For a long moment after Melissa gave the command, the only sound on the hill was the thin, ragged breath of the dead boy’s lantern guttering out on the rocks below. The sun had cleared the clouds, and it laid a bar of hard gold across the grass, the blood, and the small grey figure lying with one hand curled toward the river.Elvyn had not moved. Her frost-staff lay where it had fallen, half hidden in the heather, and her fingers were still shaped around the place where it had been.“You killed him,” she said.“I did.”“He came back.” Her voice shook. It was not the cold, controlled voice of the First Voice of the Hand’s inner circle. It was the voice of a girl standing on a riverbank. “He crossed that water alone, with a lantern in his hand, so you would see him coming and not mistake him for a threat. He told you everything. Every detail, in order. He did not lie, he did not hold back, he did not even beg.”“No. He did not.”“Then why?”“Because he failed me.” Melissa did not turn.

Melissa raised her chin. Her whole body trembled with the effort, and a thin thread of blood ran from her nostril and down her lip. The ice thickened. It crept across the water toward the island, a pale road, wide enough for a column of ten abreast.And then, with a sound like a mountain splitting, the river answered.It began beneath the ice. A dull, deep thud shook the shingle, then another. Steam hissed through the cracks in long white screams. The surface bulged. A great plate of ice tilted, and underneath it, dark water, hot enough to scald a man in seconds, roared up through the break in a fountain of boiling spray. The ice shattered, plate after plate, in a thunderous, glittering collapse, and the whole white road disintegrated into a churning chaos of steam and black water.Melissa staggered back. Her staff cracked against a stone. She went to one knee on the shingle, her hand pressed against her mouth, blood dripping between her fingers.“I told you,” Elvyn said, and her voic

“As long as the wardens are crossing.”Thorne stared at the wheel of light turning over the island. The thirteenth rod, thin and dim, flickered at the edge, bright and dark, bright and dark. A cold, strange weight settled in his stomach.“I will do it,” he said.“You may not hold.”“Then I will hold as long as I can.”“I would rather not ask this of you.”“I know.”“The risk is considerable. If your focus breaks, the backlash could—”“I know, Williams.” His voice was steady. “You told me what I am. You told me what the bond is for. I would rather use it for something than wait to find out what it does by accident.”Williams looked at him a long moment. Something in his face softened.“Then we protect you,” he said. “Sablen, Maya, Breck, and Cael Dross hold the circle around the anchor. Corwin and Adrian take the shoreline, with telekinesis and fire. Torvin and I guard the dwelling. And Kester—”“My lord?”“Kester primes the nodes. As before. The Sentinel’s power flows through you.”“I

He limped away up the slope. Thorne stood looking after him, the cold feeling sitting like a stone in his chest, and could not have said why.The first sign was the sound.It came across the river at the tail end of noon, low and slow and impossibly vast, the tread of a very great many feet on a very soft bed. It rolled through the water and up through the soles of Thorne’s boots, and every stone on the shore shivered with it. The steam above the current quivered. In the shallows, the pebbles danced.“They are in the river,” Sablen said.“Positions!” Williams’s voice rang across the garden.They ran.Thorne took his place at the center of the lawn, directly beneath the turning wheel of light, in a wide circle of bare ground that Torvin had cleared and sanded. Sablen, Maya, Breck, and Cael Dross fanned out around him, their weapons drawn, their backs to him, facing outward. The Aegis hung on his arm. The silver thread hummed at his wrist.“Breathe,” Williams said, appearing at his side

“Sit.”He did. The grass was cold. A grey wave of exhaustion rose in him, and for a moment the world swam. When it cleared, he saw the bone hull sliding up onto the pale shelf and the two women stepping out onto the stones.Melissa walked first. She came up the shelf slowly, her grey gown trailing in the shallows, her staff in her right hand. The Orion Sentinel’s veil of silver light swept down across her as she crossed the waterline, and Thorne saw her stop.She stood motionless. The light poured over her like water. A tremor ran through her thin frame. Blood began to trickle from her nose, then from the corners of her eyes, thin and red against the pale, set face. She took a step. It was clearly a battle to lift her foot. She took another.“The Sentinel is weighing her,” Corwin breathed.“She has murder in her heart.”“She is pushing through.”“She cannot.”“She is.”It was true. Slowly, inch by terrible inch, Melissa walked up the shelf, bleeding, shaking, as though wading against