The summons came before dawn, folded into the shape of a black crane made of iron filings and held breath. It struck the stone of Lirien's window with a sound like a knuckle rapping against a coffin lid, and when she rose from her bed the cold of the floor came up through the soles of her feet with a sharpness that tasted of iron and pine resin.
Serath was already awake.
He stood in the corner of her chamber with his hackles raised and his yellow gaze fixed upon the crane, and the low rumble that lived in his chest had climbed higher into his throat than Lirien had heard it in weeks. The wolf's breath came out in pale plumes that drifted through the moonlight from the window and never quite dissolved.
"Peace," she told him, though her own hands were not steady as she crossed the flagstones and lifted the crane from the sill. "It is only Mother."
Serath did not lower his head.
The crane unfolded at her touch. Iron filings spilled across her palm in a pattern she had been taught to read before she had been taught to hold a sword, and the words that formed themselves from the scattered dust carried the Queen's own hand and the Queen's own seal. They read, in a script as spare as a blade ground down to its last inch: Come to the Spirit Chamber. Bring no light.
Lirien closed her fist around the filings and felt them bite into the meat of her palm. The pain was small and clarifying, and she let it hold her upright as she dressed in the dark. Wool and leather, the grey cloak of her station, a knife at her belt that she did not draw at court but never removed. Serath watched every movement with the grave attention of a creature who understood that something was being asked of him, though he did not yet know what.
"It will be cold where we are going," she said. "Colder than here."
The wolf huffed once, slow and deliberate, as though he had known that already and resented being told.
They left her chambers by the lesser stair and descended into the older bones of the palace, where the stonework had been laid down in the time of the first queens and the torches burned a colour that was almost violet. The corridors narrowed. The air changed. Somewhere far below them a bell began to toll, low and slow, with the cadence of a heartbeat that was learning to falter.
Lirien counted the steps as she went. She had been told once, by a bindwright she barely remembered, that the Spirit Chamber sat at the exact centre of the palace and could only be entered from one stair. She had been told many things since. She trusted this one because she had walked it often enough to know it was true.
At the bottom of the stair a door of black oak stood shut, banded with iron that had been worked into the shapes of sleeping wolves. The bands did not stir as she approached, but the iron had the look of something that had once moved and might again. Serath pressed his shoulder against her thigh as they came to it, and the warmth of him, even through the wool of her cloak, was the only warmth she felt.
The door opened before she could lift her hand.
Bindwright Colm stood in the gap, framed by the faint green light that leaked from beyond him. He was a small man, narrow-shouldered and slope-backed, with the sleeves of his work-robe pushed up past his elbows and his hands dark to the wrist with ink and something thicker than ink. He blinked at her from behind a pair of spectacles that had been mended so often the wire holding the lenses was thicker than the frames.
"You came," he said, in the reedy, slightly wheezing voice of a man who had spent too many years over hot forges and cold fonts. "I told her you would. She bet me a crown's weight in iron you would not. I am pleased to be the richer man, if also the unhappier one."
"Master Colm."
"Come in, come in. Do not let the threshold catch the cold. And bring the wolf, we have use for him, though I will not say what use and you will not ask, not yet."
Lirien stepped through. Serath flowed past her hip and into the chamber with the silence of water finding its level, and the door closed behind them without sound.
The Spirit Chamber was older than the palace above it. Its ceiling was lost in a darkness that swallowed the green light and gave back only the suggestion of vaulting, and its floor was a single unbroken sheet of black ice that had been polished by the slow passage of centuries into a mirror. Lirien saw herself and Serath reflected in it, and beyond her reflection, and beyond his, the shapes of other figures arranged in a careful geometry around the thing that lay at the centre.
She had been in this chamber twice before. Once when her brother Oren had been given his naming. Once when her sister Maren had not been brought home. She had hoped never to stand in it again.
At the chamber's heart, bound by chains that glowed with a faint and guttering blue, lay the Wintersworn.
It had been a great creature once. Even now, diminished and almost spent, the span of its shoulders was wider than a man could stride and the ribs that rose and fell beneath the matted grey of its hide were each one thick as a beam. Its head rested upon the ice, eyes half-lidded, and from its nostrils there came a thin and broken breath that frosted and then did not. One of its forelegs twitched now and then in a rhythm that had nothing to do with any will of its own. The chains lay across it in a pattern Lirien did not recognise, though she had been trained in the older bindings since she was old enough to sit still.
The bindwrights ringed the creature at the cardinal points of the chamber, four of them besides Colm, each one robed in a different shade of grey and each one holding a tool that caught the green light in a different way. They did not look up as Lirien entered. Their lips moved in words that did not reach her ears, and their hands moved in gestures that did not quite finish themselves.
Queen Thessaly stood at the creature's head.
Her mother did not turn. She stood very straight, in the high-collared gown of state, her white hair bound up under a crown of black iron that Lirien had never seen her wear above her own pillow. Her hands were folded at her waist. Her stillness had the quality of a blade held at the exact angle where it neither cuts nor rests.
Lirien walked forward. The ice did not creak beneath her boots. Serath padded beside her, and his claws made no mark at all.
She stopped two paces from her mother and bowed, low and precise, in the form she had been taught to use before mirrors and judges. She did not speak. She had been told to bring no light, and she understood that this included any she might have offered with her tongue.
Thessaly spoke first.
"You kept me waiting." The Queen's voice was low and rich and cold, and it carried through the chamber the way the green light did, filling every corner without seeming to move. "I had thought you would be quicker, after so many years of practising the sulk."
"I dressed in the dark, Majesty, as I was told."
"You were told to come as you were. You were not told to dress at all."
Lirien said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not be turned into a confession.
Thessaly turned, then, and looked at her daughter for the first time since the chamber door had closed. The Queen's eyes were the same pale grey as Lirien's own, but colder, and older, and set deeper into a face that had learned to give nothing away. The lines at the corners of her mouth had been cut there by something that was not laughter.
"You know what this is," Thessaly said, and she did not gesture toward the creature.
"The Wintersworn, Majesty."
"You know what it is to us."
Lirien glanced at the chains, at the geometry of the bindwrights, at the slow and broken breathing of the beast upon the ice. "The oath our forebears laid upon it. The binding that holds the long winter from our borders."
"The binding that was the oath. That was the long winter. The thing you see before you is the last thread of an agreement made before your grandmother's grandmother was a thought in anyone's head, and the thread is fraying." Thessaly's voice did not rise. It grew more precise, the way a blade grows more precise when the last finger's width of steel is reached. "If the binding fails, the winter falls. Not the winter we know. The winter that was promised before any of us drew breath."
Bindwright Colm had come up beside Lirien without her hearing him, and he spoke now in the careful, fussy tone of a man correcting a pupil.
"The creature is dying," he said. "Not as a beast dies. As a name dies. When the last creature that bears a true name is gone, the name itself is gone from the realm, and with it the binding that rode upon it. We have, by my best count and my second-best fear, until the second bell of the morning. After that, the thread will not hold any weight we can lay upon it."
Lirien looked at the creature again. The breath that came from its nostrils was thinner now. The chains across its hide had begun to move in ways the wind could not account for.
"What do you need of me," she said, and her voice was level, because she would not let it be anything else.
Thessaly studied her daughter for a long moment, and something moved in the cold grey of her eyes that might have been pride and might have been something older and less comfortable to wear.
"We need an heir to lay a hand upon the binding," the Queen said. "We need a voice to speak the older words. We need a daughter of the blood to stand where I once stood and add her weight to the thread, and the thread is very thin."
Lirien did not move.
"You are not asking me to renew it," she said.
"No."
"You are asking me to take it from you."
Thessaly did not flinch. The crown of black iron on her brow did not stir.
"I am asking you," the Queen said, "to do what must be done before there is no one left to ask."
Lirien heard her own answer before she knew she had given it.
"I will."
The words came out quieter than she had intended, and steadier. Across the chamber, Colm made a small sound low in his throat, half relief and half the particular disquiet of a craftsman handed a problem of a different shape than the one he had laid out his tools for.
Thessaly did not smile. She inclined her head a degree, which was the closest the Queen of the Frostbound Realm had come to embracing anyone since the year Lirien's brother had walked into the south and not walked out.
"Then we begin within the hour," Thessaly said. "Bindwright. The athame and the iron basin. The elder oils, not the temple blend, and the name-stones from the third shelf, not the fourth. Go."
Colm went. His footsteps on the flagstones were quick and oddly light for a man of his girth, and Lirien could hear him drawing breath through his nose in the careful way of someone trying not to cough and not quite succeeding at it.
The Queen turned back to her daughter, and for a moment the mask of state slipped, just enough to show the woman beneath it, who was very tired, and very old before her time, and very frightened in a way she had not been frightened since the war.
"You know what this costs," Thessaly said. It was not a question.
"I know what the realm costs if it is not paid."
"Yes. That too."
Thessaly's hand came up as if to touch Lirien's cheek. It stopped in the air halfway. It dropped again to her side. The crown of black iron on her brow caught the torchlight and gave back nothing.
"We were never gentle, were we," the Queen said, more to the room than to Lirien.
"No," Lirien said. "We were not."
The ritual chamber lay three floors below the throne room, sunk into the bedrock of the keep where the first Vaels had laid their foundation stones a thousand years before. The air down there tasted of iron and lamp oil and the particular cold that lived in stone that never saw the sun. Lirien knew the smell. She had been in this chamber twice before, once as a girl of nine watching her mother bind a lesser spirit to the harbor stones, and once as a woman of seventeen standing witness while a thief's soul was hammered into a ring of black steel.
The first time she had been afraid. The second time she had been certain. This third time she was neither, and she did not know what to call the thing that lived in the space between.
The basin stood on a low plinth at the chamber's heart, ringed with the old chalk sigils that Colm had spent a lifetime learning to lay without smudge. The dying creature had been brought down in a sling of woven wire, and it lay now beside the basin on a sheet of salt-bleached canvas. The breath that came from its nostrils was so thin it barely stirred the loose threads of its mane. The chains across its hide shifted and clinked in rhythms the wind could not explain.
Lirien knelt where Colm indicated. The stone was so cold it felt almost warm through the linen of her gown. She folded her hands in her lap the way she had been taught as a child and tried not to think about the thing she had agreed to do.
"Daughter," Thessaly said from behind her, and the word was a title and a weight and a key all at once.
"I hear you."
"Place your right hand upon the binding. Place your left hand upon the basin. When I speak the first word of the older speech, you will breathe in. When I speak the second, you will breathe out. When I speak the third, you will not breathe at all, and you will hold, and you will not let go, no matter what comes through the thread."
"And if what comes through the thread is more than I can hold."
"Then you will hold it anyway, because there is no one else to hold it, and the realm is more important than any one daughter, including you."
Thessaly paused. The torch on the wall behind her guttered in a draft that had no source.
"That is what I told your brother," the Queen said, quieter. "He did not believe me. Do not make his mistake."
Lirien put her hands where they were meant to go. The binding beneath her right palm was cold, colder than the stone, cold in the way of something that had been cold for a very long time and had learned to keep its cold well. The basin beneath her left palm was rimmed with a thin crust of ice, though the chamber was warm enough to make her gown cling at the small of her back.
Colm had retreated to his alcove of tools. She could hear him arranging them by touch, the small clinks of silver on silver, the careful whisper of cloth over glass. Once, far off in the keep above them, a bell rang. She counted the strokes without meaning to. Seven. The hour before the second bell of the morning. They were already pressed against the edge.
"Bindwright," Thessaly said. "The oils."
Colm came forward with a shallow bowl of black stone. The oil inside it was the color of a winter pond, and it gave off a smell that Lirien could not name, something between cold linens and the iron tang of blood and the green breath of pine needles in a hard frost. He knelt at her side and began, with the careful fussiness of a man who had done this a thousand times and was determined to do it right on the thousand and first, to trace the sigils on her brow and her throat and the inside of her wrists.
"Hold still, child," he murmured. "I have not lost a vessel in thirty years and I do not intend to begin now."
"I am not the vessel, Bindwright."
"No. You are the anchor. Worse. The vessel can be replaced."
He painted the last sigil across her palm, just above the place where her skin met the rim of the basin, and then he drew back to his alcove, and Thessaly took her place behind Lirien in the place the chalk circle had been laid for, and the Queen laid her own hands, very lightly, upon her daughter's shoulders.
"Listen," Thessaly said, and her voice dropped into the lower register of the older speech, and the air in the chamber thickened around the sound of it. "Listen, and do not interrupt, and do not fall before the third word has been spoken."
Lirien listened.
The first word came down into the chamber like a stone dropped into a well. It was not a sound she could hear with her ears. It was a sound she felt in the hinge of her jaw and the soft hollow at the base of her throat and the soles of her feet where they pressed against the cold floor. She breathed in, as she had been told, and the air she drew was the same air she had always drawn, except it was heavier, and it tasted of the oil on her skin.
The chains on the dying creature moved. The threads of its mane lifted as if a wind had passed through the chamber, though no wind moved. Somewhere far off, she heard Colm whisper something to himself in the rapid mumbling of a man reassuring his own hands.
The second word came, and it was worse. It pressed against the inside of her ribs like a hand laid flat against a closed door. She breathed out, and her breath came out white in the torchlight, though the chamber was warm. She heard herself make a small sound, and she did not know if it was her sound or something else's. The basin beneath her left palm had begun to hum, a low vibration she felt in the bones of her wrist.
The third word did not come.
She waited for it, counting the beats of her own heart against the silence. One. Two. Three. The torch on the wall steadied. The creature beside the basin stirred and laid its head down again upon the canvas. Thessaly's hands on her shoulders did not move.
"Mother," Lirien said, and her voice sounded wrong to her, thin and far away, as if she were hearing it from the bottom of a well.
"Hold," Thessaly said, and the word was not the third word, it was an order, and Lirien obeyed it because obedience was the only shape her body knew how to take in this chamber.
The thread was not coming to her.
She could feel it, a presence at the edge of the basin, a tug against the binding under her right palm, a thing that wanted to be drawn down into the vessel that had been prepared. But it was not moving. It hung in the air between the basin and the chalk circle, and it would not descend, and it would not rise, and the second bell of the morning was coming, and she could feel the creature beside her beginning, at last, to stop breathing.
Then she heard it.
A sound at the door of the chamber. Not a knock. Not a footstep. A long, low, grieving whine, the kind of sound a wolf makes when it finds the place where its pack has been slaughtered and there is nothing left of them but the smell.
"Serath," she said.
She did not know she had said it aloud until she heard the word leave her mouth and saw, in her peripheral vision, Colm turn from his alcove with the silver athame still in his hand. Thessaly's fingers tightened on her shoulders.
"Do not move," the Queen said.
"I did not call him."
"I know."
The whine came again, closer, threading between the torch flames. Lirien's bond-sense, the thing that had lived in the back of her skull since her naming day, was singing. She could feel the wolf pressed against the door of the chamber as if his whole body were a hand laid flat against the wood. She could feel the heat of him, the rank wild smell of him, the grief that lived in him like a second skeleton. He had come because she was in here. He had come because he had felt the thread gather itself above the basin and had known, in the way of bonded beasts, that the thread would take what it wanted, and what it wanted was not the prepared vessel at all.
"No," Lirien whispered. "No. Serath. Stay out."
The door of the chamber blew inward.
It did not break. It did not splinter. It simply came away from its hinges in one piece and slid across the flagstones with a long low grinding sound that Lirien felt in her teeth. Cold air came in with it, the deep cold of the high places above the keep, the cold that had no mercy in it, and through the doorframe walked the wolf.
He was bigger than she remembered. He had always been a large wolf, but the Hollowing had carved him down to the ribs, and the months since had not put the weight back on him. He looked like a sketch of a wolf done in grey ink on grey paper. His eyes were the color of the oil on Lirien's brow. He did not look at the creature on the canvas. He did not look at Thessaly. He looked at Lirien, and Lirien looked at him, and the bond between them rang like a struck bell.
"Bindwright," Thessaly said, and her voice was still regal, still low, but there was a hairline fracture running through it now that Lirien had never heard before. "The prepared vessel. Quickly."
"There is no time," Colm said. He had gone pale beneath his fuzz of beard. "The thread is choosing. I can see it choosing. If I move the vessel now I will tear the weave and the binding will fail and we will lose everything that is left of the name."
"Then what do we do."
"We let it choose where it wants to go," Colm said, and he sounded, for the first time since Lirien had known him, afraid. "And we pray."
The thread chose.
Lirien felt it leave the basin. She felt it cross the chalk circle in a single long silent line, as if it were a needle pulled through cloth. She felt it pass through her left palm and into the bones of her wrist and up the bones of her forearm and into the soft hinge of her shoulder and down into the place behind her ribs where her breath lived. She felt it meet, in that deep warm dark, the place where her bond to Serath was anchored, and she felt the two things, the old name and the new bond, recognize each other.
"Oh," she said, very softly. "Oh, no."
The wolf threw back his head and howled, and the howl was not grief anymore. It was a sound of arrival, of something coming home to a place it had been traveling toward for a very long time. Lirien tried to rise. Thessaly's hands on her shoulders held her down. The chalk sigils on the floor flared white and then went out. The torch on the wall went out. The second torch went out. The chamber went dark except for the faint silver glow that was rising from the skin of Lirien's hands where they lay upon the basin and the binding.
The frost began at her fingertips.
It spread across her knuckles in a fine white lace, so delicate she could see her own skin through it. It climbed her wrists. It moved up her forearms beneath the linen of her sleeves, and where it passed, the cloth stiffened and went pale and then went white. She could not feel her hands anymore. She could not feel her arms. She could feel, very faintly, as if from a great distance, the warmth of the wolf as he crossed the chalk circle and laid his great grey head against her knee.
"Hold," Thessaly said, and the word was the third word at last, the one that had not come before, and Lirien held, because she had been told to hold, because the realm was more important than any one daughter, because her mother had told her brother the same thing and her brother had not believed her and she would not make his mistake.
The frost reached her throat. It reached her jaw. It reached the bridge of her nose, and the soft hollows beneath her eyes, and the edges of her lips. The chamber was very quiet. The only sound was the faint chiming of the chains on the dying creature, which had stopped breathing at last, and the faint chiming of the frost on Lirien's skin, which had just begun.
Colm's voice came out of the dark, very small and very even.
"She is in the fever."
"Yes," Thessaly said. "I know."
"How long."
"Until the thread settles. Three days. Perhaps four."
"And if she does not come back."
"Then we will have lost a daughter as well as a son, and the realm will have lost its last heir, and I will have to sit upon this throne and find a way to tell my youngest that there is nothing left to inherit."
In the dark, Lirien tried to say something. The frost on her lips would not let her shape the words. She tried to reach for her mother. The frost on her hands would not let her lift them. She tried, very hard, to stay awake, because she had understood, somewhere in the last bright burning moment before the cold took her, that if she slept she might not come back to the same room.
She slept anyway.
The frost on her skin kept growing, long after her breath had gone thin and her eyes had closed and her body had gone heavy in her mother's arms. It climbed her cheeks and her brow and the soft dark crown of her hair. It threaded itself through the strands until each one was a thin white wire. It lay across her closed eyelids like a veil.
Somewhere in the chamber, the wolf lifted his head from her knee and began, very softly, to sing.
The song was not a song, in any way the court singers would have recognized. There was no melody, no measured phrasing, no human architecture of verse and refrain. It was a low and broken sound, torn from somewhere beneath the wolf's ribs, and it rose and fell with the slow rhythm of Lirien's fading breath, as if Serath were trying to teach her lungs how to keep their own time. It filled the chamber with something that was not warmth, exactly, but the memory of warmth, the shape of it, the way a hearthstone keeps the scent of the fire long after the coals have gone to ash.
Thessaly did not move. She held her daughter against the slow encroaching white, and she did not weep, and she did not pray. The queen of the Frostbound Realm had outlived her husband and perhaps her eldest son and any number of friends she had been fool enough to love, and she had learned that prayers were for those who had not yet learned to bargain. She was bargaining now, in the silent arithmetic of a mother counting breaths, trading years of her own remaining winter for each one her daughter kept.
The frost climbed.
It reached the crown of Lirien's head and spread there like a coronet. It traced the line of her jaw. It laid itself, very delicately, across her closed eyes, and for a moment the only color in the chamber was the faint blue-white of it against her dark hair, and Thessaly's hand upon her daughter's cheek looked almost warm by contrast.
Serath sang on.
Colm, in the doorway, had not moved either. The old bindwright's knuckles were white on the frame of his cane, and his mouth was a thin line, and his eyes, which had seen a great many extraordinary things in his long and meticulous life, were wet. He did not speak. He had nothing to say that would be of any use.
Hours passed, or what felt like hours in the close dark of the sickroom. The candles guttered and were renewed. Thessaly's women came and went with broths and poultices and were sent away again. Maren came, the youngest, with her pale face and her careful eyes, and was sent away more firmly still. Somewhere below, in the deeper halls of the palace, a courier was dispatched to the hold with the reprieve writ, and the headsman laid down his axe, and the prisoner in the ice cell was given back his hours.
Lirien did not know any of this. She was somewhere else.
She was walking through a forest of black glass, under a sky that had no color, on ground that rang faintly under her feet as if she were walking on the back of something vast and sleeping. She was not cold. She was not warm. She was aware, distantly, that her body was somewhere it could not get out of, and that something was being decided about her, and that she ought to be afraid, and that the fear, when she reached for it, had the texture of frost under her fingers. She could not quite pick it up.
In the distance, through the black trunks of the glass forest, she thought she saw a shape. Tall. Cloaked. Walking the same direction she was walking, at the same pace, as if it were her shadow and she were its.
She tried to call out. The forest swallowed her voice.
When she woke, it was to the smell of willow-bark tea and tallow smoke and the faint, warm, living musk of a great dog pressed close against her hip.
Her eyes opened on a ceiling she did not recognize. It took her a long moment to understand that she recognized it perfectly, that she had looked up at this very ceiling since she was a small child learning to count the cracks in the plaster, that it was only the angle of her head and the strange clarity of her sight that had made it seem unfamiliar. Her body felt hollowed out and strangely light. Her fingertips tingled. When she drew a breath, it came in clean and sharp, and the cold that filled it was just the cold of a northern morning in a stone keep, and not the cold she remembered, the cold with teeth.
She turned her head.
Serath was there, curled against her side, his great scarred head on his paws, his pale eyes watching her with the steady, unflinching patience of a creature who had decided to be present for whatever came next. His ears flicked forward when she moved. His tail, the part of it that still had fur, lifted once and fell again.
"Three days," Thessaly said, from the chair beside the hearth.
Lirien turned her head the other way. Her mother was sitting upright, hands folded in her lap, dressed as if for court, her crown laid on the table beside her. She looked as if she had not slept in those three days, and as if she would not admit it under torture.
"The prisoner," Lirien said. Her voice came out a scraped whisper. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Kael."
"Reprieved," Thessaly said. "By my hand, this morning. The writ is already in the hold."
"Why."
"Because I am queen, and I have chosen to be queen a little longer, and the realm will not survive my losing a daughter and a prisoner in the same week." Thessaly's gaze did not waver. "Do not mistake mercy for weakness, Lirien. It is the most expensive coin I have ever spent."
Lirien closed her eyes. The relief was so sudden and so enormous that it nearly broke her. Kael, alive, in his cell, with his reprieve writ and his borrowed hours. She thought of his face when she had last seen him, bloodied and stubborn, and the way he had looked at her as if she were the only solid thing in a falling world, and she had to press her hand against her mouth to keep from making a sound.
When she opened her eyes again, Thessaly was watching her with an expression Lirien could not read.
"There is more," Thessaly said. "And you are not going to like it."
"Mother."
"The Heart of Winter has been broken."
The words fell into the room like a stone into a well. Lirien heard them, and heard them again, and felt the strange bright clarity of her new-waked mind lay each syllable open and examine it for sense.
"That is not possible," she said.
"It was not supposed to be," Thessaly said. "It is. Colm has confirmed it. The great binding, the one that has held the deep winter in its bed for nine hundred years, has been shattered into seven pieces. Seven shards. Seven seals, broken." She paused. "Six, perhaps, if one is still where it ought to be, but Colm cannot find it, and the wards say nothing."
"How," Lirien said. Her voice was not a whisper now. It was thin and hard, the voice she had used in the training yards when a drill instructor tried to teach her something she already knew. "How could it be broken. Who would."
"Someone is collecting them," Thessaly said.
The fire popped. Serath's ears flicked back. Somewhere in the palace a door closed, and the sound rolled through the corridors like a small, deliberate drum.
"Collecting them," Lirien repeated.
"Three of the shards have surfaced in seven years. One in the southern deserts, one in the drowned cities, one in the hands of a merchant who did not live long enough to sell it. Each was in a place where, six months later, the winters grew strange. Colm has been tracing them. He has been tracing them quietly, because if word of this reaches the Wintersworn before we have the pieces in hand, we are all of us dead, and the realm with us." Thessaly's hands had not unfolded from her lap. Her knuckles were the color of old bone. "There is a fourth shard. Here. In the keep. In the ice cell, under the seal of the wardens, where it has been since my grandmother's day."
Lirien sat up. It cost her more than she expected. The room tilted. Serath rose at once and pressed his shoulder against her back, steady as a wall.
"Kael," she said, slowly. "Kael is in the ice cell."
"Kael is in the ice cell," Thessaly agreed, "with a shard of the Heart of Winter under his pillow, and has been, by my father's design, since the day he was brought to us as a foundling of seven. My father knew. My mother knew. I did not know, until Colm came to me three nights ago, white as his own apron, and told me what the seals were saying."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Lirien had ever heard.
"You knew," she said, "and you put him on trial."
"I knew nothing. I knew a prisoner, and a name, and a charge, and a sentence. I did not know what lay under his sleeping mat, or I would have been a great deal more careful with him." Thessaly's voice, for the first time, had a crack in it. A hairline, no wider. "Do not imagine, Lirien, that I am telling you this for your comfort. I am telling you because you are the heir of this realm, and because the fever did not take you, and because in three days you will be well enough to stand, and in three weeks well enough to ride, and when you ride, you will ride after the shards, and I will not send you into the dark without telling you what the dark is."
Lirien looked at her mother for a long moment. Then she looked down at Serath, who was watching her with his pale, unwinking gaze.
"You sang," she said to him, quietly.
The wolf laid his great head against her knee.
Thessaly rose, and drew the shawl tighter around her shoulders, and went to the window, and stood with her back to the room, looking out at the white world of her shrinking kingdom. Her voice, when it came, was the voice of a queen again, and not a mother, and not a woman.
"There is a man in the southern deserts who calls himself the Collector. Find him. Find what he has. And do not let him put the pieces together, or the winters will not be the only thing that wakes."
Outside, the snow began to fall, and did not stop, and the bells in the chapel below began to ring for the morning offices, and the day, like all the days that would follow it, began whether or not anyone was ready for it.