He put off asking Lyra in the morning.The morning had sunrise in it, first—the light coming up over the shoulder of the mountain and onto the blossom all at once, so that the whole of Bloomridge went from grey to rose to a red so deep it was nearly gold, and every tree on the hill seemed to catch fire from the top down. Ethan watched it from the crown of the hill with his arms folded, and understood why people slept on the grass for it.Then there was tea, which Nina made over the watch-fire in a kettle she had carried up the hill for the purpose, and which she was pouring when Seraphina came back from the edge of the camp, where she had kept the second watch until dawn with great seriousness and a borrowed spear held solemnly upside down.Seraphina stopped by the fire. She looked at the row of tents, and at Celestia, who was coming out of one of them, stretching her wings. She looked at the tent Celestia had come out of. She looked at the tent next to it, whose flap had not been open

It was sixteen days from the Stair forts to the capital of Shuanglin at the pace of the ox-carts, and for fifteen of them the country was white.It was not winter anymore, anywhere else in the world. Here it had not noticed. The high plain lay under old snow gone grey and granular in the sun, and the wind came across it from the north without anything to stop it, and in the mornings there was ice on the water-butts. Now and then they passed a village: a huddle of low stone houses with turf roofs, smoke going up thin from one chimney in three. The people came out to watch the grain go by. They did not wave. They stood at the edges of the road in their thin coats and counted the carts under their breath. At the end of one village a small boy ran alongside the column for half a mile, counting aloud. When he got to thirty-eight he stopped, and stood in the road, and just looked.The capital came up out of the plain on the sixteenth afternoon: walls and towers, all rimed white, and behind t

They stayed in Shuanglin eight days, which was six more than the council's resolution had allowed for and two fewer than Kreia wanted.In that time Eileen and the Marquis's master mason laid the first of the twelve heat-houses against the wall of the House of Winter. They quarreled about drains for most of it, and finished it on the sixth day, and Seraphina blessed the iron box before they lit it—which Eileen said made no difference whatever to the physics, and which did not stop Seraphina from doing it. Kreia chose five masters of Shuanglin's merchants to go south and learn to count the vault, and they came to be introduced to Lyra, who looked at each of them for a long time and then gave each of them a copy of the counting rules in her own hand. The letters to the Prince and the council went south by rider. And on the seventh evening, because she had promised it in Yanling and a queen of Shuanglin kept her promises now, Israya took the Regent's party to the springs.The bathhouse sto

Nobody said anything for a while. The wind came across the plain and pulled at the cloaks and the horses' manes, and somewhere down the column a Steel Guard's mount blew and stamped.Nina was the first to move. She did not say anything either. She got down off her pony, and took her guidebook out of the saddlebag, and opened it to a page near the back, and walked up the column and held it out to Ethan, open, with her thumb beside a note in the margin.salt—elves—2 yrs?"I wrote it down," she said. "At the Marquis's table. And then somebody filled my cup." Her voice was rough. "I turned the page, Ethan. I just turned the page."Seraphina had not got down. She sat very straight on her white mule at the back of the column, with her gloved fingertips pressed to the silver amulet at her throat, and her lips were moving. The wind took whatever she was saying away over the snow. When she opened her eyes she was looking west, down the road, the way Avelline was."The lower quarter," she said,

It took them five weeks to come to Avelline, and Lucianna had spent most of them being stared at.They had gone the long way, as the Queen had told them: west out of the forest by paths no human knew, and across the high country north of the human capital by the old road, and then south and west again through farmland and small towns toward the city Maerwen had never left. They had gone on foot, in plain grey travel cloaks, with their hoods up. It had made no difference. There were elves in the human lands—wood-kin of the marches, and half-elves, and the elven weavers of the Yanling markets—and the humans were used to them. They were not used to elves like these. Lucianna had watched it happen in every village: a face at a window, then another, then doors opening one after another down the street. Children were called in. Men came out to stand in their doorways and look.Avelline had elves. It had never had these."They are afraid of us," Aetherlyn had said, on the second week."They a