The middle of the afternoon came and went, and the floor was not finished.Ethan watched it not be finished from the rail of the box. The dwarves of Ironroot worked across the sand in two rows with their hoods up, one row lifting and one row laying, and between them Master Brannoc walked up and down with a straightedge as long as himself and laid it across every stone that went into its bed. Twice he made them lift one out again. Nobody in the box suggested that anyone hurry. Not one of the hooded heads turned toward the box all afternoon."Article the second," said Lord Renwick, "if Her Highness would be so kind."Fu Rong turned the page by its corner.They did the firestones before the lamps were lit: the price at the pit-mouth, who set it, who could look at the books. The one-in-four levy Yanling had laid on every stone crossing its border for two hundred years, which Fu Rong struck out herself, unasked, with one stroke of Liuyue's pen, and then sat looking at the line as if she had

Vael Shadowfang laid the point of his knife against the kneeling woman's throat, as he had laid it against forty-four throats in the Guild yard, and it went through.Not into her. Through. The knife met nothing, and the woman under it came apart like wet paper, and there was only a heap of thin black silk on the stones, the long wrap Lyra had worn over her gown when she walked out, with the glass-clear knife lying in its folds. No body. No blood. Shadow ran off the silk into the cracks between Brannoc's new stones like water finding a drain.The elf looked at it."I should hope so," said Lyra Vespera, softly, at his back.He turned. He was fast, Ethan would have sworn nobody alive was faster, and he was not fast enough. She stood close behind him in the one strip of lamplight left, untouched, gown whole, hair pinned exactly as she had pinned it, and her empty right hand was already flat against the middle of his chest."Vesper's Hour," she said. She said it at talking volume. It sounde

There were three of her.Lyssandra had both blades locked in the angle of the vampire's knife and shield a hand's breadth from that calm white face, and then the face on her left smiled at her, and the face on her right smiled, and the one in front went on holding the swords and did not smile at all.The left one came at her. She tore a blade free and cut through it and it was smoke. The right one feinted high. She put the hilt of the other sword into its face backhanded and it burst black against her knuckles. When she turned back, the one in front had gone into the dark between two lamps.She stood in the middle of the new stones with both swords out and her heart going like a drum, and could not see anything.It did not matter. She had not needed to see for a long time.She shut her eyes.The noise of the stands came first, because it was biggest. She let it go past. Under it the hiss of the lamps on their iron arms. Under that the grit shifting beneath her boots, her own breath, th

Liuyue brought the fair copy to the Yanling residence an hour before midnight, and put it on the table in front of the princess, and did not say anything.Fu Rong looked at it. The Chancellor's clerk had made it in a round, clear hand, five heads on two sheets, and down the margin of the first four ran three sets of initials, over and over: her own quick fierce F.R., the Chancellor's small R., and a single plain E. that did not look like anything in particular. Beside the fifth head there was a question mark. It was a very small question mark. It had been sitting in the corner of her eye all evening, and now that it was under the lamp it seemed to her the largest thing on the page.That the host of Carosso shall march within the month, and winter in Yanling, and stand with the host of Yanling at the foot of the Jade Stair when the snow goes off it, and not after.The clerk had copied her correction in the same round hand as everything else, so that nobody reading it would ever know ano

On the eleventh day out of Carosso the road went into the Emerald Forest, and the light changed.Ethan had heard Fu Rong describe it, at the banquet, and had thought she was being poetic. She had not been. The trees closed over the road like the roof of a hall, so high and so thick that at noon the light came down green and dim, the color of the bottom of a pond, and the host went on under it in a long murmuring column with its voices dropped, the way men lower their voices in a temple without being told. There was moss on everything. There was moss on the moss. The wagons made no noise on the soft black road, and the horses' hooves made none, and after the first day even the Collegium's battle-mages stopped complaining about the damp and rode with their grey hoods up and said nothing at all.Tobb, the Sylvans' guide, rode at the head of the column on his mule and did not say anything either. He had said perhaps forty words since the gate at Carosso. Twelve of them, on the evening of t