The room was too small.It was a stupid thought. The chamber was round and high and wide. But it was pressing on him from all sides, the walls leaning in, the air thick as wool, and no matter how hard he pulled at it, none of it went anywhere useful."Breathe," said Lyra."I'm *trying.*""Not like that. You're gulping." Her hands were on his shoulders, small and cold and unbelievably steady. "In through the nose. Slowly. Count four.""I can't...""Count."He counted. His chest hitched and caught. He got to two and lost it, and she said, very calmly, "Again," and he started over.**[Heart rate one hundred and sixty-two,]** the System said, low and level, from somewhere beneath the roaring. **[This is a panic response. It is not dangerous. It will pass. Follow her instruction. Four in. Hold. Six out.]**He did. His lungs shuddered, and filled, an inch at a time. The walls stopped leaning. Lyra's hands moved a little on his shoulders, a small steady pressure, the way you'd steady a frigh

"*I want to say goodbye.*"The carved eye on the disc was open and bright and gold. The face around it hadn't changed. But Noah felt, with a pain so sharp it was almost a relief, that the whole room was holding still for her."*I'm not good at it,*" Amara said. "*I never have been. I once stood at a gate for an hour with a friend who was leaving for the coast, and she had to go and fetch her own coat in the end.*" A small, wet laugh. "*So I'll be quick. I'll say what matters and then I'll stop.*"A breath."*I love you.*"It was so simple. Two words, said in a low steady voice, with no ornament at all. He had heard people say it a thousand times, in half-heard songs and the loose careless talk of strangers. He had never once heard it said to him."*I loved you before you were anything else,*" she said. "*Before you were an heir, or a hope, or a problem. You were a small cross person with a fist, and I loved you the moment you were put in my arms, and nothing that comes afterward chang

They didn't need ten seconds. They needed three."A drainage tunnel," Noah whispered, hauling the ivy aside. "Old. Looked like part of the outer works. It ran under the gallery. We followed it up.""We found no doors, no chambers, nothing but wet stone and a very long walk." Lyra's voice was cold and precise, the voice of someone reciting a lesson. "I'd fainted. You carried me.""I carried you.""Don't enjoy it.""I'm not.""Good."The ivy tore. Cold air hit his face, and through the gap a night full of light came pouring in.He hadn't expected so many lights. They lay scattered across the hillside below like spilt coins. Work lamps on poles. Hand torches swinging. The long white beam of a vehicle's headlights cutting through the pines, and under it a throng of shapes, moving, shouting, running. He was standing at the mouth of a rough fissure in a steep wooded slope, high above the ruin's outer wall."*Gray!*"The voice came from below. Close. Not Vess this time, higher, cracking. Kad

Lyra Frost had been taught three lessons about the Lycans before she was nine years old, and she could still recite them in her sleep.She'd said them again in the infirmary. Lying awake at three in the morning with her side aching and the ward lamp burning low, she had found herself reciting them silently to the ceiling.*One. The Lycan court fell because it had grown proud.**Two. The Houses rose to restore the peace.**Three. It was a hard thing, and a necessary one, and we do not speak of it.*She'd been very good at them. Her father, who was not a man to show it, had once, after she recited the third without a stumble at a family dinner, put a hand briefly on her head. She remembered the weight of it. She remembered thinking, with a small bright flush of pleasure, *I have been good.**We do not speak of it.*It had never occurred to her to ask who the *we* was, or what, exactly, was so hard.---She was discharged on the fourth day, and went back to lessons on the fifth.It was G

Corvin was waiting in the old west cloister, where the arches threw long blue shadows across the flagstones and the last light of the afternoon came down slantwise through the plane trees.Noah saw him from the far end of the walk. He was sitting on a low stone bench between two pillars with his coat buttoned to the throat and his hands folded on his knees, and he looked, for once, like what he was: an old man who'd been sitting a long time and wasn't in any hurry to get up. He didn't call out. He didn't signal. But as Noah came under the first arch, his grey head turned, as though he had known to the minute when the boy would come."Mr. Gray.""Elder.""Sit, if you like."Noah sat. The bench was cold through his trousers. For a while neither of them spoke. A dry leaf came spinning down from the trees and landed on the flagstones between his boots, and Noah watched it, and tried very hard to feel nothing.He'd been dreading this.Not because he thought Corvin would be angry. He'd have