Night came down over Northfort, and the town did not sleep.There were too many wounded for the market hall, so they were in the granary too, and in the chapel, and in the houses around the square, with the doors open and the lamps burning, and Nina's volunteers going from door to door with water and linen and the surgeon's orders. There were prisoners in the old grain store. There were the dead, in rows under blankets along the inside of the east wall, where the farm boys had laid them out with their spears beside them. And there were the beastkin.Nobody knew what to do with the beastkin. They had been an enemy at noon and something else by sundown, and there were nearly two hundred of them, and they had no collars and no masters and no idea at all what they were now. Calder had put them in the yard of the new tannery by the south wall, with a rope across the gate, because it was the only enclosed space left, and they sat in the yard among the drying frames in silence and looked at t

The letter to Guild Master Regnas took Ethan four attempts, which was one more than even his answer to the King had needed.The trouble was that everything true in it sounded mad. A physician who does not taste the cup. A steward who measured poison with a bone spoon for fourteen months and was checked monthly to be sure he had not exceeded it. A dead warlord's last advice, which was to look for the board before sitting down at it. Ethan read the third draft over and heard how it would sound in a guild hall at midday with a fire going and a dog asleep under the table, and burned it.The fourth draft said almost nothing. It said: Old friend. Send two people you would trust with your own children to Carosso, not to the palace but to the city, and have them find out who has been supplying the royal physicians for the last two years and who pays him. Do not write the answer down. Send it in someone's mouth. He sealed it and took it down to the river steps below the town, where the washerwo

They came in sight of Ironvale at dusk on the ninth day, and the first thing Ethan saw was the people outside the walls.There were more than three hundred now. They were camped in the frozen fields under the east wall in anything that would keep off the wind—carts turned on their sides, blankets on poles, holes scraped in the bank of a ditch—and their fires were small, because there was nothing much to burn. When the northern column came over the rise, a few of them stood up to look. Most of them did not. They had been looking at armies for a month.Above them, on the walls, there were torches, and the glint of spears, and banners Ethan did not know. The gates were shut.Calder had the command tent up a mile from the North Gate by full dark, with a brazier going and the map of the city weighted flat on a trestle with four stones. Around it stood Celestia and Nina, Rook of the Guild, the captain of the Duke's riders, a lean young ranger lieutenant called Bram, one of the northern knigh

Malgrave fought like a man reciting something he had learned by heart.He spoke with every stroke. Ethan could not understand a word of it—old words, rough-edged, spat out between breaths—but he understood what they did. At every word the shadow in the black sword thickened, and lashed out past its edge in whips of darkness that came at him from angles the blade itself could not reach. One of them caught him across the left forearm and laid it open through the leather, and the pain of it was cold, not hot, and the blood came out slow and dark.He went on.Malgrave brought his armored fist down on the cobbles, and the ground heaved. Black spikes came up out of the stones in a line toward Ethan, one after another, each as long as a spear, faster than a man could run. Ethan threw himself sideways and the last of them went past his shoulder and took a strip out of his coat. He came up out of the roll with Fireheart already swinging, and the red fire went out from the edge of it in an arc a

Eileen arrived in the capital in the last week of winter, unannounced, on the box of a smith's wagon with her own anvil roped down in the back of it under a tarpaulin.She did not go to the palace gate. She went to the Guild, and asked for Garrick, and when Garrick came down the steps she told him who she was and what she wanted, and Garrick—who had heard about Master Eileen of Dasi for thirty years without ever meeting her—looked at her for a long moment and then sent a runner up the hill to the palace at a dead run.Ethan came down himself. He came down the Guild steps two at a time, and stopped at the bottom, and she was standing by the wagon with her copper hair tied back under a leather cap and her sleeves pushed up past the elbow, exactly as she had stood in the doorway of her forge in Dasi a lifetime ago, with a glowing bar in her tongs and her sharp amber eyes going over him from the boots up."You broke two swords," she said."I did.""In one week.""It was a hard week.""I he