flinched.
Lyra felt the frost-mana in her own meridians shudder at it, the way a candle flame shudders at a door slammed in another room.
Then the wind came back and swallowed it.
At the front of the column, the blue light did not waver.
But Lyra saw, for one moment, a tall dark figure near the head of the Second Lance turn sharply toward the north and stand very still, with one hand on his sword.
Uncle Lucian had heard it too.
And on the wind, faint beneath the smell of ice and snow and her own sweat, so faint she was not sure she had not imagined it, came a thin trace of sweetness.
Clean.
Refined.
The sweetness of something that had passed through a cauldron.
Then the storm closed around them again, and there was nothing but the white, and the rope, and the light.
V.
The Twelfth Tower
The blizzard ended the way it had begun: all at once.
One moment, the white and the roar.
The next, the Seventh Lance stumbled out through the back edge of the storm as if through a curtain, and the wind simply stopped, and the silence rang in their ears like a struck bell.
It was night.
Lyra did not know when that had happened.
Somewhere in the storm, the day had ended without asking anyone.
Now the sky above the Frozen Land was black and enormous and utterly clear, and there were more stars in it than she had ever seen in her life: so many, so thick and so bright, that they did not look like points of light at all but like frost on a dark window.
The moon was not up yet.
It did not need to be.
The snowfield glowed under the starlight, faintly blue, from one horizon to the other.
And across the northern sky, slow and silent, the lights were moving.
Green first, a long pale ribbon of it, rippling from east to west like a curtain in a draught.
Then violet beneath it.
Then, at the very edges, a faint deep red, like embers.
The whole sky breathed with it.
The old Wall soldiers called it the Dragon’s Breath, and said it was the dead dragon under the mountains dreaming.
Lyra had seen it from her window a hundred times.
She had never seen it from out here, with nothing between her and it but cold air and the ache in her legs.
Nobody in the Seventh Lance said anything.
There was nothing to say.
Ahead of them, the pale blue light of the Archduke had dimmed back down to nothing.
He was only a dark figure again, still running, at the same unchanging stride.
And beyond him, low on the horizon to the northeast, a row of small orange lights was burning.
Fires.
A long line of them, strung out along a dark, straight edge that ran across the stars.
The Wall.
They had run all day beside it, out of sight in the glare and then the storm, and now it rose out of the snowfield in front of them again, black against the Dragon’s Breath.
And at the place where the watchfires burned closest together, where the Wall bent north toward the pale, distant bulk of the Kharn Glacier, a great square tower stood up out of it like a fist, with a fire blazing on top of it and a banner above the fire that none of them could see yet in the dark.
Senna stopped running.
It was the first time she had stopped all day without a reason.
The whole lance piled up behind her on the rope.
Cedric walked into Finn.
Hilde walked into Cedric.
Senna did not notice.
She was standing very still in the starlight with her spear in her hand, looking at the tower.
“Senna?” said Rowan.
“That’s the Twelfth,” said Senna.
Her voice was very quiet.
“That’s the Twelfth Tower.”
Nobody said anything.
Lyra, standing on the rope two places behind her, remembered a dark room and a fire, and a thin girl in an armchair with her knees tucked up, saying: My father’s on the Twelfth Tower.
I count the horns.
On top of the tower, someone had seen them.
A horn sounded, deep and slow, rolling out across the snowfield in the silence.
Every candidate on the Frozen Land lifted their head to it.
One note.
Long, and low, and steady.
It did not rise and it did not break.
It went on for a long time, and then it faded into the stars.
Then silence.
Senna had gone rigid, listening.
Lyra could see her lips moving.
Counting.
No second horn came.
No third.
Senna let her breath out in a long white cloud.
“One,” she said.
She turned round to the rest of the lance, and in the starlight Lyra saw that she was smiling: the first real smile any of them had ever seen on her thin, windburned face.
“One long one.
That’s not a tide.
That’s not anything bad.” She wiped her face with the back of her glove.
“That’s friends at the gate.”
On the tower top, a great light flared.
Someone had thrown oil on the watchfire, and it roared up into the night, orange and gold, and they could see the banner above it now: the frost-sword and the dragon skull, and under them, in white thread on black, the number XII.
Figures were moving along the top of the Wall, dozens of them, lanterns bobbing.
Somewhere inside the tower, faint and far away, a great iron gate was being winched open.
They could hear the chains.
And along the whole length of the column, all across the snowfield, candidates were beginning to laugh: tired, cracked, disbelieving laughter, the laughter of people who have run from dawn to dark across the Frozen Land and not died.
At the front, the Archduke did not turn round.
But he raised one hand above his head, and closed it into a fist, and held it there.
And then, for the first time since the gate of Frost-Crest, he slowed to a walk.
The Seventh Lance walked the last half mile to the Twelfth Tower roped together under the Dragon’s Breath, with their breath smoking and their legs shaking and the stars reflected in the pale mithril of their weapons.
Hilde was leaning on her brother.
Mira and Isolde were walking side by side and not talking, and the tin of salve was in Isolde’s hand.
Sigurd Kell was at the back of the rope, holding it, where he had been all day, and he had not complained once since the blizzard.
Rowan walked at the front beside Senna.
Cedric, in the middle, had started to hum.
Lyra walked near the back and let the net behind her ribs rest.
She looked north once, just once, toward the dark shape of the Kharn Glacier under the lights.
Toward the Hollowmere, somewhere beyond it, a day’s march away.
She remembered the howl in the storm, three notes grinding against each other like ice.
She remembered the sweetness on the wind.
Then she looked at Senna, at the front of the rope, walking faster and faster toward the tower gate as it swung slowly open in a spill of golden firelight; at the soldiers of the Twelfth crowding out through it with lanterns, cheering; at one tall, grey-bearded soldier in a scarred steel cap who had pushed his way to the very front of them all, and stopped dead, and was staring out across the snow at a thin girl with a spear as though he could not believe his eyes.
Senna began to run.
The rope went taut.
The whole Seventh Lance, all ten of them, laughing and stumbling and cursing her name, ran after her.
End of Chapter 7.