On the third evening after the gate, Regnas had the Guild's long tables carried out of the hall and set up end to end across the square below the Cathedral hill, and the lower quarter came up the hill with whatever it had.It was not a feast. Nobody had called it one. It was bread and river-fish and a great deal of barley soup in borrowed pots, and ale from the Guild's own cellar, and a woman in a grey head-cloth ladling it out at the end of the first table as if she had been doing it all her life, which she might have been. The freed sat where they liked. So did the soldiers of Carosso, in their shirtsleeves, and the watch of Avelline in their white-falcon surcoats, a little stiffly at first, at the same tables. Over the Guild hall's door, and over the broken west gate beyond the roofs, the white falcon hung in the last of the light.Ethan sat halfway down the second table, where Regnas had put him, which was not at the head. He had noticed that, and been grateful for it. Eric sat on

She had a heartbeat's warning, and she spent it.Seraphina did not decide to raise the shield. Her hands went up on their own, as they had gone up in the reeds outside Avelline with the Duke's dogs behind her, and the light came out of her in a dome of gold around her body. His fingers, dark and crackling, struck that instead of her. There was a crack like a green branch breaking. She skidded back on the stony ground, and the dome shivered all over.He was close on the other side of it. Tall, pale-handed, in a dark cloak, with a face she would not have been able to describe a minute later if her life had depended on it. For an instant his eyes were the wrong color—dark all through, with something moving in them—and then they were only eyes again. He leaned on the gold with his open palm, like a man leaning on a door he knows is about to give."Ah," he said. "A lively one. Your soul shines so brightly, little saint. It will make the perfect offering."The pressure of him was cold, and i

The cages had no doors. They had never been meant to open.Tyriel cut the first of them. The root bled when his blade went through it, a dark slow sap that smelled of cold iron, and it took him four strokes to make a gap wide enough for a child. After that Celestia went down the line with a small black flame in her palm, threaded with silver, and held it to the bars one at a time, low down, where they came out of the floor. She kept it small. There were people on the other side of every bar, and a mountain on top of all of them. The roots hissed, and blackened, and gave.They came out slowly. Some of them would not come out at all until someone went in and took their hands. A young elf girl stood in the gap Celestia had burned and would not step through it. Celestia took off her own cloak and held it open, and waited. After a while the girl stepped into it. She looked up at the horns and the silver hair and did not smile. She held on to the cloak with both fists.Nina guided an old wom

Seraphina woke to the sound of the world trying to pull her apart.She was lying in Ethan's arms. She knew the shape of them before she opened her eyes. But whatever warmth there was in him could not reach the cold spreading out from her shoulder. For twenty-six days the curse had been a slow frost. Now it was a tide, and the tide was being called.Below them, through the ragged hole where half the cavern floor had fallen away, the great seal blazed in the dark, and its light did not fall on her so much as reach into her. It found the black veins under her skin and tugged at them, gently, the way a fisherman tests a line. With every pulse of it she felt herself thinning—felt some thread of whoever she was being drawn down toward the door, toward the patient, sorrowful attention waiting on the other side.There you are, the woman had said. And the curse in Seraphina's blood had answered like a key turning in a lock."She's burning up." Ethan's voice, above her, frayed at the edges. "Eil

They came down off Shadow Peak into the valley and found the camp already struck, because Lyra had read the rider's message once and done everything in it in the order it was written. They were seven days on the old road to Avelline. There they left Merrin Ashby at the blue door by the bridge, where a woman who had walked to the Guild every week for a year opened it before the girl could knock; and that night, in a room over the Guild hall, Ethan took out Garrick's book and turned to the page headed Missing, and wrote one word at the end of the line that had been waiting for it. Found. Then it was south, and the road, and the cold coming down out of the north behind them day by day.By the time Carosso's walls rose out of the winter haze, Ethan had stopped feeling the cold. Seraphina had ridden in the hospital wagon most of the way. On the last morning she had asked to ride in front of him instead, so that the city would see her upright going in, and he had lifted her up and wrapped hi