Chapter 9: The Blue-Vein Warren

I.

The Twelfth Tower

His name was Oskar Vaar, and he was a sergeant of the Twelfth Tower, and he had not seen his daughter in five months.Full novel: Where Void and Heart Collide — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠

He did not say anything when she reached him.

Neither did she.

She simply ran into him at full speed, spear and all, and he caught her the way a wall catches a wave, and lifted her clean off the snow, and held her there in the spill of golden light from the gate while the Seventh Lance, still roped to her, piled up behind in a laughing, stumbling heap.

He was a tall, grey, weathered man with a scarred steel cap and the same nose as Senna, turned up a little at the end.

When he finally set her down, he held her at arm’s length and looked at her: the blue Frostweave coat, the silver clasp at her throat, the pale mithril spear in her hand.

He looked at it for a long time.

“That’s not your grandfather’s spear,” he said at last.

His voice was rough.

“I kept that one too,” said Senna.

“It’s under my bed.

In the citadel.” She turned the new spear so he could see the butt-cap.

“Look.”

Oskar Vaar read the two small numerals engraved there, XII, and his face did something complicated.

Then he pulled his daughter back against his chest and put his chin on the top of her head and closed his eyes.

The Seventh Lance, as one, found something very interesting to look at in the opposite direction.

“Right,” said Rowan, clearing his throat, and began to untie the rope.

* * *

The Twelfth Tower was not a tower in the way the citadel’s towers were towers.

It was a fortress built into the Wall itself: a great square keep of black basalt and star-iron, five storeys tall, with walls twenty feet thick and a fire burning on its roof that had not gone out in three hundred years.

On the southern side, the safe side, it opened onto a broad walled yard the size of a village square, with barracks along one edge, stables along another, and a well in the middle under a little roof of slate.

That was where the candidates would sleep.

Not in the barracks.

Not in the keep.

“On the ground,” said Captain Orsa, “in tents you pitch yourselves, by fires you light yourselves, after a supper you cook yourselves.” She was a small, square, iron-grey woman with a voice like a slammed door, and she looked at the hundred candidates collapsing in her yard the way Master Emberly looked at a sack of potatoes.

“That’s how my soldiers do it on patrol.

That’s how you’ll do it on the ice.

Tonight you practice with a wall around you.

Tomorrow you won’t have one.”

Nobody groaned.

Nobody had the energy to groan.

The Archduke had already sent Lord Kenneth down the lines with a pot of something hot and bitter that tasted of ginger and pine and made the blood come back into their hands.

Now he stood by the well with Captain Orsa and a slate, and began, in a voice that was just as calm and steady as it had been at dawn, to hand out the evening.

It went by lances.

Every lance had a task, and every lance would have a different one tomorrow, and the day after, until every one of them had done every job the Wall did in the field.

The First and Sixth Lances would fetch water: break the ice on the well, haul it, and set it to melt and boil.

The Second and Eighth would pitch the tents: long, low, double-walled Wall tents of oiled beast-hide, ten to a tent, one for each lance.

The Third would build the fires.

The Fifth would build the field kitchen: hearths, spits and the great iron cauldrons the Twelfth kept stacked in its stores.

The Ninth would cook.

The Fourth and Tenth would take the first and second guard shifts on the Wall-top, alongside the Legion, until dawn.

“And the Seventh,” said the Archduke, “will butcher.”

He pointed toward the stables.

Two of Captain Orsa’s patrol soldiers were dragging something out across the snow on a sledge.

Then something else.

Then a third thing, larger than the other two together.

They were two rime-elk and a frost-boar.

The elk were grey-white and long-legged, each the size of a draught horse, with antlers like frozen branches.

The boar was worse.

It was the size of a cart, humped and bristled, with tusks as long as Lyra’s forearm and a hide covered in a crust of blue-white frost that crackled when the sledge moved.

All three were whole.

Nobody had so much as gutted them.

“The patrol took them this morning,” said Captain Orsa.

“That’s supper.

That’s tomorrow’s breakfast.

That’s what you carry out onto the ice.” She looked at the Seventh Lance.

“Knives out.”

The Seventh Lance looked at the frost-boar.

The frost-boar, being dead, looked at nothing.

But somehow it managed to look very large.

“I have,” said Isolde Frostmere slowly, “never in my life touched the inside of an animal.”

“I have,” said Finn Brannoc.

They all turned to look at him.

Finn was already shrugging off his pack.

He drew the Kitchen General’s heavy butcher’s knife from its sheath, turned it over once in his hand to feel the balance, and ran his thumb along the edge with a small, approving nod.

It was the most at home any of them had ever seen him.

“My father owns the Roaring Drake,” he said.

“Somebody has to butcher the drakes.” He looked at the elk, then at the boar, then at the sky, working something out.

“Elk first.

They’re easier, and they’ll freeze solid in two hours if we leave them.

The boar can wait; the frost on its hide keeps the cold out as well as in.” He paused, and looked round at the other nine.

“Who’s done this before?”

Rowan put his hand up.

“Pigs,” he said.

“On the farm.

Every autumn.”

“Beasts,” said Lyra.

“On the Kharn, with the vanguard.

Mostly the cores.

Some of the rest.”

“Me too,” said Cedric.

“Mostly.”

“Mostly what?” said Finn.

Cedric considered.

“Mostly I hit them,” he admitted, “and Lyra does the part with the knife.”

Senna had come back from her father without anyone noticing, and was already kneeling beside the second elk with her knife out.

“Goats,” she said, not looking up.

“And a bear once.

It was a small bear.”

Finn nodded as though this was all perfectly satisfactory.

“Then Rowan and Senna take the second elk, and I’ll show everyone else on the first.” He looked at the remaining faces: Isolde, Mira, Sigurd, the Aarn twins, all of them faintly green in the firelight.

“Don’t worry.

Nobody’s good at it the first time.

You just have to not mind the smell.”

It turned out that almost everybody minded the smell.

What followed was, Lyra would later decide, one of the finest hours of her life, and she would not have traded it for a crown.

Finn was a patient teacher.

He was also, it transpired, completely unshakeable.

He showed them where to open the elk, and how to go in shallow so the knife did not pierce anything they would regret, and how to roll the whole steaming mass of the insides out onto the snow in one piece.

Hilde Aarn took one look at the steaming mass, said “Oh,” in a very small voice, and sat down in the snow with her head between her knees.

Her brother, who had been perfectly all right until then, looked at his sister, looked at the steaming mass, and sat down beside her.

“It’s all right,” said Finn kindly.

“My little sister does that too.

You can hold the legs.”

Mira Halvard, by contrast, turned out to be superb.

She knelt beside the elk with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, her short blade in one hand and the butcher’s knife in the other, and approached the animal exactly as she approached a cauldron: with total, clinical, fascinated attention.

She lifted out the liver and turned it to the firelight to examine the color.

She identified the gall bladder before Finn could warn anyone about it and removed it whole, holding it well away from everything else, with the air of someone who has handled far worse things in a laboratory.

When she found the elk’s core, a pale grey knot of frozen mana nestled against the heart, she cut it free in two neat strokes, rinsed it in snow, and held it up to the light with genuine delight.

“Rank two,” she announced.

“Very clean.

Good extraction.” She looked at Finn.

“You were right about the order.

The grain of the mana runs along the spine.

If you’d gone in from the belly first, you’d have cracked it.”

Finn regarded her with something like respect.

“You’ve done this before?”

“Never,” said Mira.

“It’s just alchemy with more blood.”

Isolde was not superb.

She tried.

Lyra would always give her that.

She knelt down beside Mira with her jaw set and her knife in her hand and her face the color of the snow, and she made one careful cut where Finn showed her, and then a second.

On the third, the elk’s stomach, which Finn had very specifically warned everyone about, burst.

The smell rolled out over the yard like a fog.

Isolde Frostmere, heir to one of the oldest houses of the North, the best eye under thirty, who had never in her life been seen to lose her composure in public, stood up, walked three steps away with enormous dignity, and was comprehensively sick in a snowbank.

Nobody laughed.

Mostly because Sigurd Kell had been sick in the next snowbank over about a second and a half earlier.

Mira did not look up from the liver.

But she reached into her coat without a word, took out the little tin of salve that had gone back and forth between them all afternoon, and held it out sideways in Isolde’s direction.

“Under your nose,” she said.

“The snow-ginseng cuts the smell.

Then come back and hold the lamp.

You’ve got the best eyes here.

I need to see what I’m doing.”

Isolde stood there for a moment, white-faced, breathing hard.

Then she took the tin, and rubbed salve under her nose, and came back, and held the lamp.

Her hand was perfectly steady.

On the second elk, Rowan and Senna worked in total silence and perfect rhythm, like two people who had both been doing this since before they could remember and did not need to discuss it.

By the time Finn’s group had finished the first elk, theirs was already skinned, quartered and hanging from the stable rafters.

That left the boar.

The boar was a problem.

Its hide was half an inch thick and armored in frost, and when Cedric took the first cut at it with his butcher’s knife, the blade skidded off the crust with a shriek like a nail on slate and nearly took his thumb off.

“Right,” said Cedric, and reached over his shoulder for the Dragon-Spine Cleaver.

“No,” said Finn, Lyra and Rowan all at once.

“I’ll be careful.”

“You’ll cut it in half through the middle,” said Finn, “and we’ll be picking the stomach out of the meat until midnight.” He looked at the frosted hide, frowning.

“It needs splitting along the spine first.

From the top.

Like a log.

Then we can peel it.”

They all looked at the spine of the frost-boar, which was the height of a man’s chest and crusted in ice as hard as glazed stone.

Lyra stepped up beside Cedric.

She did not draw her sword.

She drew the Kitchen General’s butcher’s knife, and rested its edge lightly on the top of the boar’s spine, right behind the skull.

It was only frost.

She had been cutting through frost since she was seven.

She let the smallest possible thread of her own cold run down her arm into the knife: not Chaos, not Void, nothing that would make anybody look twice.

Just the frost of the Eisenhardts, the family’s oldest trick, so that the blade and the ice became, for a moment, the same temperature, and the ice stopped caring which was which.

Then she drew the knife down along the spine, from the skull to the tail, in one long, slow stroke.

The crust of frost split open behind the edge like a seam coming apart.

The hide beneath it parted, clean and straight, all the way down.

There was a pause.

“That’s an Eisenhardt thing,” said Finn at last.

It was not a question.

“That’s an Eisenhardt thing,” Cedric agreed, with great satisfaction, and put the cleaver back over his shoulder.

“She’s been doing it to my breakfast for years.”

* * *

All around the yard, the rest of the camp was coming together, the way a battle does or a harvest: in a great deal of noise and confusion, with a surprising amount of it going right.

The Second Lance pitched its tent in eleven minutes, and it was perfect.

Every one of them was the son or daughter of a Wall captain, and they had apparently been pitching Wall tents in their parents’ yards since before they could walk.

They laid out the ground-hides, drove the iron pegs through the snow into the frozen earth beneath, and raised the great double-walled beast-hide in a single heave, and then, being tower captains’ children, went straight over to the Eighth Lance to explain what it was doing wrong.

The Eighth Lance was doing everything wrong.

Its first attempt at a tent went up magnificently, hung in the air for a single beautiful moment, and came down again on top of all ten of them and Lord Roderick, who had wandered over to offer encouragement.

For a while, the tent was simply a large heaving shape in the snow from which a great deal of muffled shouting and one enormous laugh emerged.

When Roderick eventually stood up, he was wearing it.

The Third Lance could not light the fires.

The wind came down off the Wall in sudden gusts that put out every spark the moment it caught.

They tried flint.

They tried striker-steel.

One of the tower captains’ sons tried to light a fire with his sword-qi and blew the whole woodpile across the yard.

In the end, Senna, going past with a haunch of elk over her shoulder, stopped, knelt, built a small wall of snow bricks on the windward side of their fire-pit without a word, lit the tinder under it with a single strike, and walked on.

The Third Lance stared at the little flame, which was now burning cheerfully, and then at her retreating back.

“Who is she?” one of them said.

“Kharn,” said another, with enormous respect.

The Fifth Lance built the field kitchen, and it was a masterpiece.

The Fifth had been Magnus Hale’s quiet little miracle: three quartermasters’ children from the Wall, two apothecaries’ daughters, a stonemason’s son, a smith’s boy and a baker’s girl from Frost-Crest who had spent her whole life hauling loaves the size of cartwheels out of an oven.

In less than an hour, they had built three long fire-trenches lined with flat stones, raised a row of iron tripods over them, hung the Twelfth’s great black cauldrons from the tripods, set up a spit-frame over a bed of coals, and laid out a cutting table on two barrels with every knife, ladle and pot arranged along it in order of size.

The baker’s girl stood at the end of it with her arms folded and a ladle in her belt, and Lyra, seeing her, thought that somewhere in the Frost-Crest kitchens, Master Emberly had just felt a disturbance in the world.

The Ninth Lance cooked.

Or, rather, the Ninth Lance stood in front of three cauldrons of boiling snowmelt, holding raw elk, and looked at each other in slowly mounting panic.

“Has anybody,” said the Ninth Lance’s leader, a tall, anxious boy from one of the eastern valleys, “ever cooked anything?”

It emerged that nobody had.

Their mothers had cooked.

Their fathers had cooked.

The citadel kitchens had cooked.

Out of ten young people who could all, by now, climb the Thousand Steps three times before lunch, not one had ever made a stew.

The baker’s girl from the Fifth looked at them for a long moment.

Then she sighed, unfolded her arms, and took the ladle out of her belt.

“Onions first,” she said.

“Somebody give me the pouches.”

So the Kitchen General’s spice pouches came out.

Ten small canvas pouches for each lance, full of salt and pepper, dried thyme and juniper, smoke-salt, Eastern chili and a pinch of Uncle Kenneth’s warming root.

The Ninth Lance, under the baker’s girl’s direction, browned the elk in its own fat over the coals, and threw it in the cauldrons with the salt and the juniper, and some wild onions the Twelfth kept in its stores, and a sack of barley, and far too much chili, because one of them had misunderstood what “a pinch” meant.

The Seventh Lance, meanwhile, had put the frost-boar on the spit.

That had been Lyra’s idea, and Cedric’s, and in fact it had been the same idea, arrived at in the same moment by two people who had been roasting meat together on the Kharn since he was nine and she was seven.

Finn and Rowan lashed the boar’s quarters to the spit-frame.

Senna banked the coals.

Lyra rubbed the whole thing down with salt and smoke-salt and a scandalous quantity of thyme and juniper from four different pouches, and Cedric took the first turn at the handle.

An hour later, when the smell of the boar began to roll across the Twelfth’s yard, the whole camp stopped what it was doing.

On the Wall-top above them, one of Captain Orsa’s sentries leaned over the parapet and called down, in a voice of genuine longing, to ask if there would be any left over.

“No,” called up Hilde Aarn, who had recovered completely from the elk and was now sitting next to the spit with her chin in her hands and her eyes closed, breathing in.

“Absolutely not.

Go away.”

II.

The Briefing

They ate sitting on their packs in a great ring around the field kitchen, with the fires between them and the Wall at their backs and the Dragon’s Breath still rippling green across the sky overhead.

The Ninth Lance’s elk stew was edible, which was more than anyone had expected.

It was also so hot with Eastern chili that the first spoonful made Sigurd Kell’s eyes water and the second made him cough for a full minute, after which he declared it the best thing he had ever eaten and went back for more.

The Seventh Lance’s boar was carved at the spit by Finn Brannoc, in thick, dark, crackling slices, and passed round the ring on the blades of butcher’s knives until every one of the hundred had some.

When it reached the Archduke, he took a slice, ate it standing, and said nothing at all.

But when Cedric went up to offer him a second, he took that too.

Captain Orsa, who had sent a plate up to her sentries on the Wall-top and come back for one herself, chewed a piece of the crackling thoughtfully and looked across at the Seventh.

“Who seasoned this?”

Lyra and Cedric pointed at each other.

“Hm,” said the captain, and went back for a third.

For a while, the only sounds were the fires and the wind and a hundred people eating as though they had run all day across the Frozen Land, which they had.

Somebody on the far side of the ring started to hum an old Wall song, and somebody else joined in, and then the Twelfth’s soldiers on the ramparts above took it up too, a deep, rough chorus rolling down over the yard.

For a little while it felt almost like a festival.

Then the Archduke set down his bowl, and stood.

He did not raise his hand.

He did not need to.

The song died away, verse by verse, from the far side of the ring to the near.

On the Wall-top, the soldiers stopped singing too.

Alaric walked into the middle of the ring, into the firelight, where every one of them could see him.

The three Elders rose with him and stood behind him: Lucian, Roderick, Kenneth.

Captain Orsa stood a little apart, arms folded.

“You did well today,” the Archduke said.

Nobody had expected that.

A ripple went round the ring.

“You ran from Frost-Crest to the Twelfth Tower in a single day.

You crossed a rift field and a blizzard.

Not one of you was lost.

Not one of you turned back.

You built this camp, and you cooked this food, and some of you,” his eyes rested for half a second on the Eighth Lance, “built your tent twice.” A few people laughed.

“There are soldiers on this Wall who could not have done what you did today at your age.

I want you to know that I know it.”

He let the silence settle again.

“And now I want you to forget it.

Because none of it matters.”

The fires crackled.

Nobody moved.

“Everything you did today, you did with a wall around you.

Even on the ice.

Even in the storm.

You had a light in front of you and my brothers on either side of you, and you knew, every one of you, that if you fell in a rift, somebody would pull you out.

That if you lay down in the snow, Lord Roderick would carry you.

That if you went blue, Lord Kenneth would put a pill in your mouth.” He turned slowly, looking at each face in the ring.

“That ends at dawn.”

On the far side of the fire, Hilde Aarn’s hand found her brother’s sleeve.

“When you walk out of the north gate of this tower tomorrow,” said the Archduke, “you will be in the Frozen Land.

Not on its edge.

In it.

And from that moment, the only thing between you and death is yourself, and the nine people on your rope.”

He paused.

“We will be there.

My brothers and I.

We will be on the ridges and in the rocks, where we can see every one of you.

We will watch every step you take and every blow you strike.” His voice did not change at all.

“And we will not come.”

The silence became absolute.

“If a beast has you by the throat, we will not come.

If your lance is overrun, we will not come.

If you fall, we will not catch you.

If you are dying, we will not save you.” The grey eyes went round the ring.

“We will watch.

That is all.”

Somewhere near the Tenth Lance, a boy made a small, choked sound.

Nobody looked at him.

“I know how that sounds,” said Alaric quietly.

“I know what you’re thinking.

That I am your Archduke, and I brought you here, and I’m going to stand on a rock and watch you die.

I understand.” He looked down at the fire for a moment.

“In eleven weeks, you will walk into the trial zones of Aethelgard, and under the Anti-Cheat Decree, no family can help you there.

No clan.

No teacher.

Nobody.

If an Elder of this house so much as throws a stone to save you in those zones, you are disqualified and banned for life.

So you have a choice.

You can learn tomorrow, here, with us close enough to see it happen, what it is to fight for your life with no one coming.

Or you can learn it in the spring, in the South, alone, with no one watching at all.”

He raised his head.

“I chose this one for you.

I’d choose it again.”

Nobody spoke.

Lyra looked around the ring and saw the words landing in a hundred faces, one after another, and saw what they did.

Some went white.

Some went hard.

Some went very still, the way hunters go still.

Beside her, Senna was nodding, slowly, as though someone had finally said something true.

“Captain,” said the Archduke.

“Tell them what’s out there.”

Captain Orsa unfolded her arms and stepped forward into the firelight.

“Goblins,” she said.

A murmur went round the ring.

It was not quite relief.

But it was close.

The captain looked at them with her flat iron eyes, and the murmur died.

“You’re thinking of forest goblins,” she said.

“The little green ones in the southern stories, the ones that steal chickens and run away from farm dogs.

Forget them.

What lives out on the Frozen Land isn’t that.” She tossed something into the ring.

It landed in the snow in front of the fire with a dull, heavy thump.

It was a skull.

It was the size of a man’s, but wrong: long and heavy-browed, with a jaw like a bear-trap and two tusks jutting up from the lower lip.

The bone was not white but faintly blue, as though it had been soaked in ice.

“Frozen goblin,” said Orsa.

“Their skin is white, like the snow, and it’s striped all over with thin blue lines, like veins of ice.

You won’t see them until they want you to.

They don’t feel the cold.

They can go a week without eating.

And they breed faster than anything else on this land.

A pair of them in a cave in autumn is a village of fifty by spring.”

She held up one finger.

“Troops.

Most of any warren.

Waist-high, fast, all teeth and bone spears and knives.

Stupid on their own.

In a pack, they’ll swarm you like ants on a dropped sweet.”

Two fingers.

“Archers.

Bows of whalebone and gut, arrows tipped with black ice that shatters inside the wound.

They sit on the high ground and they don’t miss much.”

Three.

“Warriors.” Her voice went a little harder.

“One in five, in a big warren.

They’re not the same animal.

Nobody knows why.

Something in the blood, or what they’re fed as whelps.

They grow as tall as the Young Lord there,” a nod at Cedric, “and twice as wide.

Built like the barbarians of the Southern Caldera.

They carry axes of blue ice and clubs made from mammoth thigh-bones, and they wear armor they’ve taken off dead men.

A warrior can kill a Wall soldier in single combat.

I’ve seen it happen.”

Four fingers.

She paused before she spoke, and this time the whole ring leaned in.

“Witches.

Rare.

One in a warren of a thousand, if that.

They’re small and old and they look like a gust of wind would kill them.

Don’t believe it.

A goblin witch speaks to the cold.

She’ll call fog down on you until you can’t see your own feet.

She’ll put a hex on the air that makes your sword-qi fall apart in your hands like wet sand.

She’ll howl, and her warriors will stop feeling pain.” Orsa’s jaw tightened.

“Kill her first, if you can.

You probably can’t.”

She lowered her hand.

Then, after a moment, she lifted it again, and held up her thumb.

“And kings.” A flicker of something crossed her face.

“Once in a generation.

I’ve seen one.

Once.

Twenty years ago, from the top of this tower, a mile off.

It took three companies of the Legion and Lord Lucian himself to kill it.” Lucian, behind the Archduke, did not move.

“You won’t meet a king.

Pray you don’t.”

The fire snapped.

Nobody said a word.

“There’s a warren,” the captain went on, “in the Rimefang Gorge, six miles north of this tower, on the road to the Hollowmere.

My patrols have been watching it since autumn.

It’s grown.” She let that sit.

“At the last count, a little over a thousand.

Two hundred warriors.

A hundred archers.

The rest are troops.

And a witch.”

“A thousand,” somebody whispered.

“A thousand,” agreed the Archduke.

“And a hundred of you.”

He looked round the ring one last time.

“They’ve been raiding the villages below the Kharn passes since the first snow,” he said.

“Three farms burned.

Seven people taken.

The Twelfth Tower has been waiting for enough soldiers to go in and end it.” A pause.

“Tomorrow, it has you.”

The fires burned down.

The Dragon’s Breath rippled overhead.

On the Wall-top, a sentry coughed and shifted his feet.

“Remember everything they taught you,” said Alaric Eisenhardt.

“Every stair.

Every leaf.

Every herb in every pot.

Stay on your rope.

Watch your lancemates.

Keep your eyes open and your head clear.” He turned to go.

Then he stopped, and looked back over his shoulder, and for just a moment, in the firelight, he did not look like the Archduke of the North at all.

He looked like a tired father.

“And come back alive,” he said.

“The Kitchen General will never forgive me if you don’t.”

* * *

Nobody slept much.

The Seventh Lance lay in its tent in two rows of five, wrapped in their coats and blankets on the ground-hides, listening to the wind across the roof of oiled leather and the fires ticking outside and, every hour, the call of the sentries changing on the Wall-top.

Hilde was holding her brother’s hand across the gap between their blankets, and did not seem to care who saw.

Mira was lying on her back with her hands folded on her chest, like a tomb effigy, and her eyes wide open.

Sigurd Kell was pretending to be asleep, badly.

Rowan was not pretending anything.

He was sitting up at the end of the row with a stub of candle and a piece of charcoal, drawing on the back of an old supply chit.

Lyra, lying nearest him, turned her head and watched him work.

He was drawing a gorge, from Captain Orsa’s description: two steep walls, a narrow floor, caves at the far end.

Then ten small marks, in pairs, and arrows between them.

“You should sleep,” she murmured.

“So should you.” He did not look up.

“How do you fight a thousand of anything?”

Lyra thought about it.

“One at a time,” she said.

“And never where they want you to.”

Rowan looked at her then.

Then back at his drawing.

After a moment he rubbed out one of his arrows with his thumb and drew it again, somewhere else.

On Lyra’s other side, in the dark, Senna Vaar said very quietly, “The Rimefang’s got a ledge.

Along the east wall.

Halfway up.

My father showed me, when I was small.

Goats use it.”

Rowan went very still.

“Show me,” he said.

Senna sat up.

Lyra closed her eyes and listened to the two of them murmuring over the candle, and to the wind, and to her own heartbeat under the soft, steady net her grandmother had woven.

Six miles north.

A thousand goblins, and a witch, and whatever had howled in the storm with three voices at once.

Be ordinary tomorrow, she told the thing beneath the net.

For a long time, it did not answer.

Then, just before she fell asleep, it stirred, very faintly, the way a great beast stirs in its sleep at the smell of snow.

III.

The Rimefang Gorge

Breakfast was small, and nobody complained.

The Kitchen General’s hard oatcakes.

A cup each of Lord Kenneth’s ginger-and-pine tea, and a second cup of plain hot water with a pinch of salt in it, which Senna said was what the Wall drank before a fight, because a full belly made you slow and an empty one made you stupid.

They ate standing, in their lances, in the grey light before dawn, with their packs on and their weapons on and their ropes coiled over their shoulders, and nobody said very much.

The Archduke walked down the lines as they ate.

He did not make a speech.

He stopped in front of each lance leader for a few words, and moved on.

When he reached the Seventh, Rowan held out the old supply chit with the charcoal gorge drawn on the back of it.

Alaric took it and studied it for a long time: the two walls, the caves, the ten marks, and the thin line Rowan had drawn halfway up the eastern cliff, with a small, careful goat beside it.

“Who found the ledge?” he said.

“Senna, Your Grace,” said Rowan.

“Her father showed her.

When she was small.”

The Archduke looked at Senna.

Senna looked at her boots.

“The ledge overlooks the archers’ side,” said Rowan.

His voice was steady, but his hand, Lyra saw, was clenched hard at his side.

“If the other lances go in at the mouth, the goblin archers will be up on the west wall shooting down into them.

From the ledge, we’d be above the archers.

Nearly level with them.

We could take them off the wall.” He swallowed.

“And the ledge runs almost to the caves.

If the warriors come out, we’d be there first.”

“You would,” said the Archduke.

“Ten of you.

Between the archers and the warriors.” He looked at Rowan for a long moment.

“Alone.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Alaric handed the chit back.

“It’s a good plan,” he said.

“It’s the plan I would have made.

Don’t die on it.”

He moved on to the Eighth.

Rowan stood very still for a moment, looking at the chit in his hand.

Then he folded it carefully and put it inside his coat, next to his skin, where the Kitchen General had said to keep the water.

* * *

The north gate of the Twelfth Tower was a different thing from the south.

The south gate opened onto a yard, and a well, and the Wall’s great sheltering bulk.

The north gate opened onto nothing.

A tunnel sixty paces long, through black basalt twenty feet thick, lit by torches in iron brackets; then two great doors of star-iron, banded and studded and scarred with claw marks as deep as a finger; and beyond them, when Captain Orsa’s soldiers hauled them open on their groaning chains, the Frozen Land, white and silent and waiting.

The soldiers of the Twelfth stood along the tunnel walls as the candidates went through, as they had at Frost-Crest the day before.

But they did not strike their spears on the stone this time.

They stood in silence, every one of them, and watched the hundred go by.

Lyra passed Oskar Vaar near the end of the line.

He did not say anything to his daughter.

He only put out one hand as she passed and touched her shoulder, very lightly, and let her go.

Then the doors closed behind them with a sound like the end of the world.

Six miles.

The land between the Twelfth Tower and the Rimefang Gorge was a long, rising slope of wind-scoured snow and black rock, climbing toward the white shoulders of the Kharn.

There was no blizzard this morning.

The sky was clear and hard and pale as a knife, and the air was so still that Lyra could hear the snow creak under a hundred pairs of boots.

They did not run.

The Archduke walked at their head, at an easy pace, as if the hunt were a stroll.

That was worse, somehow, than running.

Running left no room to think.

They saw the first sign after two miles: a line of footprints crossing the slope from east to west.

They were bare, broad and long-toed, with the marks of claws at the tips.

There were dozens of them, overlapping.

Senna knelt beside them for a moment, then stood up and said nothing and walked on, and that was more frightening than anything she could have said.

After three miles, they found the farm.

Or what had been one.

A low stone house in a fold of the hills, with its roof burned through and its door gone and the snow drifted halfway up the inside walls.

A pen beside it, empty, the gate smashed.

A child’s wooden sledge, lying on its side in the yard.

Nobody said anything about the sledge.

They walked past it in silence, one lance after another, and every one of them looked.

After five miles, the smell reached them.

Smoke, first.

Then something underneath the smoke, thick and rank and animal, like a stable that had never been cleaned, like a den.

Hilde pulled her collar up over her nose.

Somebody in the Eighth Lance gagged.

And then the land opened in front of them, and they were at the Rimefang.

It was a crack in the world.

That was the only way Lyra could describe it afterward.

The slope simply ended, and there was a gorge cut down into the rock, a quarter of a mile wide and three hundred feet deep and running away north toward the Kharn for as far as she could see.

Its walls were sheer black rock streaked with blue ice, like the cliffs of the Dragon-Ribs in miniature.

Its floor was flat and white.

And its floor was full.

The warren filled the whole bottom of the gorge from wall to wall, for half a mile.

It was not a village the way a human village was a village.

It was a hive.

Hundreds of low, round, domed huts of packed snow and ice, crowded together so closely that their walls touched, like frogspawn.

Crooked towers of stacked ice-blocks rising here and there among them, with platforms on top.

Fences of sharpened bone.

Great totems of antler and skull, hung with scraps of fur and rusted metal and things that glittered.

Smoke curling up from a hundred holes.

And at the far end of the gorge, where it narrowed, a row of great dark caves in the foot of the cliff, their mouths hung with curtains of hide.

And everywhere, moving, the goblins.

Lyra had thought she was prepared.

She had seen a skull.

She had heard Captain Orsa.

It did not matter.

They were white.

As white as the snow they walked on, so white that for a moment her eyes simply slid off them, and they became visible only when they moved.

And all over that white skin, from the crowns of their long, heavy skulls to the tips of their clawed toes, ran thin lines of blue: branching, twisting, glowing very faintly in the shadow of the gorge, like the veins in a block of ice, like frost-ferns on a window.

Hundreds of them.

Scurrying between the huts, crouching over fires, squabbling in knots at the doorways.

The troops were small and quick and hunched, all elbows and teeth.

The archers perched on the ice-towers and along the high ledges of the west wall, dozens of them, with their long whalebone bows across their knees.

And near the caves, where the gorge narrowed, stood the warriors.

They were not goblins.

Not the way the others were.

They stood upright, taller than any man in the Twelfth Tower, with the same white skin and the same branching blue veins stretched over shoulders like boulders and arms like the trunks of trees.

Some of them wore scraps of plate armor, dented and blackened, clearly taken from dead soldiers.

Some wore nothing but furs and paint.

They carried axes whose blades were slabs of blue ice, and spears of sharpened bone, and clubs made from the thigh-bones of mammoths.

They stood in loose groups outside the caves and did nothing, the way a pack of wolves does nothing, while it waits.

There were a great many of them.

Lyra heard Hilde Aarn, lying flat in the snow on the lip of the gorge beside her, start to breathe very fast.

“Slow,” she murmured, without looking round.

“Through the nose.

Like on the Steps.”

Hilde breathed.

Slower.

Then slower.

At the very end of the gorge, above the caves, a figure sat on a platform of piled skulls.

It was small, smaller than any of the troops: a bent, withered, ancient thing wrapped in white fur, with long, stringy white hair that hung to the platform, and a staff across its knees made of a single twisted horn.

It was not moving.

It might have been asleep, or dead, or carved from ice.

But the blue lines on its skin did not glow faintly like the others’.

They blazed.

They were so bright that Lyra could see them from a quarter of a mile away: a web of cold, burning light drawn over a body like a cracked lantern.

The witch.

And hanging on a thong round her throat, catching the pale morning light every time the wind stirred her furs, something small and round and glittering.

Too far away to see clearly.

A stone, perhaps.

A core.

Lyra looked at it for a long moment.

The wind shifted along the gorge, and came up over the lip, and carried the stink of the warren full into her face: smoke and filth and old blood.

And underneath it, so faint she almost did not catch it: sweetness.

* * *

The Archduke gave the lances their places in a low voice, lying in the snow on the lip of the gorge.

The First through Fourth would go in at the mouth of the gorge, where the slope came down to the floor in a long ramp of scree.

The Fifth and Sixth would come down the western slope behind them and hold the flank.

The Eighth through Tenth would wait on the lip, in reserve, until the warren was committed.

And the Seventh would go along the ledge.

Then he stood, and so did his brothers, and all four of them turned and walked away.

Not back to the tower.

Up.

Lucian went north along the eastern lip of the gorge in long, silent strides, and at the top of a crag of black rock that overlooked the caves he stopped, and turned, and folded his arms, and became as still as the rock.

Roderick climbed to a knob of stone above the gorge mouth and sat down on it, cross-legged, like a man settling in to watch a tournament.

Kenneth, with his three satchels, found a hollow on the western lip where he could see the whole length of the warren, and crouched there, and did not move.

The Archduke went last.

He walked to a high, bare shoulder of rock in the middle of the eastern cliff, directly above the Seventh Lance’s ledge, and stood there against the sky with the war-blade of his house on his back, and looked down.

He did not look at Lyra.

He did not look at Cedric.

He looked at the warren.

And Lyra understood, lying in the snow, that he had meant every word.

Rowan got to his feet.

So did the other nine.

“Rope,” he said quietly.

“Senna first.

Then Finn.

Me.

Cedric.

Lyra.

Mira.

Isolde.

The twins.

Sigurd last.” He looked along the line.

“If anyone falls off, don’t shout.”

“Shouting brings the snow down,” said Hilde, in a small voice.

“Shouting brings the goblins,” said Senna.

They tied on.

Senna led them to the edge of the gorge, to a place where the cliff broke into a crumbling notch that nobody would have looked at twice, and stepped down into it, and vanished.

The ledge was a goat track.

Nothing more.

A lip of black rock, sometimes two feet wide and sometimes one, running along the face of the eastern cliff a hundred and fifty feet above the floor of the gorge, glazed with ice and dusted with snow and, in places, simply not there, so that they had to step across gaps with nothing beneath them but air and, far below, the snow roofs of the warren.

The wind came up the cliff in cold, sudden gusts.

The rope hummed between them.

They went along it one step at a time, in total silence, their backs to the rock.

Below them, the warren went on with its morning.

The smoke rose.

The troops scurried.

The warriors stood by the caves, doing nothing.

The witch sat on her throne of skulls, unmoving.

And on the west wall, directly across the gorge from them and not quite level, the goblin archers sat along their ledges with their bows across their knees and looked, every one of them, at the mouth of the gorge, where any sensible enemy would come from.

Not one of them looked up.

They were two thirds of the way along the ledge when the horn sounded at the mouth of the gorge, and the First Lance went in.

IV.

The Silver Rain

For the first minute, it went exactly as Rowan had drawn it.

The First Lance came down the scree ramp at the mouth of the gorge in a wedge, the way the Wall veterans had taught them, shields forward and spears low, and hit the outermost huts of the warren like a fist through a paper screen.

The Second came in on its left.

The Third and Fourth on its right.

The noise came up the cliff to the Seventh Lance a heartbeat later, all at once: the roar of forty voices, the crash of mithril on bone, and then the goblins.

Lyra had never heard a sound like it.

A thousand throats, shrieking together, a high, piercing, chattering scream that bounced off the walls of the gorge and came back doubled.

The whole warren boiled.

Troops poured out of the snow-huts in a white flood, hundreds of them, all teeth and elbows and bone knives, and flung themselves at the four lances at the mouth of the gorge like a wave at a breakwater.

The breakwater held.

From the ledge, a hundred and fifty feet above, Lyra could see all of it.

She saw the tower captains’ sons of the Second Lance lock their shields and brace, and the white wave break against them and fall back and come again.

She saw a pale mithril spear in the First go through three troops at once.

She saw a boy from the Fourth swing his axe in a great flat arc and clear a space around himself the width of a hut.

Nine weeks of the Thousand Steps.

Nine weeks of the Sword-Pond.

It showed.

The troops were fast and many and utterly without fear, but they were small, and the lances were not.

On the west wall, the goblin archers rose from their ledges as one and drew.

“Now,” breathed Rowan, and they began to move faster along the ledge, toward the point where it came closest to the far wall.

The archers loosed.

A black cloud of arrows went down into the mouth of the gorge.

Lyra saw the Second Lance’s shields come up in a single motion, and heard the arrows hit them: not a thud, but a sharp, splintering crackle, like a pane of glass stamped on.

Black ice.

Shattering on impact, just as Captain Orsa had said.

A girl in the Third went down with a shaft through her thigh, and Lyra saw it burst inside the wound and saw her scream.

The archers drew again.

And on her throne of skulls at the far end of the gorge, the witch woke up.

She did not stand.

She did not seem to move at all.

But her head came up, very slowly, the long white hair falling back from a face like a withered apple, and the blazing web of blue on her skin flared so bright it hurt to look at.

She opened her mouth.

And she howled.

It was not loud.

That was the terrible thing.

It was a thin, high, keening sound, barely louder than the wind, and it went through the gorge like a needle through cloth.

Lyra felt it go into her ears and down her spine and into her meridians, and felt the frost-mana in her blood stumble, just for a moment, like a dancer missing a step.

Then the fog came.

It poured down out of the sky above the warren.

It rose up out of the snow.

It came out of the mouths of the caves in thick, rolling banks, white and freezing and utterly silent, and in thirty heartbeats it had filled the bottom of the gorge from wall to wall like milk poured into a bowl.

The lances at the mouth vanished into it.

The huts vanished.

The warriors by the caves vanished.

Only the tops of the ice-towers stood up out of it, and the ledges of the west wall, and the archers, drawing again.

And from inside the fog, the sounds changed.

Lyra heard it happen.

The steady crash of the lances’ mithril, the shouts of hold!

and left!

and brace!

broke up, all at once, into confusion.

Someone was shouting that they couldn’t see.

Someone else was shouting a name.

And in the middle of it, clear and horrified, a boy’s voice: “My sword-qi, it’s gone, it just…

it won’t come…”

The hex.

She’ll put a hex on the air that makes your sword-qi fall apart in your hands like wet sand.

Lyra felt it herself: a dull, dragging wrongness in the air, like trying to breathe through wet wool.

She reached for the smallest thread of frost along her sword-arm, the thread that any Sword Master could raise without thinking, and it came, but slowly, sluggishly, crumbling at the edges as it came.

For the candidates in the fog, who had only just learned to raise it at all, it would not come.

The goblin troops did not need sword-qi.

They poured into the fog after the lances, shrieking.

“Rowan,” said Senna from the front of the rope.

Her voice was very calm.

“They’ve seen us.”

On the west wall, directly across the gorge, one of the goblin archers was pointing.

Not at the fog.

Up.

At them.

The others turned.

Dozens of long white heads swung round at once, and dozens of pairs of eyes, pale and blank as the witch’s, found ten small blue figures strung out along a goat track in the middle of the eastern cliff.

The archers drew.

“Down!” shouted Senna.

They went flat against the rock.

The volley hit the cliff above them and around them and below them with a sound like a hailstorm on a slate roof, and the air was suddenly full of black ice: splinters and shards and fragments, whirling, glittering, stinging.

Lyra felt something slash across the back of her hand.

Beside her, Mira cried out.

Further along the rope, someone screamed, a raw, shocking sound, and Lyra twisted and saw Hakon Aarn clutching his arm, a shattered shaft sticking out of his upper sleeve and his sister on her knees beside him with her hands over his.

“The Frostweave,” gasped Hakon, white to the lips.

“It stopped…

most of it…” He looked down at the bloody sleeve.

“Not all of it.”

“Another volley,” shouted Senna.

This time Lyra did not go flat.

She came up onto one knee with her sword drawn, and as the black cloud came across the gorge toward them, she moved.

Master, she told herself.

Only Master.

Only what they’d believe.

She cut.

Once, twice, three times, the frost-lily blade moving in short, flat arcs in front of Mira’s head and Isolde’s and her own, and the black arrows that would have struck them shattered in midair into dust.

Beside her, Cedric was on his feet too, the Dragon-Spine Cleaver held broadside like a shield, and the arrows cracked against the mithril and fell away in splinters.

Sigurd had pulled Hilde and Hakon down behind his broad back and was crouching over them, his broadsword held flat above their heads.

It was not enough.

There were too many.

And from below, from the fog, came a new sound: scrabbling.

Claws on rock.

Lyra looked down.

The troops were climbing the cliff.

Not many.

Not yet.

A dozen, then twenty, swarming up the black rock face toward the ledge like white lizards, long fingers finding holds in cracks where no human could have found one.

More were coming out of the fog behind them.

At both ends of the ledge, where it met the gorge floor in long, crumbling slopes, more were already running up.

They were pinned.

Archers in front.

Troops below and on both sides.

A hundred and fifty feet of air behind them.

And three hundred yards away across the gorge, on the rim, above the hex and the fog and the screaming, a tall grey figure stood against the sky with his arms at his sides, and did not move.

* * *

Isolde Frostmere had never been afraid in her life.

That was not a boast.

It was simply true.

She had been born into the fourth-oldest house in the North, with the best eyes of her generation, and from the day she could first hold a bow, there had never been anything in the world she could not hit.

Fear, as far as Isolde had ever been able to tell, was what happened to other people.

People who missed.

She was lying flat on a goat track on the side of a cliff, with a sheet of black ice exploding against the rock above her head, and she was so afraid that she could not move.

It was not like anything she had imagined.

It was not a thought.

It was a thing in her body: a cold, animal paralysis that had started in her stomach and gone out into her arms and legs and locked them solid.

Her bow was in her hand.

Her quiver was on her back, full of mithril-tipped arrows.

She could see the archers on the west wall as clearly as she could see her own fingers, every one of them, the way she had always been able to see everything.

And she could not move her arm to reach for an arrow.

She could not even breathe properly.

Her breath came in little short gasps that did nothing.

Beside her, Mira was pressed flat to the rock too, bleeding from a cut on her forehead.

Mira was looking at her.

“Frostmere,” said Mira.

Her voice was shaking.

“Isolde.

Shoot them.”

I can’t.

“There are too many,” Isolde heard herself whisper.

“There are forty.

I can shoot one.

Two.

There are forty, and they’ll…”

Another volley hit.

Something struck her shoulder, hard, and she felt the Frostweave stiffen under the blow and the ward in its lining flare hot, once, and turn the black ice aside.

She was not hurt.

She was still not moving.

Further along the ledge, she heard Hilde Aarn sob.

And underneath it, under the shrieks and the crackle of ice and the scrabbling of claws on rock, under her own ragged breathing, Isolde heard something else.

A hum.

It was very faint.

She had heard it before.

She had been hearing it, she realized, for three weeks.

Ever since the terrace, ever since she had lifted a bow of pale frost-mithril out of a nightoak trunk and drawn the string for the first time, and it had sung.

A single clear note, and the whole terrace had heard it.

And after that, when nobody else could hear it, the note had stayed.

In the long range at the citadel.

In the dark, in her bed in the west wing.

At the very edge of hearing, like a word on the tip of her tongue, like someone in the next room saying her name.

She had thought it was her imagination.

She had thought, if she was honest, that she was going a little mad.

It was not her imagination.

It was the bow.

And it was not asking to be used, the way she had thought.

It was asking her.

Asking to be let.

Isolde closed her eyes.

She did not decide to stand up.

Later, she would not be able to remember doing it.

One moment she was lying flat on the ledge with her whole body locked in fear; the next, she was on her feet, on a goat track a hundred and fifty feet above the ground, in full view of forty goblin archers, with her eyes shut and her bow in her left hand and her right hand reaching up for the string.

“Isolde!” That was Mira, screaming.

“Get down, you idiot, get DOWN…”

She did not reach for an arrow.

She hooked her fingers round the empty string, and drew it back to her cheek, and listened to the hum.

And she let go.

Not of the string.

Of herself.

Of the thing she had been holding tight all her life without knowing it: the need to aim, and to see, and to be sure.

She let go of it the way you let go of a branch you are hanging from, and she fell, and something caught her.

The hum became a note.

The note became a chord.

And on the empty string, between her fingers and the grip, light gathered.

It came out of her.

She felt it go: out of her chest and down her arm and into the bow, a cold, bright rush of mana she had never known she had, not the frost of her house, but something sharper and cleaner, silver-white, like moonlight on the edge of a knife.

It ran along the string and gathered there, and gathered, and took shape.

A shaft.

A head.

Fletching of light.

An arrow that had not been there a moment before.

Mira stopped screaming.

Along the ledge, Cedric had turned, the cleaver still raised against the arrows.

Lyra had turned.

Rowan.

Senna.

The twins, clutching each other.

All of them looking at the girl standing upright on the ledge in the middle of the storm of black ice, with her eyes closed, and a bow drawn, and a shaft of pure silver light burning on the string.

Isolde Frostmere did not aim at the archers.

She tilted the bow up, and up, until it pointed straight at the pale sky above the gorge.

And she loosed.

The arrow went up with a sound like a bell.

It climbed, a single streak of silver, straight and fast, over the gorge and over the fog and over the witch on her throne, higher and higher, until it was a point of light against the sky.

Every head in the Seventh Lance tipped back to follow it.

On the west wall, the goblin archers stopped drawing and looked up too.

At the top of its climb, the arrow stopped.

And broke.

It did not shatter.

It bloomed.

The single point of silver light burst open like a seed-head in the wind, and scattered, and became a hundred points of light.

Then two hundred.

Then too many to count: a great silver spray of them, spreading out across the sky over the Rimefang Gorge like the Dragon’s Breath had spread across the sky over the Twelfth Tower, glittering, turning, every one of them a small, perfect arrow of light.

They hung there for one heartbeat.

Then, all together, they turned their heads down.

And they fell.

They fell like rain.

Like silver rain, like a sudden spring shower out of a clear winter sky, and they did not fall straight.

They curved.

They hunted.

Lyra watched a single silver streak come down over the west wall, bend in midair like a hawk turning, and go through a goblin archer’s chest as it tried to run, and then another.

She watched a dozen more fall into the fog at the bottom of the gorge and vanish, and heard, from inside the fog, a sudden rising chorus of goblin shrieks, cut off one after another.

She watched a silver arrow come down straight toward the ledge, straight at her, and swerve past her so close that she felt its cold on her cheek, and take a goblin troop off the cliff face two yards below her feet, where it had been reaching for Mira’s ankle.

It was not falling on the lances.

That was what Lyra saw, and would remember.

In the fog below, where the First and Second and Third and Fourth Lances were fighting blind in a boiling mass of goblin troops, hundreds of silver arrows fell, and not one of them touched a human being.

They went round shields.

They went round shoulders.

They went between a boy’s raised arm and his own face, and took the goblin behind him.

They knew.

Somehow, they knew what they were hunting, and what they were not.

Arrow-Qi, thought Lyra.

Arrows that turn in flight.

Arrows that track by spiritual heat.

She’s become a Bow Master.

Here.

Now.

On a goat track.

It went on for a long time.

Or it seemed to.

Probably it was no more than ten heartbeats.

Then the last silver arrows fell, and the sky above the gorge was empty and pale again.

On the west wall, there were no archers left standing.

None.

Isolde opened her eyes.

The bow was still up.

The string was empty.

There was blood running out of her nose, bright red against her white face, and she did not seem to know it.

She looked out across the gorge at the empty ledges of the west wall.

Then she looked down at the bow in her hand.

“Oh,” said Isolde Frostmere, very quietly.

Then her knees gave way, and Mira caught her.

* * *

There was no time to be amazed.

The troops were still coming.

They came up over the lip of the ledge at both ends at once, where the goat track ran down to the floor: a white, shrieking tide of them, twenty at the north end and more behind, thirty at the south.

The silver rain had thinned them.

It had not stopped them.

They came along the narrow ledge in single file because there was no other way to come, bone knives in their fists and their mouths full of teeth, and at each end of the Seventh Lance’s rope, there was an Aarn twin.

Hilde was at the north end.

Hakon was at the south.

They had ended up there by accident, in the scramble when the volleys hit, and there was no time to change it.

Hakon’s left arm hung useless at his side, blood soaking the blue sleeve.

His bow was in his right hand, and he could not draw it.

“Hilde,” he said.

His sister did not look round.

She could not see him; the whole length of the lance was between them, and the curve of the cliff.

But she answered at once. Visit g.com for the full chapter.

“I know.”

And then the Aarn twins did something that nobody in the Seventh Lance had ever seen before, and that Lyra would spend a long time afterward trying to understand.

Hakon crouched, braced the grip of his bow against the rock with his foot, and hooked the string with his good hand.

Hilde, at the other end of the ledge, drew and loosed at the troops coming along the north end.

And in the same instant, in the exact same instant, without being able to see her, Hakon drew his bow with his hand and his foot and his teeth, and loosed at the troops coming along the south.

Two arrows.

Two heartbeats.

One sound.

They struck the leading troop at each end of the ledge in the same moment, and both arrows burst.

They were frost-arrows.

Every archer in the North could lay a little frost on an arrowhead.

But these did not simply freeze.

They went off like thunder in a jar: a sudden flat crack and a blast of white, and a burst of frost that exploded outward in a fan along the narrow ledge, and hurled the first six goblins at each end straight off the cliff into the fog.

“Again,” said Hilde and Hakon, at the same time, to nobody.

They loosed again.

The same instant.

The same sound.

Two more bursts of frost, one at each end of the ledge, and more white bodies went tumbling down the cliff.

“How are they doing that?” gasped Finn, who was flattened against the rock in the middle of the lance with his spear at the ready and nothing to use it on.

“They’ve always done it,” said Sigurd, from behind them.

He was staring, too.

“Their father says they used to cry at the same time.

In different rooms.

When they were babies.”

Hilde was not crying now.

She was talking.

A steady, fast, running murmur under her breath as she shot, and at the other end of the ledge, too far away to hear it, her brother’s lips were moving with exactly the same words.

“Three.

Tall one.

Left.

Now.”

Crack.

Crack.

Frost and falling bodies at both ends of the rope.

“Two behind the rock.

Wait.

Wait.

Now.”

Crack.

“Out of arrows.”

Hilde reached back over her shoulder without looking, and Sigurd Kell, who had worked out what was happening a moment before anyone else, was already pulling arrows from Hakon’s quiver and passing them hand over hand along the lance to her.

At the other end, Rowan was doing the same from Hilde’s to Hakon’s.

The Seventh Lance became a single long line of hands passing arrows along a goat track, both ways at once, while at its two ends a pair of twins who could not see each other fired as though they were a single archer with two bows and one heart.

The tide at the north end broke first.

Then the south.

When the last troop at Hakon’s end went over the cliff, he dropped his bow and sat down very suddenly on the ledge, grey-faced, clutching his bloody arm.

At the other end of the rope, at the same moment, his sister sat down too.

“I felt that,” said Hilde, to no one, and wiped her eyes.

“He’s going to be all right.

I can feel he’s going to be all right.”

Mira, still holding Isolde upright against the rock, had already dug a roll of bandage and a small dark pill out of her satchel.

She passed them hand over hand along the rope to Hakon.

“Chew it,” she called.

“Don’t swallow it whole, it’ll only work half as well.

And keep pressure on that arm.”

Hakon chewed.

For a moment, on the ledge, there was quiet.

The Seventh Lance lay against the cliff, breathing, bleeding, looking at each other.

Below them, in the fog, the fighting went on, but it sounded different now: the shrieks of the troops fewer, the shouts of the lances steadier.

The silver rain had broken the back of the swarm.

Then, from the far end of the gorge, from the row of dark caves at the foot of the cliff, came a new sound.

It was not a shriek.

It was deeper than that.

It was a roar: a single, enormous, rolling roar from two hundred throats at once, rising out of the fog like a beast tide hitting the Wall.

The warriors were coming out.

V.

The Warrior

They came out of the caves into the fog, and the fog did not hide them.

It could not.

They were too big.

From the ledge, the Seventh Lance watched the dark shapes loom up out of the white one after another: huge, hunched, broad as doorways, heads and shoulders standing clear above the mist where the troops had been swallowed.

The blue veins on their skin glowed through the fog like lanterns carried by giants.

Most of them turned toward the mouth of the gorge, where the four lances were still fighting, and began to move toward it in a long, loping, ground-eating run.

Not all of them.

A knot of them, twelve or fifteen, broke away from the rest and turned north.

Toward the end of the ledge, where the goat track came down the cliff in a steep, crumbling slope of broken rock to the gorge floor, forty feet from the mouths of the caves.

Toward the place where every goblin archer on the west wall had just died, and where the silver rain had come from.

At the head of them walked the biggest thing Lyra had ever seen on two legs.

It stood a full head taller than the warriors around it, and they stood as tall as Cedric.

Its shoulders were so broad that it had to turn sideways to pass between two snow-huts.

Its white skin was not striped with blue so much as webbed, the veins so thick and so many that the whole great body seemed netted in cold light.

It wore a breastplate.

Not scraps: a whole one, a Frost Legion breastplate, blackened and dented and hammered out wider at the sides to fit a chest no human had ever had, with the frost-sword of the Eisenhardts still faintly visible on it under the grime.

And in its right hand, held as lightly as Lyra would hold a riding crop, it carried a club: the whole thigh-bone of a mammoth, as long as a man, capped at the heavy end with a knob of blue ice studded with iron nails.

It stopped at the foot of the slope, and looked up at the ledge.

Its eyes were pale and blank like all the others.

But they found Isolde, slumped against the rock in Mira’s arms with blood on her face, and stayed on her, and something in the long white skull understood.

It opened its mouth and roared.

“That,” said Cedric Eisenhardt, very softly, “is a big goblin.”

Nobody laughed.

Rowan was already moving.

“Hilde,” he said.

“Stay up here with Hakon and Isolde.

Keep them on the rock.

Anything comes up the cliff, shoot it.” Hilde nodded, white-faced, bow in her hands.

“Everyone else, off the rope.

With me.” He looked down at the slope.

It was narrow, a gully of broken black rock between two buttresses of the cliff, no wider than three men abreast.

At the bottom, the warriors were already starting up it.

“We hold the gully.

They can only come at us three at a time.

If we’re on the rope, one of them grabs it and pulls us all off the cliff.”

“And if they get past us,” said Senna, “they’re on the ledge.

With Isolde.”

“So they don’t get past us,” said Rowan.

They untied.

Seven of them went down the goat track toward the top of the gully: Rowan, Senna, Finn, Cedric, Sigurd, Lyra, and Mira, who had handed Isolde to Hilde and followed without being asked, drawing her short blade.

“Halvard,” said Rowan.

“You’re an alchemist.”

“I’ve noticed,” said Mira.

“Where’s the nearest cauldron?” She did not stop walking.

* * *

The first three warriors reached the top of the gully in a rush, and the Seventh Lance met them there.

Finn Brannoc and Senna Vaar met them first, side by side, spears low.

There was no plan to it.

There was no time.

The first warrior came up out of the broken rock with an axe of blue ice raised over its head, and Senna’s spear went into its thigh and Finn’s into its belly in the same instant.

It did not stop.

It did not even seem to notice.

It simply kept coming, pushing itself up the length of the two shafts toward them, and swung the axe down.

Finn got his spear haft up across his head.

The axe hit it with a sound like a bell.

The blue ice of the blade shattered.

The haft did not.

For a heartbeat, Finn stared at the unbroken shaft of pale ash and frost-mithril in his hands.

Where the axe had struck, right where the crack had been in his old spear, the one he had taped over and thought nobody could see, there was not even a scratch.

Then he twisted the spear, hard, the way his father twisted a spit, and heaved, and threw the warrior sideways off the top of the gully onto the rocks below.

“It’s not stopping,” gasped Senna.

Her spear was still in the second warrior’s shoulder.

It was still coming.

“It doesn’t hurt…”

She’ll howl, and her warriors will stop feeling pain.

At the far end of the gorge, on her throne of skulls, the witch was still howling.

Thin and high and unending.

And the fog was thickening around them, pouring up the gully like smoke up a chimney, and the hex was in it.

Lyra felt it press down on her.

Beside her, she heard Sigurd swear, and saw his broadsword come up with a faint red glimmer of sword-qi along its edge, and saw the glimmer gutter, and crumble, and go out, like a coal dropped in snow.

Cedric’s cleaver had no glow on it at all.

Rowan’s plain longsword was only steel-grey.

They were fighting monsters that could not feel pain, in a fog that took away the only thing that made them more than children with sharp sticks.

“Mira,” said Lyra.

“I know.” Mira was on her knees behind them, at the back of the gully, where a flat rock stuck out of the cliff.

She had torn open her satchel and spilled it on the rock.

She was working with both hands at once, fast, the way she worked over a cauldron in Kenneth’s tower.

“I need your pouches.

All of you.

The Kitchen General’s pouches.

Now.”

Nobody asked why.

Seven canvas pouches landed on the rock beside her.

Mira ripped them open, one after another, and poured them all out onto the stone in a single heap: salt and pepper, thyme and juniper, smoke-salt and chili.

So much Eastern chili.

And Uncle Kenneth’s warming root, ground fine, seven pinches of it, which on its own would have warmed a whole lance through a night on the ice.

Then she took a small twist of red paper out of her own satchel, tore it open, and emptied it on top.

A fine orange-gold dust, faintly glittering.

“Sun-pepper,” she said, to nobody.

“From the Southern Caldera.

Two silver marks a pinch.

I’ve been saving it for eight years.”

She put her bare hand flat on top of the heap and closed her eyes.

Lyra had seen Mira’s soul-flame before, in the Alchemy Tower: a small, steady, green-gold flame, like sunlight through leaves, the same color her blood had lit in the seal-crystal.

It came now.

It came up out of Mira’s palm into the heap of spices, and the heap caught.

It did not burn.

It roared.

A great column of red-gold smoke boiled up off the rock, thick and hot and furious, shot through with orange sparks.

It hit the witch’s white fog like a fist hitting a pillow.

And where it touched, the fog recoiled: shrinking, thinning, curling away from the heat like frost from a breath on a window.

In a heartbeat, there was a hole in the white around the top of the gully, the size of a room, full of hot red smoke that stank of chili and juniper and burning sun-pepper and made everyone’s eyes stream.

And inside it, the hex was gone.

Lyra felt it lift from her like a wet blanket pulled off her shoulders.

Beside her, the red glimmer came back up the edge of Sigurd’s broadsword, and this time it did not gutter.

It blazed.

The warriors in the smoke were choking.

Every one of them.

Coughing and clawing at their faces and staggering, their great white bodies convulsing, and the one on Senna’s spear had stopped coming forward and was bent double, retching.

“The Kitchen General,” said Mira, from her knees, with streaming eyes and a look of savage satisfaction, “said to season everything.”

* * *

They fought.

There was no other way to tell it afterward.

It was not a battle, the way the stories had battles, with lines and plans and banners.

It was ten minutes, or an hour, of blood and smoke and screaming in a gully of broken rock, while warrior after warrior came up out of the fog below and hit them.

Cedric fought the way he always fought: heavy, and laughing.

The Dragon-Spine Cleaver went up and came down in great crushing arcs, a third lighter than it had been three weeks ago and faster for it, the frost-mithril inlay along its edge flaring blue.

The first warrior who met it lifted a mammoth-bone club to block, and the cleaver went through the bone like an axe through kindling and did not stop.

The second warrior was bigger, and cleverer, and it caught the cleaver on its own club and held it there, and for a long moment the heir of the North and a goblin as tall as he was stood chest to chest in the red smoke, straining, their weapons locked, their faces a foot apart.

The warrior was stronger.

Lyra saw it at once, and saw Cedric see it, and saw him start to give ground, one step, two.

His boots slid on the broken rock.

His left shoulder dropped.

You dropped your left shoulder on the second exchange.

The warrior saw it too.

It let go of the club with one hand and struck at his left side with a fist the size of a helmet.

Lyra was already there.

She did not do anything a Sword Master could not do.

She came in low on her brother’s left, under the blow, and put the flat of the frost-lily blade against the warrior’s wrist, and turned it.

That was all.

The great fist went past Cedric’s ribs by a finger’s width, and the warrior, off balance for a single heartbeat, took the full weight of the Dragon-Spine Cleaver as Cedric wrenched it free and brought it down.

Cedric stood over the body, breathing hard.

“I dropped my shoulder,” he said.

“You dropped your shoulder.”

“Don’t tell Rowan.”

“I heard,” called Rowan, from the other side of the gully.

Rowan fought like the leaf.

Lyra had never seen him fight for his life before.

She had seen him spar, a thousand times, light and fast and patient, stepping out of the way of Cedric’s great swings and waiting for the sky to give him an opening.

This was the same, and it was not.

He did not step out of the way of the warriors’ blows.

There was no room in the gully.

He stood his ground, and let them come, and at the last possible instant, when an axe of blue ice was a hand’s breadth from his head, he moved a hand’s breadth, and it missed.

And his plain longsword went in, once, short and exact, into a throat or under an arm or behind a knee, and out again, and he was already turning to the next.

He did not waste a single stroke.

Every cut was the smallest cut that would do.

He was so busy doing it that he did not see the warrior behind him.

It had come up the cliff face at the side of the gully, not up the slope.

It came over the rim of the rock at his back in silence, and rose, and lifted a great axe of blue ice over his head with both hands.

Sigurd Kell saw it.

He did not shout.

There was no time to shout.

He simply threw himself across the gully, through the red smoke, and got his broadsword up between the axe and Rowan’s skull with both hands on the hilt.

The axe came down on the broadsword.

The sound was enormous.

The blue ice shattered into a thousand pieces, and the force of it drove Sigurd down onto one knee on the broken rock with his arms buckling, and his teeth bared, and a sound coming out of him like a bull.

But he held.

The frost-mithril held.

And the warrior, with nothing left in its hands but the haft of a broken axe, stood over him for one heartbeat too long.

Rowan turned, and cut it down.

For a moment, in the smoke, the two of them looked at each other.

Sigurd, on one knee, his great chest heaving.

Rowan, standing over him, his sword red to the hilt.

Rowan put out his hand.

Sigurd looked at it for a long moment.

Then he took it, and Rowan pulled him up.

“Two hundred and twelve losses,” Sigurd said hoarsely.

“To a farmer’s boy.”

“Two hundred and twelve wins,” said Rowan.

“I know.” Sigurd wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked away.

“I’ve been counting.”

They turned back to back without another word, and did not leave each other’s side for the rest of the fight.

* * *

And then the big one came up the gully.

It had been waiting.

Lyra understood that afterward.

It had stood at the foot of the slope and let its warriors go up first, one after another, and watched them fight, and watched them die, and learned.

And when there were no more warriors in front of it, it came.

It came through the red smoke without coughing, its breath whistling in and out through its nose in short, harsh snorts.

It came up the broken rock as if the rock were a staircase.

The Legion breastplate on its chest was splashed with the blood of its own kind.

The mammoth-bone club swung loosely at the end of its arm.

Senna went at it first.

She was the nearest.

She came in low with her spear, fast as a Kharn wolf, going for the tendons at the back of the knee the way her father had taught her to go for a bear, and her spear went in, and the warrior did not even look down.

It swung the club backhand, almost lazily, and caught her across the chest.

The Frostweave flared.

Lyra saw the Matriarch’s wards blaze up white across the whole of Senna’s coat, circle over the heart, line down the spine, as the blow landed.

They held.

The mammoth-bone did not break Senna’s ribs.

But it lifted her off her feet and threw her ten feet across the gully into the rock wall, and she hit it, and slid down it, and lay still.

“Senna!”

Finn got there first.

He did not go for the warrior.

He went for the gap between it and Senna, and planted himself there, feet wide, spear leveled, his narrow dark face set like stone.

The warrior swung at him.

He took it on the haft, and the haft held, but the blow drove him back two steps and down onto one knee beside Senna’s body, and the warrior raised the club again, over both of them, both hands.

Lyra moved.

It was the hardest thing she had ever done.

Harder than the Steps.

Harder than the crystal.

Because she could have ended it.

She could have ended it with a single cut, from where she stood, twenty feet away: one thread of void-intent along the frost-lily blade, one unhurried draw, and the warrior would have come apart at the waist before the club began to fall, and the whole gorge would have seen a sixteen-year-old Sword Master do something that no Sword Master could possibly do.

And on the high shoulder of rock above the ledge, her father was watching.

So she did what a Sword Master would do.

She ran.

She crossed the gully in four strides and came in beside Finn and put her sword up, flat, both hands, under the falling club, exactly the way Sigurd had done for Rowan.

The blow landed.

She let it land.

She let it drive her down, and let her arms buckle, and let her knees hit the rock beside Finn’s, and let the shock of it go through her in a way that looked, from anywhere in the gorge, exactly like a girl who had just taken the full weight of a mammoth’s thigh-bone on a sword and very nearly broken.

The frost-lily blade sang with it, a faint, clear, furious note.

Behind her ribs, the net shivered.

Hold, she told it.

Hold.

It held.

The warrior pulled the club back for a third blow.

And Cedric came into it from the side.

He came with the cleaver held low and both hands on it and all of his weight behind it, and he did not try to hit the warrior.

He hit the club.

The Dragon-Spine Cleaver met the mammoth-bone a foot from the warrior’s fist, and the mammoth-bone, which had turned every blade in the gully, cracked.

It did not break.

But it cracked, and the knob of blue ice at the end of it sheared off and went spinning away into the smoke, and the warrior stumbled, for the first time, and looked at its own weapon.

Finn’s spear went into its forearm and through it and into the rock of the gully wall behind, and pinned it there.

The warrior roared and tore at it.

The spear held.

Frost-mithril does not break.

Senna had come to.

Lyra did not see her get up.

She simply appeared, low on the other side, with blood running from her mouth and her eyes blazing, and her spear went into the back of the warrior’s knee, the other knee this time, and sliced sideways, and the great leg folded under it.

The warrior went down on one knee, pinned to the wall by its arm, roaring.

And Rowan was standing in front of it.

The warrior still had one free arm.

It still had the broken club.

It swung it up across its own chest, across the Legion breastplate, to guard, the way it had watched its warriors guard, the way it had learned.

And the breastplate was steel, and the club was mammoth-bone, and between them, they covered everything.

Throat to belly.

There was no gap.

Rowan closed his eyes.

Lyra saw him do it, and her breath stopped.

He stood very still in the red smoke with his plain longsword held low at his side, eyes shut, exactly the way he had stood alone under a lantern in the starlit courtyard of the citadel on spring nights, for weeks, cutting at nothing.

Exactly the way he had stood under a branch of dead leaves on the Sword-Pond while Lord Lucian watched from the colonnade.

He started nine days ago to cut the leaf behind the leaf.

Without touching the one in front.

Rowan cut.

It was one stroke.

Short and flat and very quiet, a whisper through the smoke, like a breath through the teeth.

His sword went into the club.

And through it.

Without touching it.

Lyra saw it.

She did not believe it, but she saw it.

The plain steel blade passed through the mammoth-bone as if the bone were not there, and through the steel of the Legion breastplate behind it as if that were not there either, and the club did not split and the breastplate was not dented and the frost-sword stamped on it was not so much as scratched.

And behind them both, the great heart of the warrior stopped.

It did not fall at once.

It knelt there against the gully wall, pinned by Finn’s spear, and its pale, blank eyes looked down at its own unbroken armor, and at its own unbroken club, and then up at the farmer’s son in front of it with his eyes still closed.

Then it fell forward onto the broken rock, and did not move again.

Rowan opened his eyes.

He looked at the warrior.

At the breastplate, unmarked.

At the sword in his hand, which did not have a drop of blood on it.

“Oh,” he said, very quietly, in almost exactly the voice Isolde had used on the ledge.

And from the top of the black crag above the caves, where a tall, lean, wild-haired figure had been standing with his arms folded since the fight began, there was a sound.

It carried down through the gorge, over the shrieks and the fighting and the fog.

Lyra heard it, and so did every one of the Seventh Lance.

Lord Lucian Eisenhardt, the Sword Maniac, who had not raised his voice to anyone in living memory, had laughed out loud.

* * *

At the far end of the gorge, the witch stopped howling.

She was on her feet now, on the throne of skulls, for the first time.

Small and bent and ancient, with her white hair whipping round her in a wind that had not been there a moment before, and the web of blue on her skin blazing so bright it was almost white.

She had seen her greatest warrior fall.

She lifted her twisted horn staff over her head in both withered hands and opened her mouth, and the fog began to pour back into the gorge from every direction at once: thicker, colder, whiter than before, a wall of it, rolling toward the red smoke over the gully like a wave about to break.

Up on the ledge, Isolde Frostmere opened her eyes.

She was still slumped against the rock, with Hilde holding her up on one side and the wounded Hakon on the other, and the blood from her nose had dried on her lip.

She did not look strong enough to lift a cup.

But she reached for her bow.

“Isolde,” said Hilde.

“You can’t.

You can hardly…”

“Help me up,” said Isolde.

The twins looked at each other.

Then they got their shoulders under her arms, one on each side, and lifted her to her feet between them, and held her there.

She drew the empty string.

It was harder this time.

Lyra, looking up from the gully, could see it.

The silver light came slowly, and it came thin, one thread and then another, and Isolde’s whole body shook with the effort of it.

But it came.

A single arrow, fine as a needle, burning white on the string.

Isolde closed her eyes again.

She did not aim at the witch.

She could not have seen the witch; the fog was already rolling over the throne of skulls.

She listened.

Lyra saw her head tilt, very slightly, like a hunting bird’s.

Arrows that track by spiritual heat.

And there was nothing in that whole gorge colder than the witch.

Isolde loosed.

The arrow did not go up this time.

It went straight out across the Rimefang Gorge like a thread of light pulled tight, a quarter of a mile, over the huts and the fighting and the fog.

It went into the wall of rolling white and vanished.

For one heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the fog stopped.

It did not fade.

It did not blow away.

It simply stopped moving, all of it, all at once, the whole great rolling wave of it hanging frozen in the air over the gorge like the pink mist over the Dragon-Heart Spring.

And then it fell.

It came down out of the air like a curtain dropped from a rod, soft and white and silent, and settled on the snow, and was only frost.

And there, on her throne of skulls at the far end of the gorge, with a thread of silver light standing out of the center of her chest, the witch was sitting down again.

Her staff had fallen from her hands.

The blaze of blue across her skin was going out, vein by vein, the way a hearth goes out, until she was only a small, grey, withered thing wrapped in white fur.

The hex broke.

Lyra felt it go, all across the gorge.

Felt the air clear, and the frost-mana in a hundred young meridians come surging back like water through a broken dam.

Down at the mouth of the gorge, where the four lances had been fighting blind in the fog against two hundred warriors that could not feel pain, sword-qi suddenly blazed up all along the line, red and blue and gold and green, and the warriors, who could suddenly feel every wound they had taken, began to scream.

On the lip of the gorge, a horn sounded.

The Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Lances came down the scree ramp in a wave, fresh and furious, with Lord Roderick’s roar of pure delight following them all the way down from his rock.

The warren broke.

It broke the way a dam breaks: all at once, and then completely.

Troops and warriors alike turned from the lances and ran, north up the gorge, past the caves, toward the Kharn, a white tide going out.

The lances did not follow.

Nobody had told them to, and nobody needed to be told not to.

They stood where they were, in the wreckage of the snow-huts, among the white bodies, and watched them go.

Up on the ledge, Isolde Frostmere slid down between the Aarn twins and sat on the goat track with her back to the cliff and her bow across her knees, and began, very quietly, to cry.

Hilde sat down beside her and put an arm round her.

On the other side, Hakon, grey-faced, did the same with his good arm.

None of them said anything.

They didn’t need to.

* * *

It was a long time before anyone in the Seventh Lance moved.

When Lyra finally stood up, her arms were aching all the way to the shoulder from the mammoth-bone.

Her hands were shaking.

Her sword was notched along the edge where the club had landed; she would have to ask Brunhild Ashanvil if frost-mithril could be mended, and she suspected the answer would be a lecture.

Behind her ribs, the net was quiet.

It had held.

Around her, the gully was a ruin of broken rock and red smoke and white bodies.

Senna was sitting against the wall with Finn kneeling in front of her, holding a wad of bandage to a cut on her lip and scowling at her as though she had done it on purpose.

Cedric was lying flat on his back on the rocks, looking at the sky, laughing weakly at nothing.

Sigurd and Rowan were sitting shoulder to shoulder on a boulder, not talking.

Mira had her satchel open again, and was going from one of them to the next with pills and bandages and a small, fierce frown, telling everyone that they were idiots, one after another, as she treated them.

Nobody was dead.

Lyra did not know about the other lances yet.

She would learn, later, at the Twelfth Tower, that nobody had died there either: that there were broken arms in the First, and a girl in the Third with a black-ice arrowhead that Lord Kenneth would spend two hours taking out of her thigh, and a boy in the Fourth who would never again see out of his left eye.

But nobody was dead.

Not one of a hundred.

She looked up.

On the high bare shoulder of rock above the ledge, her father was still standing exactly where he had stood all morning.

He had not moved.

He had not come.

But as she watched, he unfolded his arms, and lowered his head, just once, toward the gully where the Seventh Lance lay.

And then, slowly, he started to climb down.

Lyra turned away before he reached the bottom.

There was something she had to do first, and she did not want anyone to ask her why.

She walked the length of the ruined warren alone, through the frost where the fog had fallen and the silent, broken snow-huts and the bodies, to the far end of the gorge, where the caves were.

The throne of skulls stood in front of them, and on it sat the witch, small and grey and very dead, with Isolde’s silver arrow already fading from her chest like frost melting off a window.

The thing on the thong round her throat was a core.

Lyra knelt, and cut the thong with the Kitchen General’s butcher’s knife, and held the core up to the pale light.

It was rank four, or near it.

Too big and too clear to have come from anything that lived in this gorge.

Something large had died for it, somewhere out on the ice.

And running through the heart of it, curled inside the blue like a hair in honey, was a thread of gold.

The sweetness rose off it, very faint, clean and refined.

Someone gave you this, she thought, looking down at the witch’s withered face.

Someone came all the way out here and gave you this, and you wore it round your neck like a treasure.

She closed her hand around the core.

And then your village grew.

And grew.

And grew.

Far away to the north, beyond the end of the Rimefang Gorge, beyond the Kharn Glacier, from the direction of the Hollowmere, something howled.

One voice.

Then two.

Then three, grinding against each other like ice floes.

All across the ruined warren, a hundred heads turned toward the sound.

Lyra put the core inside her coat, next to her skin, and stood up.

End of Chapter 9.