For three weeks after the forest the road was only a road, and the host was glad of it.It climbed out of the trees into the foothills of the western ranges, where the nights were so cold that the pikemen slept three to a blanket and woke with frost in their beards, and it came down again onto the red plain. The grass there had been burned brown by the summer and silvered by the first frosts, and it went on to the edge of the sky in every direction, flat as a table, with a well every half-day's march and a line of stone posts to show where the road ran when the snow came. General Calder drove them hard across it. He had marched in mud once, he said, and did not mean to do it twice.Renwick had sent his Under-Chancellor with the host. Ethan had not asked for him and had not been consulted, which he suspected was the point. The man's name was Lucius, and he rode in the only closed carriage in the column and was never seen to look out of it. Twice a day a rider came up the road from the w

They argued for two more days, and they argued about small things, which Ethan had learned in Carosso was how you could tell that the large things were settled.They argued about silk. Yanling taxed Carossan wool at its border and Carosso taxed Yanling silk at its own, and both taxes were older than anyone at the table, and nobody could remember what either had been for. They argued about who would judge a Carossan pikeman who got drunk in a Yanling tavern and broke a Yanling head: Yanling's magistrates, said General Huang; Yanling's magistrates, said General Calder, with a Carossan officer sitting beside them to see it done fairly, and Huang looked at him for a long moment and said, "Yes. All right. Yes." They argued about what would happen if a pick in the Nine Mouths broke through into something that was not firestone. The Captain of the Pits said that whatever lay under the mountain belonged to the mountain, and he would like to see anyone from Carosso tell the mountain otherwise,

"Yes," said Feindo.He said it slowly, turning the word over. His golden eyes had gone somewhere past the vizier's shoulder, toward the far wall, where the carved storms marched."Yes. It has been some time since we reminded our sleeping friend of its obligations." He stood up from the cracked throne and shook the frost off his sleeve, like a man shaking off rain. "Come, Hesk. Bring the girl."Behind her pillar, Maud Kettering held the two trays very level, and felt the cups begin to shake on them.The girl. Sui, with her red cord and her letter. Maud thought of the child being led down into the ice instead of up onto the Stair, and her hands went cold to the wrists.But the vizier was already bowing, and saying, "The frost-witch is in her rooms, Majesty. I'll send," and Maud understood, and the cups stopped shaking.Not Sui. The other one.In the laundries they said the King went down under the palace at every full moon, and fed something, and came up again with frost on his hands. Th

A month later, the war came down the Jade Stair.Israya saw the top of the pass at dawn from the back of a white horse, with the whole host of the Frost Crown behind her on the swept road. The road had stayed swept for twenty days. Every morning it had lain clear and hard in front of the legions, black stone between high white banks, and every night behind them the snow had come down again and filled it in. There was no going back along it. She did not think that was an accident.The Stair began where the road ended. It went down from the saddle of the pass in terraces, great steps cut into the mountain by kings nobody remembered, each of them as high as a man and as wide as a field, deep in snow. From the top you could see a long way down them. You could see, at the bottom of the upper flight, where the pass narrowed between two shoulders of rock, a dark line drawn across the snow from one side to the other: pikes, and banners over them. A blue banner with a silver dragon on it. Red b

The hospital tents stood in the lee of the left-hand wall, where the avalanche had not reached, and all night their lamps were the brightest thing on the Stair.Ethan went through them after dark. He went slowly, because there was no other way to go: the cots were end to end and the spaces between them were full of orderlies, and men on stretchers on the ground, and buckets. The air smelled of blood and yarrow and wet wool. Nina was everywhere at once. She had no hammer at her belt now, and she moved as though she kept expecting to feel it knock against her leg.Halfway down the second tent he stopped.The man in the cot in front of him had a wolf's-head helm on the ground under it, and his leg in splints to the hip. Beside him, a Yanling pikeman with his arm strapped across his chest lay asleep with his mouth open. Beyond them, three more Shuanglin men, and then a Carossan, and then two more in grey."They were in the snow," said Nina, behind him. She was wiping her hands on a rag tha