The grass quit three days before the world did.First it thinned to brittle yellow stalks that snapped like glass under Ethan's boots. Then it was gone, and the ground turned to a hard gray crust veined with frost. On the morning of the nineteenth day since the ruin, Ethan crested a low ridge and saw the Northern Ice Expanse for the first time.It didn't look like a place. It looked like the end of a page. White ran flat to the horizon, so bright it hurt, and a wind came off it that Ethan felt in his molars."Well," Lyra said beside him, wrapped in so many furs she looked like a bundle someone had tied with rope. "That's going to be unpleasant."Selene stood a pace behind them, her black robes buried under a gray Bureau greatcoat, frost already rimming her hood. She drew a small silver instrument from her glove, read it, and put it away without expression."Fifty below," she said. "Cover your faces. Skin freezes in minutes at this temperature, and Aether circulation slows with it." He

The Elder crossed the ring of spears without hurry, leaning on the black bone staff, and the spearmen drew back from him like water from a hot stone.Ash didn't snarl. Ethan had expected him to. The wolf lay chained in the center of the hall with his indigo eyes fixed on the blind old face, and the bond between them went very quiet, the way a room does when someone enters whose name you've heard all your life. The Elder stopped an arm's length away. He lowered himself onto the ice with a long, creaking effort, set the staff across his knees, and held out one hand, palm up and trembling.Ash looked at the hand. Then he lowered his nose and pressed it into the Elder's palm.A sound went through the hall. It wasn't quite a gasp. It was a hundred people letting out a breath they'd held for most of their lives.The Elder said something in the old tongue, and his voice cracked in the middle of it. The scarred woman answered sharply, and he repeated himself, and she swallowed hard and turned