The ice cracked under the Salt Sphinx's knees, a sound that echoed across the throne room of Solspire like the breaking of a small bone. The cold was absolute. It pressed through cloth, through skin, down to the marrow, and the Salt Sphinx understood then that this was not mere winter. This was a cold with intention, a cold that wished to be felt, that had been waiting in these walls for centuries to greet some new supplicant with its full, indifferent weight.
Two guards held the Salt Sphinx upright by the upper arms. Their gauntlets bit into the flesh through the thin shirt, and the Salt Sphinx could feel the pulse in their fingers, the slow, confident rhythm of men who did this work daily. The taller guard smelled of black iron and horse sweat. The shorter one reeked of lamp oil and the bitter root he chewed to keep his teeth from chattering in the throne room's chill. Neither spoke. Neither needed to speak. Their grip said everything.
Beneath the Salt Sphinx's knees, the floor was a sheet of glacier-blue ice, polished to a depth that reflected the vaulted ceiling and the pale ring of courtiers who lined the walls like a gallery of carved saints. Every breath the Salt Sphinx exhaled bloomed white in the still air, hung a moment, and was swallowed by the cold. Somewhere high above, a string of sunheart crystals had been rigged along the vault ribs, but they gave off no warmth, only a sullen amber glow that made the shadows deeper and the faces of the watchers older.
At the far end of the long hall, the throne sat on a dais of seven steps. Each step was carved from a single block of pale stone, and each was colder than the last. Upon the throne, a woman sat with her hands folded in her lap, her back straight as the blade of a pike. She wore white fur over white silk, and on her brow rested a circlet of blackened silver set with a single stone that might have been a sunheart and might have been a sliver of coal. Her face was narrow, her mouth a thin pressed line, her eyes the color of lake ice held up to a winter sky. She was looking down the long length of the hall at the Salt Sphinx with the patient, measuring look of a woman who had learned to wait out storms.
Queen Mother Selene Solhart did not speak. Not yet.
The Salt Sphinx's gaze dropped from her and swept the hall instead, the way a cornered creature's gaze will sweep any space for an exit, a weapon, a friend. There was no exit. There were no weapons. The friends were far away, in a cottage above a village that did not appear on any of the maps the southern lords kept in their cedarwood cabinets. There was only the hall, and the watchers, and the cold, and the woman on the throne.
A man in deep blue velvet detached himself from the ring of courtiers and walked toward the Salt Sphinx with the unhurried pace of someone crossing a garden he had crossed a thousand times before. He was lean, with a small silver beard trimmed to a point, and his eyes were pale and quick. He smiled. The smile did not reach the eyes.
"Your Grace," he said, inclining his head toward the throne without slowing his steps. "The subject is brought."
Selene's gaze did not move from the Salt Sphinx. After a long moment, she spoke, and her voice was the kind of cold that did not need to be raised to be heard across a hall.
"Bare the arms. Bare the throat. Begin."
A second figure emerged from the watchers' ring. This one wore a long coat of undyed linen, buttoned high at the throat, and on his chest he bore no sigil at all, only a small brass instrument that hung from a chain. He was older than the man in velvet, with the soft hands and watchful eyes of someone who had spent a lifetime in close work with other people's bodies. Behind him came three others, each in their own linen coats, each with their own small instruments.
Physicians. The Salt Sphinx felt the word settle in the chest like a swallowed stone.
The lead physician stopped an arm's length away and bowed, not to the Salt Sphinx, but to the throne. Then he turned and considered the Salt Sphinx with a look that was neither cruel nor kind, but simply thorough.
"You will hold still," he said, in the tone of a man stating a fact about the weather. "You will answer when spoken to. You will not weep. If you must weep, do it now and have it done with. We have other subjects after you."
The Salt Sphinx said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not sound like begging. The taller guard released one arm and, without ceremony, tore the sleeve of the shirt from shoulder to wrist. The linen came away with a small dry sound. The skin beneath was the color of old tallow, and the veins beneath it ran blue, the blue of the glacier floor on which the Salt Sphinx knelt. The lead physician drew a breath through his nose, a small professional sound, and leaned closer.
Cold fingers touched the inside of the wrist. The Salt Sphinx flinched, and the shorter guard's grip tightened in warning.
"Pulse is shallow," the physician murmured to the man with the brass instrument, who had produced a sheaf of thin paper and a sharpened reed. "Respiration quick. Extremities cold to the touch, though this may be ambient."
"Ambient," the scribe repeated, and the reed scratched softly on the paper. The sound was oddly domestic, the sound of a kitchen in another life.
Selene had not moved on her throne. The Salt Sphinx could feel her gaze the way one feels the weight of a hand laid across the back of the neck, light and constant.
The second physician stepped forward. This one was a woman, shorter than the lead, with a face that had been handsome once and now held the particular sharpness of someone who used it as a tool. She wore her linen coat open at the throat, and beneath it, at her belt, hung a row of small glass vials stoppered with wax. She did not look at the Salt Sphinx. She looked only at the lead physician, awaiting the nod.
The nod came. She stepped close and took the Salt Sphinx's chin in two cold fingers and turned the face toward the light of the sunheart crystals. The amber glow fell across the Salt Sphinx's features, and the woman studied them with the detached scrutiny of a butcher inspecting a carcass.
"The pallor is not cosmetic," she said. "Look at the capillary response along the cheekbone. There is no flush, even when pinched."
She pinched. The Salt Sphinx felt the small bright spark of pain and held very still.
"Indeed," the lead physician agreed. "Make a note. No capillary response along the zygomatic. The subject does not blush."
"Cannot, or will not?" asked the man in blue velvet from somewhere behind the physicians.
"Cannot, my lord. There is a difference. One is character. The other is constitution."
The Salt Sphinx kept the eyes downcast and the jaw set. The cold of the floor was climbing through the knees now, into the thighs, into the belly. It felt like the slow rising of black water. Somewhere in the long gallery, a courtier shifted his weight, and the leather of his belt creaked. Somewhere else, a woman coughed into her sleeve, a small wet sound.
The lead physician produced a thin glass tube from within his coat and held it up to the light. Inside the tube, a single drop of something dark sat in a bead at the closed end. He tapped the tube once against his palm, and the drop slid to the open end. He held it toward the Salt Sphinx's face.
"Open the mouth."
The Salt Sphinx opened the mouth. There was no point in refusing. The guards would have done it for them, and with less care. The lead physician held the tube close to the Salt Sphinx's lips and waited. After a long breath, the Salt Sphinx breathed out across the open end of the tube, a slow, steady exhalation that fogged the glass. The drop inside the tube moved. It slid up the glass in a long, slow climb, leaving a pale trail behind it. The lead physician's eyes narrowed.
"Cold air," he said, after a moment. "Of a particular coldness. Note the viscosity on the glass. This is not a breath from the lungs. This is something cooler passing through the lungs."
"Affectation?" the scribe asked.
"No," said the woman physician, who had stepped around to study the Salt Sphinx's profile. "There is a kind of cold that is born in the marrow and carried in the blood. I have read of it. I did not think I would ever be paid to look upon it."
Selene stirred upon her throne. It was a small motion, the slightest adjustment of her folded hands, but in the stillness of the hall it was the loudest thing that had happened since the ice cracked.
"Read of it where," she asked. Her voice had not changed. It was still the same cold, unhurried instrument. But there was a new note in it, a note the Salt Sphinx could not quite name, somewhere between hunger and caution.
"In the old histories, Your Grace. In the records of the Coldspring line, before they were struck from the rolls. The last of that line died in the Year of the Long Frost, if the chronicles are to be believed."
"They are not to be believed," said the man in blue velvet. "The chronicles were written by men with axes and motives. The Coldspring line did not die. It was simply moved out of sight."
"And yet," said Selene, "here one is. In my hall. On its knees."
The Salt Sphinx felt the words land like a hand across the mouth. Here one is. As if the Salt Sphinx were a thing washed up by the tide, a curiosity, a piece of wreckage from a ship that should have sunk long ago.
The lead physician had not stopped his work. He had produced a second tube, and now a third, and he was moving them in slow passes over the Salt Sphinx's exposed arm, watching the glass for any change. The third tube, held above the inside of the elbow, began to frost. A thin skin of white crept up the glass from the open end, delicate as a feather, and the lead physician made a small sound in his throat, professional and wondering at once.
"Mark that," he told the scribe. "Mark it carefully. There is a cold here that does not come from the room. There is a cold that lives in this one, as a fire lives in another."
The woman physician had knelt on the ice beside the Salt Sphinx without asking leave, and now she pressed her ear to the Salt Sphinx's chest, just below the sternum, the way one listens to a wall for water behind it. Her hair smelled of dried rosemary and the bitter black tea the southern courts served at their councils. After a long moment she sat back on her heels and looked up at Selene.
"The heart is slow," she said. "Slower than any heart I have heard. As if it were keeping time with a longer season."
"And the blood," Selene said. It was not a question.
"Touch it and find out," the woman replied, and there was the smallest edge to her voice, a thing that made the man in blue velvet smile his careful smile again.
The lead physician unstoppered one of the glass vials at his belt and produced a short, bright needle. He did not ask. He simply took the Salt Sphinx's exposed arm, turned it palm up, and slid the needle into the soft pad at the base of the thumb. The pain was a clean, sharp thing, very small, very precise. The Salt Sphinx did not flinch. The lead physician looked up briefly, as if surprised, and then withdrew the needle and held the vial to the welling bead of blood.
The blood that came out was not red.
It was a deep, translucent blue, the blue of glacial meltwater when the sun strikes it just so. It sat in the vial like a chip of sky, and the lead physician held it up to the sunheart crystals and turned it slowly between his fingers. The woman physician drew a short breath. The scribe's reed stopped moving on the paper.
"My lords and ladies," the lead physician said, and his voice had changed. The professional calm was still there, but beneath it there was now the faintest tremor, the tremor of a man who has just seen something he had only read of in books. "This is winterglass blood. I have never seen it before. I have read the descriptions. I am certain of what I am seeing. This is the blood of the Coldspring covenant, which was supposed to have ended with the last heir of that line. The covenant was supposed to be broken. The blood was supposed to be gone from the world."
The hall was very quiet.
Selene Solhart sat forward on her throne. It was the first true motion she had made since the Salt Sphinx had been brought in. Her folded hands had come apart, and one of them now rested on the arm of the throne, the long fingers curled, the knuckles pale.
"Bring the subject closer," she said. "To the foot of the dais."
The guards hauled the Salt Sphinx upright. The knees had gone half numb from the cold of the floor, and the first step the Salt Sphinx took was clumsy, the foot slipping on the polished ice before finding purchase. The taller guard steadied the Salt Sphinx with a grip on the upper arm that left no doubt about who was being moved and who was doing the moving. The woman physician rose and stepped back into the ring of courtiers without a word. The scribe fell in behind, his sheaf of paper clutched to his chest.
The Salt Sphinx was brought to the foot of the seven steps and made to kneel again. This close, the throne smelled of old beeswax and the cold stone from which it had been carved. Selene's face was harder at this distance, the lines around her mouth deeper, the eyes more guarded. She studied the Salt Sphinx for a long, silent moment, and the Salt Sphinx studied her back, because looking down at the floor now felt like a defeat that could not be afforded.
"You know what you are," Selene said, at last. It was not a question.
The Salt Sphinx said nothing. The cold in the room had a texture now, like the nap of velvet drawn across the bare skin.
"You know what your blood is," Selene went on, her voice still unhurried, still that cold clear instrument. "You know what was done with the last of the Coldspring line, and why it was done. You know why the court at Solspire spent forty years hunting every rumor of an heir, every whisper of a child born in the high north with the winterglass in the veins."
The Salt Sphinx swallowed. The throat clicked, very faintly, in the stillness.
"You know," Selene said, "and yet you came when the summons came. You did not run. You did not hide. You came to my hall, and you knelt on my ice, and you let my physicians open your arm and look at your blood. Why."
The Salt Sphinx felt the question like a hand laid under the chin, lifting. The hall waited. The watchers waited. The guards waited, patient as stones. Somewhere high in the vault, a sunheart crystal ticked softly as the cold contracted its mounting.
The Salt Sphinx thought of the cottage above the village, of the small fire in the hearth, of the woman who had raised a foundling in the high north and never once spoken of the court below. The Salt Sphinx thought of the courier who had come down the mountain pass on a roan mare with a letter on parchment so white it had seemed to give off its own pale light. The Salt Sphinx thought of the seal on that letter, a sun and a sword crossed over a field of ice.
And the Salt Sphinx thought, very clearly, that the answer Selene wanted was not the true answer, and the true answer was not safe to give in this hall, in front of these watchers, with these physicians still holding their vials of blue blood and their notes and their small brass instruments.
"I came," the Salt Sphinx said, and the voice was steady, though the breath beneath it was thin, "because the summons bore the seal of the Solhart throne. I was taught that a true summons may not be refused."
The hall released her like a held breath. Selene did not rise from the dais, did not nod dismissal, only turned her gloved hand palm-down in a small gesture that had ended a hundred audiences before this one. Sera Coldspring understood the gesture. She bowed to the painted Sunheart above the throne, then to the woman beneath it, then walked backward three paces, as she had been taught in the cottage above the village, before turning and following the captain of the guard through the tall doors of oak and iron.
The captain was a tall woman with a face like a hatchet and a long braid the color of wet bark. She said nothing as they crossed the outer anteroom. She said nothing as they mounted the first flight of stairs, where torches stood in iron fists and the stone was warm to the touch from the braziers behind the landings. She said nothing until they reached the third landing, where a boy in the Solhart livery waited with a lantern.
"The tower rooms," the captain said to the boy, and the boy bowed and turned and climbed, and the captain handed the lantern to Sera without looking at her, and said, "I am no longer required above. You will find the prince in the last door on the left. There is a guard outside who will not let you leave until dawn unless the queen mother permits it." A pause. "She will not."
Then the captain was gone back down the stair, her boots finding the steps with the sureness of a woman who had walked them a thousand times.
Sera lifted the lantern. The flame was small and steady and smelled of fish oil and pine pitch. She held it out before her and climbed.
The tower stairs wound upward through the heart of the keep. They were wide at the base and narrow at the top, as all such stairs were, so that any sword arm descending would be cramped and any defense ascending would be slowed. The walls were whitewashed and bore the brown stains of old torch smoke in long streaks like the tears of giants. Sera counted landings the way her nurse had taught her to count anything frightening. One. Two. Three. Four. Each landing had a window, narrow and deep, set in the thickness of the wall. Each window looked out over a different quarter of the city below, and in each quarter she could see, when she lifted the lantern, the small lights of braziers being lit against the coming night, and once, far down in the lower bailey, the orange lick of a forge and the small moving shape of a smith striking at a wheel.
On the seventh landing the stairs ended in a short corridor. A single guard stood at the far door. He was young, much younger than she had expected, with the smooth face of a boy who had not yet had to shave and the wary eyes of a man who had already had to kill. He wore no sword. He wore a short knife at his belt and a long leather club at his hip, and when he saw her he straightened, and when he saw her face, properly, in the lantern light, he blinked.
"You are the salt one," he said. He had not meant to say it. She saw the color rise in his throat and the quick clench of his jaw.
"I am Sera Coldspring," she said, and was pleased that her voice came out without the thin place in it that had almost betrayed her in the hall. "The queen mother has sent me to see the prince."
The guard looked at her a moment longer. Then he stepped aside and opened the door for her, without touching her, without quite meeting her eyes. She understood that. She was not offended. In the cottage in the high north, the village had stepped aside from her as a child, too, when the snows came late, when the ewes miscarried, when the small cold that she carried in her palm had gone out one winter morning and frozen the milk in the pans on the shelf and no one had been able to explain it.
She went in.
The chamber was large, larger than she had expected, and cold. The cold was not the clean mountain cold she had been raised in, but the close and feverish cold of a room that had been heated and overheated and then cooled and reheated, so that the air tasted of smoke and tallow and something else beneath, something faintly sweet that she did not want to name. Frost had crept along the inside of the tall window, in long curling fingers of white that caught the lantern light and threw it back in pale glints. The hearth held a fire of applewood that had been allowed to burn down to a heap of soft red embers, and three tallow candles on the bedside table had each burned to a different length, the shortest of them almost gone.
Prince Aedric Solhart lay in the bed beneath a pile of furs so deep that at first Sera saw only the shape of him, a long mound beneath the heaviest of them, a silver-fox pelt that had been laid over the others as if the cold had been a thing to be pinned. Then she saw his hand on the coverlet. It was the hand of a young man, but it had the loose tremor of a fever, and the nails were bluish at the beds. She looked, then, at his face.
He was very fair. The blood beneath his skin, even in the fever, had a pale cast to it, the color of weak tea, and his hair where it lay on the pillow was the color of wheat in late autumn. His eyes were closed. His breath came in short, shallow pulls that stirred the silver fur over his chest in small regular motions, and the breath sounded, faintly, like the rustle of paper. His brow was sheened with sweat that had dried and been sweated again and dried again, so that his skin had a faint salt crust at the temples.
Sera set the lantern on a chest near the door and unwound the long scarf from her throat and laid it over the chest as well. She did not take off her coat. She was not ready to take off her coat. She crossed the room on the braided rug, which was too fine for her boots, and stopped at the bedside and stood a moment, looking down.
The prince opened his eyes.
They were the pale gray of the winter sky above her village on a clear morning, and they fixed on her face with a sharpness that did not belong to a man in a fever. He studied her. He studied her coat, which was wool and lined with sheepskin and travel-stained. He studied her face, which was narrow and pale and had the small scars of windburn at the cheeks. He studied the way she stood, with her hands at her sides and her weight on her heels and her chin slightly raised, as a northern woman stands when she means to stand a long time.
"You are not a physician," he said. His voice was smooth and clear, even reduced by fever. There was a royal accent to it, a careful aristocratic clipping of each vowel that reminded her of the way the captain had said the tower rooms, as if every word were a small coin to be laid on a counter.
"No," Sera said.
"You are not a nurse."
"No."
"You are not my sister, and you are not my mother, and you are not the priest who came this morning and burned incense and did nothing useful, and you are not the guard who brought you, because he would not have left without speaking." He paused. The pause made her wait. "So."
"So," she said. "I am Sera Coldspring. I have been sent by the queen mother."
The prince's mouth thinned. He lifted one hand from the coverlet and pushed back the silver-fox pelt from his chest, and the furs beneath, until his collarbone was bare. He did it without hesitation, as a man does who has been examined a hundred times by physicians and has stopped being modest about his own body. Sera saw at once what he meant her to see. The skin across his collarbone was flushed and swollen in a long uneven ridge, as if something pressed beneath it from within, and along the ridge the small veins stood out dark and angry, and at the center of the swelling, where the bone met the hollow of the chest, there was a mark.
She could not see the mark yet. The light from the candles was not strong enough. But she did not need to see it. The shape of the swelling was enough. She had seen that shape before. She had seen it last night in the cottage above the village, in the dream that had not been a dream, where it had burned on the skin of a man who was not yet a man and not yet a king and who had stood at the edge of an ice floe with the wind tearing at his cloak and had reached for her hand across the dark water and had said, with his mouth, without sound, the word she had been taught in the high north as a child to never say aloud.
The prince watched her face.
"You see it," he said.
"I see it."
"Then you are a hedge witch, after all." His voice was cold. "And I would like you to take your hedge-witch face and your hedge-witch coat and your hedge-witch lantern and go back down my stairs and tell my mother that I do not require you, and that the priest will do, and that the incense will do, and that the next time she wishes to import a piece of the north to tend me, she might at least choose a woman who can lie about what she sees."
He coughed then. The cough was small but it broke something in the smoothness of his voice, and she saw his hand on the coverlet close into a fist, and then deliberately open again, and she saw the tendons in his wrist stand taut for a moment and then smooth. He did not want to cough. He did not want her to see him cough.
Sera did not move.
"I have not been sent to lie to you," she said.
"You have not been sent at all. You have been summoned, as I understand it, and you have come because the seal of the Solhart throne is upon the letter, and a true summons may not be refused. That is what they say of you in the hall. That is what my mother told me before the priest came this morning, when she thought I was sleeping." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at the frost on the window. "I am tired of being a true summons, Lady Coldspring. I am tired of true summonses. I am tired of the priest, and the incense, and the physicians, and now you. I would like very much to be left alone with my fever and my silver fox and my frost, and to die or not die in my own time, without an audience."
"You may die in your own time," Sera said. "But not tonight."
The prince's eyes came back to her. She saw the calculation in them, the quick arithmetic of a man trained from birth to weigh what was offered and what was asked in return. He looked at her coat. He looked at her boots. He looked at her hands.
"Why not tonight," he said.
Sera reached up and unfastened the top button of her coat and then the second, and shrugged the coat off her shoulders and folded it over the back of the chair beside the bed. Beneath the coat she wore a woolen dress the color of unsalted butter, plain, with a high collar that she undid now with steady fingers. Beneath the collar, on the skin of her own collarbone, was a mark. It was not a ridge. It was not swollen. It was a scar, old and white and shaped like a small sun rising over a field of ice, and it did not glow and did not burn, but it was there, and the prince saw it, and his breath stopped for a moment and then came back shallower than before.
"You," he said. "You have it."
"I have had it since I was a child," Sera said. "I do not know what gave it to me. I do not know what it is made of. I know only that it is the same mark that is on your skin, and that it woke in me three nights ago, in a dream, and has not slept since."
The prince looked at her a long time. The fever made his eyes very bright, and the brightness made him look younger than he was, and the look on his face was the look of a young man who has been alone in a sickbed for many days and has begun to fear that the sickbed is the only world he will ever see again, and who is now looking at someone from the world outside the sickbed, and is angry about it, and relieved, and will not say he is relieved.
"Very well," he said at last. "Stay. But do not touch the candles. Do not touch the furs. Do not touch me. And do not say the name."
"I will not say the name."
"Say it and I will have the guard drag you out by the hair, fever or no fever."
"I will not say it."
He looked at her again, and this time the look was less sharp and more tired. He closed his eyes. "Then sit," he said. "And tell me why you came. Not the seal, and not the throne, and not the true summons. Tell me why you came."
Sera pulled the chair closer to the bed and sat. She did not touch the candles. She did not touch the furs. She did not touch him. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at his hand on the coverlet and at the small blue crescents of his nails, and she said, "I came because in my dream three nights ago, I stood at the edge of an ice floe, and there was a man across the water from me, and he was very young, and he was very cold, and he reached for my hand. I could not reach his. The water was between us. And I woke with the mark on my skin burning, and I knew, as I have never known anything, that if I did not come south, the man on the floe would die before spring."
The prince opened his eyes again.
"There was no water between us in my dream," he said. His voice was very quiet now. "There was a wall. Stone. Very thick. And on the other side of it was a woman with a cold face, and she would not come in."
Sera nodded. "That is because you have been waiting for me to come in," she said. "And I have been waiting for you to ask."
He stared at her. Then he laughed, a short, soft, broken sound that ended in the cough again, and he turned his face into the pillow and the cough went on and on for a long time, and she sat still and did not touch him, and when it was over and he turned his face back, his eyes were wet and the salt crust at his temples had cracked.
"Then ask," he said, and his voice was only a whisper now. "And I will see if I can say yes through this damned throat of mine."
Sera Coldspring drew a long breath in through her nose and let it out through her mouth, slowly, the way her nurse had taught her when she was very small and the cold in her palm would not stop. She looked at the frost on the window. She looked at the embers in the hearth. She looked at the mark on his collarbone, which she could see now without the candlelight's help, because it had begun, faintly, to give off its own.
"Then yes," she said. "I am staying. Until you are healed, or until you are dead, whichever comes first. And I will not touch the candles, and I will not touch the furs, and I will not say the name. But I will sit here, Prince Aedric Solhart, and I will not leave."
He looked at her a long time. The frost on the window grew a finger's length while he looked. The embers in the hearth settled and glowed. Somewhere down in the city below, a bell rang the hour, and the sound came up through the tower stones like a slow pulse.
"Then stay," he said at last, and closed his eyes, and did not open them again for a long while, and she sat in the chair beside him in the frost-rimed room, and did not move, and did not sleep, and waited for the dawn to see what the dawn would bring.