They did not finish until the bell had rung midnight, and by then they had agreed on the one thing Ethan had not known, when he started, that he would need to agree on: who would build it."Not us," said Garrick. "Not Carossans. We build walls and barns and churches with a leak in the roof. You want ten thousand people sitting on stone over a fighting-floor, and none of them falling through it." He shook his head. "You want dwarves.""The Thunder Hammer?""Miners. The finest in the world, but miners. They build down." Garrick finished his cup. "You want Ironroot. King Havram's folk, in the western mountains. They build up. There's a bridge of theirs over the Kessel gorge that's stood six hundred years with a road on it, and not a crack." He set the cup down. "They won't do it for gold. They've got gold. They'll do it for mithril. They've none in their own mountains, and they'd trade their grandmothers for a steady supply of it."Ethan thought of Mistveil. Of the heart-forge burning red

Nina came back down from Mistveil in the second month of spring with six mules loaded with mithril, and her father walking at the head of them, and a letter from the clan elders to King Havram of Ironroot sewn into the lining of her coat.She was supposed to go straight on west. She did not. She took one look at the ingot Eileen had laid on the anvil in the palace forge—the last of the Dasi mithril, and three of the Mistveil bars beside it, bright as poured moonlight—and at the drawings pinned to the forge wall, and said, "You're making him a sword.""We are," said Eileen."Without the runes.""Not without," said Eileen. "I was waiting for someone who could cut them."Solaine had come in behind his daughter, stooping under the lintel. He looked at the drawings for a long time with his big scarred arms folded across his chest. Then he looked at Eileen, and Eileen looked back at him, and something passed between the two of them that Ethan, watching from the doorway, recognized without be

Seraphina came to Carosso at dusk, at the end of summer, on foot.The gate sergeant nearly turned her away. He saw a thin young woman in a pale robe torn to the knee and grey with road-dust, with her hair coming down out of its pins and her feet wrapped in rags inside a pair of shoes that had given up some days ago, walking up the north road beside a halfling who was leading a mule; and he had orders about refugees, and he began to say so. Then the halfling looked up at him and said a name, and the sergeant stopped saying anything, and sent a runner up the hill at a dead run, and came out from behind his barrier and offered the young woman his own arm.She took it. She said thank you to him very carefully, as if she had been practicing the words for a long way and was afraid they might have worn out.Ethan met her in the lower court of the palace, by the fountain, with the lamps just being lit.He did not know what he had expected. He had been told by Neo's runner only she's here, she'

The throne room of Yanling had been built inside a mountain, and the mountain was still warm.Princess Fu Rong had grown up with that warmth and never once, until this autumn, thought about it. It came up through the black stone of the floor into the soles of your feet; it breathed out of the vents in the walls, carved in the shapes of open-mouthed lions; it lay over the whole long hall like a hand. In the middle of the floor, in a great basin of bronze, a heap of firestones glowed a deep slow orange, lighting the carved pillars from below, and in all her life there had never been a day when those stones did not glow. They were the kingdom. They had always been the kingdom. Under the mountains of Yanling the earth was on fire, and her people cut the fire out of the rock in little red pieces and sold it to the world, and the world paid.This morning, the hall was cold.Not the air. The air was as warm as ever. But the faces along the pillars were cold, and her father on his throne was g

Sir Leon was in the middle of the courtyard with a girth-strap in one hand and a young knight's ear in the other, and he let go of both when he saw the princess on the stair.He came across the flagstones to meet her. He was very big—half a head taller than any other man in the courtyard, broad as a door, with a mane of hair the red of a forge-fire streaked through with gold, and a scarlet cloak with the flame of Yanling on it thrown back over one shoulder. Across his back, in a harness of plain black leather, he carried a greatsword as long as Fu Rong was tall, with six firestones set down the length of its fuller like coals in a grate. He was Captain of the Knights of Yanling. He had been her father's sword-master before that, and hers, when she was nine and wanted to learn and her mother had said absolutely not. He had taught her anyway, in the stable-yard, at dawn, and never once told the Queen.He saluted her. Then he looked at her face, and his own face changed a little."Your Hi