THE ASHEN HEIR AND THE HOLLOW CROWN

THE LONG WHITE MARCH

They left the Ashfront on the sixth morning, in a column of forty men and eleven masked riders, under a sky the colour of dirty wool.

The Deep Watch lay forty leagues north, beyond the last of the garrison towers, in a country no map had ever properly drawn. There was no road. There was only the glacier, an endless white sheet fractured by blue crevasses and wind-carved ridges. The sun never fully rose. The cold bit through leather and wool and flesh alike.

Kael walked near the middle of the column with his spear across his shoulders and his breath streaming in front of him. His ribs were healing faster than they should. Orin walked beside him, bundled in a grey healer’s cloak, a small pack of herbs on his back. The warden had signed the transfer papers with the face of a man signing his own death warrant, but he had signed them. A healer is a healer, Hask had said stiffly. Take him. You will need him more than we do.

It was the closest thing to a blessing that any of them were going to get.

“Do not look back,” Vell said quietly, falling into step. “It makes it harder.”

Kael looked back anyway.

The Ashfront was already a smear of black on the horizon, small and cruel, the Wall running across the world like a scar. For a moment, as the crimson light flickered on the battlements, it almost looked like something alive.

“Ten thousand soldiers have died on that wall,” Vell said. “And I have never once seen it look back.”

“Perhaps it does not need to,” said Kael.

On the third day, Garrick joined them.

He came trudging up from the rear of the column, arm still strapped to his chest, face grey and drawn. Two of the masked riders flanked him, and one of them gave him a casual shove that sent him stumbling into the snow.

“What is this?” Kael asked.

“A gift,” said the nearest rider, in a flat, cold voice. “The Inspector felt that a man who reports so diligently should be rewarded with a place on the journey.”

Garrick’s face went through three expressions in two seconds. Fury. Fear. Then a dull, hollow shock, as the truth of it settled.

Corvin used him, Kael thought. He took his information, and when he was finished, he threw him in the pile with the rest of us.

“Do not look at me like that,” Garrick snarled. “I do not need your pity, lordling.”

“I am not offering any,” said Kael.

“Good.”

He fell in at the back of the cohort, alone, and no one spoke to him for the rest of the day.

The attack came at dusk on the fifth day.

It was not the Gravemaw. It was something smaller and quicker, and it came from beneath.

The ice split without warning. Pale, thin shapes erupted from the cracks: a dozen of them, then twenty, then more. They were lean and tall, with elongated limbs and faces like peeled skulls, and they moved through the snow like a pack of starving wolves. Kael had seen the paler variety before, in the memories of the harvests. Hollows. Creatures so far gone that nothing human was left in them.

“Form up!” Vell barked. “Back to back! Do not break the line!”

The masked riders did not form up. They wheeled their horses and withdrew, watching, forming a neat, silent ring at the edge of the fight.

“They are not helping,” Dax gasped, driving his spear into a pale chest. “They are just watching!”

“I noticed!”

The snow ran red. A man screamed. Another fell. Kael moved through the chaos with his borrowed Spear Forms burning in his arms, cutting down one Hollow, then two, then a third. He felt Gravemaw’s Hunger work in him, each blow returning a little warmth, a little strength.

Then he heard Garrick shout.

He turned.

Garrick had gone down on one knee, his bad arm trapped beneath him. Three Hollows loomed over him with claws raised. His eyes were wide, white-ringed, and for the first time Kael saw something there that was not hatred. It was a plain, animal terror.

Let him die, a small, cold voice whispered in Kael’s mind. He informed on you. He brought Corvin down on all of you.

Kael ran.

He did not think about it. He crossed the distance in four strides, drove his spear through the nearest Hollow’s ribs, wrenched it free and spun into the second. Vell was suddenly beside him, her spear flashing. Between the two of them, the Hollows fell.

The last one slumped into the snow.

In the sudden silence, Garrick stared up at Kael, gasping.

“Why?” he rasped.

“Because you are in my cohort,” said Kael, and held out his hand.

Garrick looked at it for a long moment. Then, very slowly, he took it.

That night, huddled around a small fire of smoked peat, Kael found Orin staring out across the glacier with a strange expression.

“What is it?”

“Look north,” the old man said.

Kael looked.

At the very edge of the horizon, where the snow met the dark, a faint glow was rising. It was not the dull crimson of the Bleed. It was whiter, cleaner, a colour he had seen once before, in a memory of a city of white stone.

“That is where Aeron went,” Orin whispered. “The Threshold. The Deep Watch was built to guard it.”

“Guard it against what?”

“Against anyone who might want to go through.”

The ring on Kael’s finger pulsed, once, like a heartbeat.