I.
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 a thousand 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 left, 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 in 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.
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.
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 Gerrit 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.
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.
II.
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 8.