The fields of Carosso went on for a day and a half, green and fat and fenced, and then they stopped, all at once, along a line nobody had drawn.On one side of the line there was wheat. On the other side there was wheat too, but nobody had cut it, and it had fallen over on itself in the rain and gone black at the roots. The first village past the line had its doors open. All of them. A cart stood in the one street with its shafts on the ground and no horse, and in a yard behind a cottage there was a wooden cradle with nothing in it, set out in the sun as though someone had meant to come back for it after the rest was loaded.They met the people who had left it on the road, going the other way. Families walking beside carts piled with bedding and pots and grandmothers. A man carrying a goat. Nobody spoke to them unless they spoke first, and when Ethan asked, a woman with a baby on her hip told him it was the fourth village now, and that there were men at the river crossings who took a t

The goldsmith's shop was the narrowest building on the Street of Smiths, squeezed between a cutler and a man who made nothing but hinges, and the goldsmith herself was a small old woman with a loupe screwed into one eye and fingers so scarred from the crucible that they looked like knotted string.She took the pendant out of Ethan's hand and held it up to the window."Feya silver," she said at once. "Stall work. Somebody pulled this wire through a plate with a hole in it and called it a chain." She turned the ruby into the light and was silent for a moment. "The stone's another matter. The stone's worth forty of the chain. Fifty. Who sold you this for what you paid?""A man who wanted to get home before the rain.""Well, he got home dry." She put it down on a square of green baize. "I'll set it in gold for you. Proper chain, proper clasp. It deserves it.""No," said Ethan. "Mend the clasp. Keep the chain."She took the loupe out of her eye and looked at him with the eye underneath it,

They rode out of the north gate at mid-morning, under the kingdom's banner, which somebody had run up the pole over the bridge especially. People stopped on the bridge to watch them go. A few of them bowed. One old woman put her hand on Celestia's stirrup as the mare went by, quite without asking, the way you touch a shrine for luck, and took it away again before Celestia could decide what to do about it."That's new," said Nina, riding behind on Wulfric."It's four days old," said Ethan."Well. It'll get older." She looked back at the city over her shoulder, and then forward again at the road north, and seemed to put Carosso away somewhere in herself with some relief. "They'll be singing about you by the time we're back. If we're back.""That's cheerful.""I'm clan-raised," said Nina. "We don't do cheerful. We do accurate."The fields ran out by noon, and the road began to climb into pine forest, with the Grey Peaks showing through the gaps ahead of them, higher each time. At a stable

The eyes in the pillar followed them as far as the next turning. Ethan felt them on the back of his neck the whole way, and when he glanced back at the corner, the green light was still falling across the floor where they had been standing, patient, like a lamp left burning in a window for somebody who is not coming home.Then the corridor bent, and the pillar was gone, and they came out into a round chamber with dragons carved all the way around its walls.It was the carvings that moved. The dragons brightened one after another, as if something were running around the frieze behind them, and out of the brightest came a ball of black mist the size of a barrel, rolling and seething, with tendrils coming off it that groped along the floor toward them. Where they touched the stone, the stone went grey and cracked.Nina threw herself sideways. A tendril raked her right forearm as she went.Ethan swung at the edge of the thing and felt the sword go into it and out again without meeting anyt

The passage beyond the golems ran straight and level for a long way, and got warmer with every step. By the end of it the stone under Ethan's hand was as warm as a cat's back, and there was a light ahead that was not torchlight, and a sound that he had been hearing for so long through the rock that he had almost stopped noticing it.Breathing. Close now.A great door stood at the end of the passage. It was carved in the likeness of two dragons facing each other, and as they came up to it, it slid aside into the wall without anyone touching it, slowly, grinding, as if the mountain had decided they might as well come in.The heart of Mistveil was a cavern the size of a cathedral, and it was full of fire and gold.The gold was everywhere. It lay in drifts against the walls, coins and cups and chains, with the hilts of old swords standing up out of it. There were bones in it too. A great many bones. Some of them still wore armor. Near the door, half-buried in coin, Ethan saw a round iron s