The banquet hall had been hung with banners for the victory, the phoenix of Yanling and the silver dragon of the north hanging turn and turn about down both long walls, and three hundred people had been fitted into it who would not have fitted on an ordinary night. Lanterns hung from the beams. The warmth came up through the black stone of the floor. There were dishes Ethan had eaten in Carosso and dishes he had never seen, and somebody had found, somewhere on a mountain in winter, enough plum wine for everyone.He sat at the high table between Fu Rong and the Queen, with King Jian on the Queen's far side. Celestia stood behind his chair. She had been offered one, and declined it, and after the Stair nobody at the high table was going to argue with her. Leon was down among the knights with his ribs strapped, being toasted. Lucius sat near the door, as before, and ate one thing very slowly, as before, and listened.It was a loud feast. It got louder. Midway through it, King Jian rose to

Two weeks later, King Feindo came down the tea terraces into Yanling in chains.He came in an open cart, because the Marquis Kreia's riders had wanted the villages to see him, and the villages came out to the road and looked, and did not throw anything, which Ethan thought was worse for him than stones. He was tried in open court in the throne hall over four days, with Yanling's ministers on one side, and Carosso's Under-Chancellor, and three witnesses from Shuanglin's provisional council seated where the city could see them. One of the three was a woman from the east wing of his palace. She wore furs and no jewels, and gave her evidence in a steady voice, and did not look at him once. At the end of the fourth day he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in Yanling's deepest cell.Ethan went down to him that night.He went alone, over Celestia's objection and past two guards who did not quite know how to refuse him. The stair was cut into living rock and got colder as it went, wh

The host came home in the spring.It came in by the east gate on a bright cold morning, a week after the last of the snow had gone off the hills, and the city turned out for it the way Carosso turned out for anything: on the walls, in the windows, on each other's shoulders, shouting. Five thousand had marched out in the autumn. Rather fewer marched in. They came up the long avenue from the river gate under the blue banners with the silver dragon on them, rank on rank, with their pikes sloped and their lambswool under-jacks from the Yanling looms showing at their collars, and General Calder rode at the head of them with his one good eye fixed straight ahead and his face doing its very best to show nothing at all.Ethan was not in the procession. He had gone out to the gate on foot at dawn, with Celestia, and stood in the arch as the head of the column came up the road, and when Calder reached him he put up his hand, and Calder leaned down from the saddle and took it."General.""My lord

The council made its resolution public on the morning before they left, in the throne room, because Lucius said that a thing the whole city had heard about was a great deal harder to wriggle out of than a thing eleven lords had voted on in private.Ethan did not argue with that. He had been going to.The room was full. Sunlight came in through the tall windows of colored glass and lay across the floor in bars of red and gold and green. It lay across the courtiers and the scholars and the merchants of the Guild, the captains of the host in their best coats, and a scattering of people from the city who had heard there was going to be an announcement and had come to see what it was. Ethan sat in the oak chair at the foot of the dais. Celestia stood at his right shoulder. Above them the throne stood empty, as it always did, and beside it, on the top step, stood Edwin, with the wooden box under his arm.The Chancellor had given the resolution a title. The title was On the Revival of Roads,

The road east took them five weeks, and for most of it the road was only a road.They went through the Emerald Forest in five days. There were posts at either end of it now, as the treaty's fourth article said there should be—a stockade of new timber at the western edge with the silver dragon over the gate, and at the eastern edge another with the phoenix—and between them, every few miles, they met the riders of the road company going the other way in pairs, one Carossan and one Yanling, with a book in a saddle-bag. The Carossan sergeant at the western post showed Ethan the book. It was full of careful copies of marks: scratches on trees, a carving on a boundary stone, the scorched brand of a charcoal-burner. Nothing that looked like the angular frost-script. Nothing at all since the winter."We copy everything anyway, my lord," the sergeant said. "The Yanling lass on the east post is very firm about it."On the fourth day they came to the clearing where the road crossed the stream.Th