There was no road north from Mistveil. Not in winter. The only way to the frontier ran back down to Carosso and out of its northern gate and around the eastern shoulder of the Grey Peaks, and so they rode south first, hard, through a day and most of a night, and came into the capital at dawn with the horses blown and their breath smoking.It was colder in the city than it had been four days ago. Much colder. There was ice on the fountains. A wind was coming down out of the north with an edge on it like a knife, and people in the streets had put on their winter cloaks a month early and were walking with their shoulders up around their ears, and nobody was talking about anything else."It's bringing the winter with it," Nina said, looking at the ice. "That's what they do. The old ones say a frost dragon doesn't come in winter. It comes, and then it's winter."King Aldric received them in the throne room, which Ethan had not seen before. It was a long, high hall of pale stone with a vault

The cave was barely a cave. It was a hollow under a shelf of rock on the side of the last hill, with a floor of dry scree and a roof low enough that Ethan had to stoop, and it went back perhaps twenty feet into the dark before it pinched out. They got the horses into the lee of the hill below it, blanketed and hobbled in a tight ring with Wulfric in the middle, and they got themselves in under the rock, and a moment later the blizzard hit the hillside like a wave hitting a pier.The noise was enormous. Ethan had not known that snow could make a noise. It roared across the mouth of the hollow in a solid white sheet, so thick he could not see his own hand held out into it, and the cold came in behind it and filled the cave to the roof.Celestia was already scraping together what there was: a few dead roots from the back of the hollow, a bird's nest, a dry thorn bush that had rooted itself in a crack in the roof and died there. She piled it on the scree and breathed on it, and it caught,

The tail came down where he had been standing a heartbeat before, and the floor of the lair exploded into shards.Ethan rolled. A piece of ice the size of a dinner plate went past his head, edge-on, spinning. He came up on one knee and the dragon was already turning away from him, fast—impossibly fast for anything so big—because Celestia was in its face.She had gone up the side of the frozen mound in three bounds and launched herself off the top of it, and she hung there for an instant in the blue light with her wings spread and her sword over her head, and then she came down across its snout with the long pale blade trailing black fire. The dragon reared back, hissing. The scales along its jaw had cracked and gone dark where the fire touched them. It snapped at her. She twisted in the air and the teeth only grazed her, and she landed rolling on the ice beyond its shoulder and came up running."Over here," she said, not loudly, "you overgrown icicle."It turned to follow her. It had f

The coat was blue, so dark it was nearly black, and it fitted. That was the remarkable thing about it. Celestia had taken him to the tailor off the market square at seven in the morning and stood behind the man with her arms folded while he pinned and chalked and muttered, and by eleven it was done, and when Ethan put it on and looked at himself in the tailor's long glass, a stranger looked back at him—a lean, tired man with a healed scar across the back of one hand and a way of standing that favored his left side, who looked, heaven help him, like somebody who might be allowed into a throne room on purpose."Better," said Celestia."I look like a lord.""You look like a man who's been told he's one and hasn't decided whether to believe it." She straightened his collar with two fingers. "That's the best look there is, in a court. Keep it as long as you can."The throne room was full.Ethan had seen it before, nearly empty, in the grey light of the morning before the frost dragon; he ha

The solarium was on the south side of the palace, a long room of glass with orange trees in tubs along the walls, and at three in the afternoon, in winter, it was the only warm room in Castle Carosso that did not smell of woodsmoke. Celestia had asked the Queen for it. The Queen had looked at her for a count of five and given it to her without asking why.She had invited seven people. Five had come. That was about what she had expected, and the five were the right five.She had learned this before she learned to read.Not the manners—manners were easy, manners were a set of steps, anyone could learn them in a season—but the other thing. The thing under the manners. She had grown up in a hall where people came to ask for things, and she had spent a great many evenings of her childhood under a long table with her chin on her knees, among the dogs and the dropped bread, listening to the voices above her. Who asked. Who waited to be asked. Who laughed first at a joke, and who laughed only