In the third week of the thaw, Ethan sent twelve carts up the valley of the Hollin to the Winterfang, with forty men and a surgeon and a priest, and went with them.The ice-face of the mountain had begun to run. Water poured off it in sheets and came down the slope in a hundred small loud streams, and the black mouth of the lair was dripping from every icicle, and inside, in the great blue hall, the ring of knights and mages was still standing around the walls, looking in at the empty middle where the dragon had been. They had begun to soften at the edges. It took two days to bring them all out. The men worked in silence, mostly, and when they spoke, they spoke low.Forty knights of the northern garrison and six mages of the Collegium came home to Northfort in the carts, under blankets, and were buried in the new ground outside the east wall on the first warm morning of the year. Ethan stood at the graveside with his hat in his hands through all forty-six names. Afterward he went back

The King had stopped coming down to dinner in the second month of spring.At first it was only once or twice a week—a cold, a tiredness, nothing anyone remarked on in a man of his years. Then it was most nights. Then the council began to meet in his bedchamber instead of the throne room, with the King propped up on pillows by the fire and the Queen beside him, and it was noticed that on the bad days he did not seem to follow what was said, and that on the good days he looked at the faces around his bed as if he was trying very hard to remember why they were there.And it was noticed, by those who noticed such things, that on both kinds of day Lord Kaelthorne was in the room.He came to the King's apartments every evening at the hour of the lamps.He brought reports, and read them aloud, very clearly, so that the King could follow them. He sat by the bed. He did not flatter. He did not hurry. When the King lost the thread of something, Kaelthorne went back and found it for him, patientl

Prince Edwin had not slept properly in six days, and on the seventh morning he stopped trying and got up in the dark and went to sit with his father.The corridor outside the King's apartments was cold at that hour, and grey, with the lamps burned low. There was a bench against the wall by the door. Master Corvale was sitting on it. The old physician had been at court since before Edwin was born—a stooped, fussy, white-haired man who smelled of camphor and had always, for as long as Edwin could remember, stood in the King's doorway every morning with the draught for his chest, and put the cup to his own lips before he carried it in. Every morning. It was a joke in the household: that Corvale had drunk more of the King's physic over the years than the King had.He was not doing it now. He was sitting on the bench with his hands in his lap, looking at them.A young man Edwin did not know came up the corridor with a covered cup on a tray—an under-physician, by his black gown, with a smoot

The narrows of the Blackwood were half a mile wide at the north end, exactly as Calder had said, and at dawn they were full of mist.It lay along the ground between the river and the trees in a thick grey sheet, waist-deep, so that the six hundred men Ethan had brought south stood in it up to their belts and looked like men wading. The river was on their left hand, loud and fast and brown with the autumn rain in the hills. The forest was on their right: a wall of dark pine going up the slope, so thick that ten feet into it the morning was still night. And in front of them, to the south, the country opened out and out into the wide mouth of the funnel, and the mist lay over all of it, and in the mist there was a sound.Drums. Very slow. Very many.Ethan sat his horse in the center of the line in a plain steel breastplate from the garrison stores, with Fireheart across his back, and listened to the drums, and counted his own breathing.In—two—three.Celestia was on his left on the grey m

Kaelthorne did not wait for his knights. He came across the courtyard alone, through the smoke, at a walk, and Ethan went to meet him.Behind Ethan the yard exploded. He heard it without looking: the black knights spurring forward, and Celestia's roar, and Lyssandra's snarl, and the northern line crashing into the southern shields at the breach. None of it came near him. There was a space in the middle of the courtyard, among the burning wagons, and the two of them walked into it from opposite sides and stopped a sword's length apart, and for a heartbeat neither of them moved."You could still stand them down," Ethan said."So could you," said Kaelthorne, and cut at his head.He was good. Ethan had known he would be, and he was better than that. He fought the way he talked—without any wasted motion at all, precisely, with a kind of tired economy, as if every stroke had been worked out in advance and he was only checking the sums. Fireheart met his blade, and met it, and the red light r