Chapter 2: Born of Ice
The train slid into Caarjys station under a sky the colour of old pewter. Frost filmed the platform, the benches, the signal box, and the breath of the porters hung in the air as they swung down with the post sacks. It was the second week of January. The station clock had frozen at nine minutes past seven, and the roses in the station-master's garden were black buds under a foot of snow.
Aliandra stepped off the train with her collar up and her boots crunching. Jenny came behind with both their bags, her glasses fogging. Neither of them spoke. The cold had a weight to it now, a presence, like something large breathing slow on the other side of a thin wall. Walking through it felt like pushing against a held tide. They struggled through the snow to the taxi rank, where a single ancient cab waited, and the driver had a scarf wound up to his eyes.
"Caarjys College," Aliandra said.
"You're certain?"
"Is there a problem with it?"
The driver hawked and spat into the snow. "Two students froze between the gates and the Great Hall last Tuesday. Just stopped walking. Guard found them standing there, blue as the sky." He put the cab in gear. "But you're already here, so in you get."
The high street was quiet. Shops that should have had festive displays in the windows showed grey cardboard and frost blooms instead. A woman with a pushchair was scraping ice from a windscreen, and her child wore a balaclava that left only its eyes showing. Jenny watched it all through the window and said nothing, and Aliandra took her hand and held it all the way up the hill.
The cab left them at the main gate. The gothic spires of Caarjys rose above the campus like something out of a cautionary tale, their stone encased in thick, unyielding layers of frost. Icicles hung from the gargoyle mouths and the fluting of every column. The air was deathly still. Not a flag moved. Not a bird sang. The whole college stood like a drawing that no one had finished colouring.
A servant with a lantern met them on the gravel and led them through the porter's lodge, past a brass stove that burned but seemed to give no heat, and into the covered cloister. Their rooms, when they reached them, were already aired and dusted. A fire had been laid in the grate. On the little desk beside the window sat the familiar square of heavy cream paper, summoning them both to the headmaster's study at the first bell of term.
"Not even a day," Jenny said. She hadn't taken off her scarf. "We haven't even unpacked."
"Then we go as we are." Aliandra took the letter through the straps of her own bag. "Come on. They've been waiting for us all week."
The headmaster's study smelled of wax and old paper and the faint mineral bite of window cleaner. Professor Roebull's fire was burning high and strong. The flames were the careful orange of a hearth, but they reached toward the window, drawn by the cold leaking in through the panes. Aliandra stood beside Jenny on the rug and forced herself not to shiver.
Roebull was behind the desk, a burgundy waistcoat under his brown suit, his chestnut beard trimmed short. Professor Eleanor Groats had taken the winged chair by the fire, long silver hair over silver robes, a bowl of smoke on the little table beside her that gave off the smell of rosemary and scorched tin. And by the tall window stood Don Dyer, arms folded. He was in his shirtsleeves despite the cold, and the muscles of his forearms stood out against the dark of his skin. He met Aliandra's eyes first and gave her a single slow nod.
"Miss Crowsummons. Miss Ingles." Roebull set down his pen. "Be seated. You'll be wanting tea, and I'll have Margaret bring it up."
"Professor," Jenny said, "we should explain everything. There's a lot to tell."
"There's nothing to tell that hasn't already been told." Groats raised her head, and her eyes had that way of hers, like she was looking three doors down the corridor. "Your crow arrived on the second morning of the Christmas break. I read your letter before breakfast, and I have not put it down since. Come here, girls."
Aliandra stayed on her feet and moved to the fire, to a position with a view of all three of them, because she was done being read to. "So you believe us."
Dyer's low baritone crossed the room. "The divinations say you've told the truth as you understand it, and the winter remains the coldest on record. The frozen fields are not a misunderstanding." He unclasped his arms. "There are wards going up across the college tonight. The full set. Professor Nightingale put names to them three hundred years ago, and they've never been beaten."
"For now," Groats said, "the enemy is moving. Around us, along the margins. The cold is testing the edges of its cage."
"Then why are we sitting with tea and small talk?" Aliandra's voice came out higher than she'd like. "If the enemy is here, why are we not fighting?"
"Because you're sitting in my office, Miss Crowsummons, and not yet on a battlefield." Roebull's hands were flat on the desk. "The Jarl and his host have made no move on mortal ground yet. The seasons may be failing, but that failure is slow and we intend to keep it slow. We will have to see what befalls when spring comes; it is yet but January. The full might of the college stands ready. Alumni from three centuries are under summons, and Professor Dyer has raised a circle in the Great Hall that would hold even a Jarl of Niflheim for a day and a night. Now we must be patient. We are prepared, but we have nothing to act against until and unless the enemy moves."
Aliandra's eyes burned, and she said nothing. Jenny's hand touched her sleeve. The tea came, and they served themselves in silence.
"Then what are we supposed to do?" Jenny asked it, and her voice was small and steady, and it cut through the mutter of the fire. "Sit in the library and wait for the world to end between revision sessions?"
Roebull looked at her. His voice changed; it was softer. "No, Miss Ingles, you're to sit in the exam hall. Next week's mocks are your last before the finals. Every sorcerer and witch in Caarjys is on call, and I am not going to send my best students into a war before they have done the one thing that will count most over the long winter: proving themselves ready." He folded his hands. "The faculty handles the wards. The faculty handles the watching. The students handle their education."
"That's a leadership decision, not a war strategy," Aliandra muttered.
"It's both," said Dyer. She looked at him, and he looked back with nothing but patience. "You're the one who's known war, Aliandra. You know the difference between a soldier and a general. The general stays back with the map."
"I'm not a general. I'm a witch who's been watched by frost giants since Christmas Eve."
"And you'll be watched all the more carefully in front of an examination board." Roebull's sternness was back. "These mocks are your passport into the highest tier of sorcery in mortal lands. If either of you squanders that because you'd rather throw stones at a giant, I'll have you both mopping the library floors until the thaw. Understood?"
Jenny said, under her breath, "Yes, Professor." Roebull's answer was a single beat of silence, and then he nodded, and the fire finally caught and held.
"Now," he said, "drink your tea, take the rest of the day to settle in, and be in the Great Hall by eight bells for the warding ceremony. You'll find seats with the other third years at the back."
They reach the door, and Groats' voice stopped them. "Miss Ingles. A moment."
Jenny stopped, sheepish, and Aliandra held the doorjamb. Groats rose without hurry and crossed the carpet, and her eyes were that pale, dark colour that sees through things. She placed one hand on Jenny's cheek. "You wrote the letter. It was good. It was careful, and it left nothing out. That's a skill, girl, and it's rarer than any magic I could teach you. You'll keep writing letters, for hundreds of years yet." She looked over Jenny's shoulder at Aliandra. "Both of you hold on to each other. Winter is a liar. It tells you that alone is safe. It isn't."
She returned to her chair. The door closed. The corridor was cold and still, and Jenny stood with her hand over her cheek where Groats touched her.
"Eight bells," Jenny said finally.
"You heard the head man. Back of the hall, by the wall."
They walked together down the long corridor toward the sound of other students moving, and the ice thickened on the stones outside the windows.
The warding ceremony that night was a muted thing, a hundred students packed into the Great Hall while Professor Nightingale's wards rose from the flagstones like a curtain of heat. Aliandra watched the frozen light crawl up the columns and felt the Serpent in her belly turn once, uneasy. The cold pressed at the glass all night, and the ice thickened on the mullions by the time they walked back to their rooms.
The week that followed was an exercise in pretending. She and Jenny revised in the library between wards, their breath steaming in the cold that leaked through the stacks. The Great Hall rang with the taking of oaths and the banding of staff. And then the mocks came, and the college shut itself up around its examinations like a man holding his coat closed against a storm.
The potions practical fell on the Thursday. The examination hall was a converted cellar beneath the east range, warm enough to mist the windows, and the benches were set up in long rows under the yellow light of witchlights. Professor Groats proctored. She moved among the students in her silver robes, hands clasped, saying almost nothing.
The task was a liver tonic, standard third-year fare, and Jenny completed hers with twenty minutes to spare. Aliandra finished hers early too. But she had brought a second set of ingredients in her satchel, and her fingers itched while she watched the sand run out of the hourglass.
"Well," said Groats, when the last student had corked their phial, "you have all passed, or nearly. But Miss Crowsummons appears to have brewed something else entirely. Share with the class."
Aliandra flushed. She had not been subtle. The phial stood on the bench before her, a dark amber liquid that swirled of its own accord, glowing faintly from within. She had distracted herself with it during the long nights, working without a recipe, following the Serpent's nudge.
"It's an elixir," she said. "It gives the drinker spontaneous multiple orgasms."
A ripple went through the classroom. Jenny's head snapped up from her bench. Groats raised one silver eyebrow and drifted closer, and her pale eyes took in the phial with a kind of quiet professional interest.
"Spontaneous," she repeated.
"Within minutes. Repeatedly. Continuously. I haven't measured the upper limit. I ran out of one batch before I could." Aliandra glanced at Jenny. "The effects last about a quarter of an hour per dose."
The queue formed before she had finished the sentence.
It was, by college standards, a remarkably orderly queue. The second years had finished their own examination and were streaming through, and they saw the congregation at Aliandra's bench and joined without asking questions. Alexis Farnaby was first. She downed the phial's rim with the two fingers' worth of amber liquid in it, and the effect came on her as she handed the vial back.
Her hips bucked. She caught herself on the bench edge as a low whimper escaped her. Her thighs pressed together and she made a small, repeated careful noise as she came, once, twice, then a third time, her face gone pink and her eyes squeezed shut. The class watched, rapt.
"Oh, heavens," she whispered, and came again.
The queue surged. Trevor Marsh knocked the phial from Aliandra's fingers in his haste to catch it, and the amber liquid sloshed at the rim, leaving sticky trails on his knuckles. He licked them and went rigid, fingers curling white around the glass, and a strangled sound came out of him as he came in his trousers. When he laid the phial down his hands were shaking and his ears were crimson.
Aliandra lost count after the first dozen. The queue kept rearranging itself, students leaving in a state of flustered bliss and new ones arriving from the corridor, drawn by the sounds. The phial had to be refilled twice. She worked the bench with the efficiency of a barmaid at closing time, measuring, pouring, handing it over, watching the immediate and enthusiastically repeated results.
Jenny took her turn with a shaking laugh and a look at Aliandra that said we are going to talk about this later. The elixir hit her like a warm tide. Her face went slack and then bright, and she pressed her fist to her mouth and came three times with her eyes closed, standing up, her knees wobbling. When she opened them they were wet.
"There you are," Aliandra murmured, and refilled the phial.
The queue had settled into a rhythm. A second-year boy with freckles and a stammer drank and came twice with a look of profound astonishment. A first-year girl with braids down her back went rigid and then folded over the bench, breathing hard, and came a fourth time while her friend helped her to the wall. The air in the cellar had gone warm and close, smelling of sweat and the crisp herbal bite of the elixir.
And then Groats reached the front of the line.
The classroom went quiet. The witchlights guttered. Groats looked down at the phial in Aliandra's hand, and her lips moved once, tasting the curl of the smell, and she took it with both hands like a chalice.
"My thanks, Miss Crowsummons," she said. "I have not tested a new intoxicant in a decade."
She drank. The phial was two-thirds full. She swallowed twice, and lowered it, and stood very still.
The first one came as a blink, a flex of her silver robes. The second was deeper; her chin lifted, her throat working. The third took her by surprise, and a small gasp escaped her. Her hand went to the bench edge and gripped. She breathed through her teeth, eyelids fluttering, and her body seized in a series of small, sharp, exquisite rhythms that she made no attempt to hide, her hips pressing forward against the wood each time.
"Extraordinary," she said, her voice thick. "You've balanced the aconite beautifully against the honeycomb. Whoever taught you your bases should take a bow."
She came again mid-sentence, and the sentence broke in half, and she shut her eyes and let it roll through her with a long, slow, audible exhale.
The queue behind her had gone deathly silent.
Groats opened her eyes. She was flushed to the collar of her robes. She set the empty phial down with exactness and folded her hands inside her sleeves, and her smile was half a teacher's and half something else entirely.
"Ten points to Miss Crowsummons," she said. "Now. On my signal, you are all dismissed. Your practical marks are recorded. Use the stairs slowly."
She came twice more on the way to the door, and did not say another word.
The corridor outside the cellar was a fog of body heat and laughter. Jenny took Aliandra's arm and steered her up the stairs, her face still pink from the elixir, her lips curved in a slow, wondering smile.
"You've created a monster," Jenny said.
"I've created a party trick. They'll remember it come finals."
"They'll remember you for the rest of their lives, Aliandra. That's not the same thing."
The cold hit them at the top of the stairs, and both of them pulled their coats tighter. The window at the end of the corridor was white with frost, the stone around it furred with crystals that glittered even in the dim light. Jenny looked at it and her smile faded to something quieter.
"The mocks continue next week," she said. "Transformations."
"I know."
"I have an idea for mine."
Aliandra looked at her. Jenny's face had that particular expression, the one that meant she had been thinking too long and too hard about something and had decided to do it anyway. Aliandra knew that expression.
"What kind of idea?"
"You'll see," Jenny said, and would not say another word about it.
The Transformations practical was held in the Great Hall, because Professor Roebull liked an audience. The hall's long tables had been pushed back against the walls, leaving a clear, polished stretch of oak before the high table, and every student in the third year sat in the alcoves and window seats, wrapped in blankets against the cold that leaked through the old stone. Braziers had been set at the four corners of the demonstration space, burning a pale, heatless flame that Roebull insisted was traditional and everyone else suspected was for show.
The task was a simple one. Transform a portion of the self while retaining control of the whole. Third-year standard, but the mocks demanded something beyond standard. Students had shrunk their own hands to doll's proportions, grown fur patches on their forearms, turned their hair the colour of oil slicks. Trevor Marsh had attempted to turn his own arse into a walnut and had been sent to the infirmary with a chair.
Jenny went last.
She walked to the centre of the floor with her hands clasped in front of her, her knitting-pattern jumper a defiant patch of colour against the grey stone. She was pale, but her chin was up, and she had a roll of parchment in her fist that she had been clutching since breakfast.
"Professor," she said, her voice carrying clearly to the high table where Roebull sat with his marking ledger, "I'd like to demonstrate a charm of my own devising. It's not in the curriculum."
Roebull's eyebrows went up. "A personal composition, Miss Ingles?"
"Yes, Professor."
"Show me."
Jenny turned to face the hall. She pulled the jumper up over her head and let it fall to the floor, then unbuttoned her jeans and stepped out of them, folding them carefully and placing them beside the jumper. She stood in her knickers and white cotton bra, barefoot on the cold oak, and the hall's murmuring died to nothing.
She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of the knickers and drew them down.
The hall watched her kick them aside, then watched her fingers find herself between her legs. There was nothing coy in the gesture. She spread herself with two fingers, showing the neat triangle of strawberry-blonde hair and the pale, wet lips beneath, and then she spoke the charm.
The words were soft. She almost murmured them. But the air in the hall thickened, and the braziers flared, and every eye in the room went to Jenny's cunt.
The transformation was delicate. A tight bud of pink flesh unfurled from her clitoris, each petal curling outward in sequence, velvet and exact, until a rose the size of a plum blossom crowned the soft mound of her sex. Its petals were translucent at the edges, catching the brazier light, and as Jenny spread herself wider the flower opened further, a full, deep bloom that glistened with her own wetness.
"Oh," someone breathed. "Oh, bloody hell."
Jenny's face was bright red, but her hands were steady, opening herself for inspection, rolling the flower this way and that so that the whole hall could see it. The petals moved as she moved, and each movement drew a visible shiver through her thighs.
"It's a transformation of the clitoris," she said, her voice level despite the flush creeping up her neck. "The petals each carry nerve endings in dense concentration. As well as being pretty, it increases sensation considerably. The orgone acceleration is a side effect; the flower's structure channels sexual energy more efficiently than the original tissue, which makes it particularly useful in sex magic rituals. I've used it in conjunction with the orgy spell work we learnt in the autumn term, and the energy yield is roughly triple."
A pause. Roebull had set down his pen. His face was unreadable.
"Triple," he repeated.
"Yes, Professor. The bloom lasts for as long as I maintain it, and reabsorption is gentle. Would you like me to demonstrate the reabsorption, or the orgone potential?"
"Demonstrate the potential."
Jenny's hand moved. She touched a single petal and her entire body jerked, her hips bucking forward. She caught herself, biting her lip, and her fingers moved again, stroking the outer petals in a slow circle. Her mouth opened. A small, sharp sound escaped her.
"Full demonstration," Roebull said. "No restraint."
For a moment Jenny's eyes found Aliandra's across the hall, and there was a flicker in them, a question that was also a dare. Then she nodded, and her fingers worked faster, and the flower trembled and shed a fine mist that sparkled in the brazier light.
She came with a cry that bounced off the rafters. Her back arched, her whole body going rigid and then slack, and the orgone pulse rolled through the hall in a visible wave, shimmering the air like heat haze. The braziers guttered. The frost on the windows cracked.
She came again, and again, each release triggering the next, her body moving in a ripple of pleasure that she made no attempt to control. The final one took her to her knees, shaking, her hand still pressed between her legs, and when she looked up at Roebull her face was wet with tears and her smile was pure triumph.
Roebull wrote in his ledger. The scratch of the pen was the only sound in the hall.
"Maximum marks, Miss Ingles," he said. "A well-argued thesis, a clean transformation, and an admirable demonstration of control under duress. The senior board will hear of this." He looked up. "Now kindly reabsorb the rose before the first years faint."
The divination mock was held in the round tower room on the following Monday, a high circular chamber with a single window that looked out over the frozen lawns. Snow had packed against the glass in a dull white crust, and the faint grey light that filtered through it gave the room the quality of being underwater. The students sat in a loose semicircle on cushioned stools, each with their instruments laid out before them. Trevor Marsh had his chicken bones in a leather bag. Elina had a scrying bowl. Jenny had a bundle of dried yarrow and a cup of cold water.
Aliandra had her Oracle of Desire cards.
The deck was worn soft at the edges, the silver foil on the backs flaking away in places where her grandmother's thumbs had held it over sixty years of readings. She shuffled slowly, letting the cards find their own order, and the familiar warmth of them seeped into her palms. The Serpent in her belly stirred, unsettled, and she pressed her thumb into the deck and breathed.
Professor Groats sat on the window seat with her hands folded, watching. The pale light caught her long silver hair and made it gleam like frost on a branch.
The first readings went quickly. Elina drew The Moon and spoke a rambling interpretation about tides and hidden truths that Groats accepted with a single nod. Trevor's bones scattered into an unmistakable wheel shape, which he read as a journey with no end, and Groats allowed it. Jenny drank her water, read the pattern of the leaves, and reported a coming change, a door opening in a wall of ice. Groats pursed her lips and made a note.
Then it was Aliandra's turn.
She cut the deck three times, laid out a five-card spread face-down on the slate tray, and turned the first card.
The Tower. The image showed a red spire struck by red lightning, its stones tumbling into darkness. She read it aloud without inflection. "A structure undermined. A collapse that clears ground."
The second card was The Dancer of Joy. It showed a woman with wild hair, her body arched in a spiral of celebration, flames curling around her bare heels. The print was old, the colours faded to soft coral and ochre, and the woman's face was upturned with an expression of pure, unguarded delight.
"The Dancer of Joy," Aliandra read. "She dances at the thaw."
The third card she turned was The Silent Watcher. A man in a long black coat stood in a field of snow, one finger pressed to his lips. In his other hand he held a branch with three leaves, and his eyes were dark hollows that seemed to look out from the card at her directly.
Aliandra stopped. A cold prickle ran down her spine and settled in her tailbone.
"The Silent Watcher," she read, and her voice was quieter now. "He keeps the secret. He holds the door."
The fourth and fifth cards she turned were crowns and vessels, but she barely registered them. Groats had risen from the window seat and was crossing the floor slowly, her silver robes whispering on the stone, and when she reached the tray she stood over it for a long time, studying the two central cards.
"The Dancer of Joy and the Silent Watcher," Groats said. Her voice was low, thoughtful. "They stand across from one another in the spread. They reinforce each other. Hand in hand, they make up a single figure, a pair that has walked the world together for a thousand years. The teacher and the sentinel. The one who opens the way and the one who guards it."
The room was silent. Jenny had set down her yarrow and was watching with her eyebrows drawn together.
"These two cards have appeared together in only three readings I have ever witnessed," Groats went on. "Each time they appeared in the spread of a person who was destined to become a great teacher of magical folk. Not merely a competent one, Miss Crowsummons. A great one. One who will open a new era for us all." She looked up, and her pale eyes were unauddenly unmistakable. "This is such a reading. The evidence of the cards is plain, and you cannot now deny what you have seen with your own eyes."
Aliandra stared at the table. The Dancer's flame-warmed face seemed to move in the faint light. The Watcher's finger pressed, still, at his lips.
"I don't feel like a great teacher," she said. "I feel like a student who's barely holding on."
"That is precisely how it begins." Groats returned to her seat. "Every great teacher I have known stood exactly where you are standing, sure of nothing but the weight of their own inadequacy. It is the people who are certain they know everything who never teach anyone anything."
Aliandra looked at the cards again. The Dancer. The Watcher. The Tower, lying collapsed at the beginning of the spread, its stones tumbling into darkness. Her throat tightened.
"These cards only come true if I survive the winter," she said. "If the frost isn't broken, nothing else happens. The teacher in these cards, she might exist, but she exists in a future where the Tower still stands. And the Tower is falling."
Groats studied her. The wind outside pressed a thin, reedy sound through the window frame.
"Then you know what must come first," she said.
"Yes." Aliandra gathered the cards slowly, pressing each one flat before layering the next on top. The warmth of them had gone faint, like embers under ash. "I suppose I do."
The mock was dismissed. The students filed out in a murmur of talk, Elina already complaining about the cold of the tower stairs. Jenny waited by the door with her bundle of yarrow tucked under her arm, and when Aliandra reached her she did not ask what the reading had said. She simply reached out and took her hand, and they walked down the spiral stairs together into the frozen grey of the college corridors, and neither of them spoke until they reached the warmth of their own room, where the fire had burned low and the window was furred with a fresh coat of ice.
Aliandra stood with her back to the flames and looked at the deck in her hands.
"Great teacher," she said quietly. "I don't know how to be that. I barely know how to be this."
The Serpent in her belly turned once, warm and steady. The cards lay still in her palm. Through the ice on the window, the white fields beyond the college walls stretched to the horizon, and somewhere out in that cold, the Jarl's host was moving.
Somewhere beyond the warded windows of Caarjys, beyond the frozen fields and the blackened woods, the world ended in a wall of shimmering air.
The borderland lay between, a plain of crushed ice that belonged to neither realm. The sky above it was the colour of a bruise, hung with faint curtains of green light that rippled without sound. No wind moved. No snow fell. The cold there was not weather; it was a thing with weight and patience, older than the bones beneath the earth.
The army had stood on that plain for three days.
They filled it from one horizon to the other, rank upon rank of them, giants in leather kilts and rusted chain mail, their whitish-grey skin mottled like the belly of a fish. Their eyes were chips of blue frost, flat and bright, and their breath plumed in perfect unison, a hundred pillars of white that rose and dispersed and rose again. Swords hung at their hips, flails over their shoulders, axes nested in their fists like kindling. They did not stamp their feet or shift their weight. They had been waiting a long time.
At the head of the host, alone on a raised shelf of ice, stood Jarl Orm Iceborn.
He was near three times the height of a man, and his shadow lay long and blue across the plain. His beard was hoar frost turned to wire, plaited with strips of leather and the finger bones of enemies. His eyes, pale as winter sky, were fixed on the shimmering barrier that divided his realm from the one beyond. It hung in the air like a curtain of heat inverted, a faint distortion through which the shape of a mortal pine forest could be seen, dusted with snow, ordinary and unbearably warm.
The scouts came through the barrier at dusk.
They emerged in a fold of shimmering air, two giants shorter than the Jarl but broader, their leathers crusted with rime. Between them they dragged a man. He was thin, dark-haired, dressed in a padded coat that had been fine once. His boots had left parallel furrows in the ice, and his wrists were bound behind his back with a length of braided leather. He was struggling. He had been struggling for some time, and his face was raw with cold and fear.
The scouts hauled him to the shelf of ice and dropped him at Orm's feet. He scrambled onto his knees, breathing hard, staring up at the Jarl with the particular wildness of an animal that knows the trap has closed.
"My Jarl," said the first scout, and his voice was the sound of ice cracking on a lake. "The winter does not recede."
The second scout spat into the snow. "It deepens. Every dawn brings a harder frost. The rivers of the south have locked to their beds. Their fires weaken."
Orm did not look away from the barrier. "And the barrier?"
"It shivers. It hungers." The first scout inclined his head toward the man. "Their world is thin now. We walked through it like walking through mist. They have forgotten us."
The prisoner made a sound, something between a sob and a curse. Orm looked down at him at last, and the man's voice broke out of him, high and desperate.
"Please. I have a wife. I have children. I was only cutting wood, I was only—"
"Silence."
Orm's voice rolled across the plain like a glacier shifting. The man's mouth closed. His shoulders shook.
The Jarl stepped down from the shelf of ice and came to stand over him. The frost sighed under his weight. He drew the great axe from the loop at his back, and its blade was the colour of the sky before a blizzard, etched along its length with runes older than speech.
"The advance into Midgard," Orm said, and his voice carried to the last rank of his host, "may begin."
A sound went through the army. Not a cheer. It was deeper than that, a single vast exhale of held breath, and the scrape of a thousand hands tightening on a thousand weapons.
"But first," the Jarl said, "the sacrifice."
The man screamed. Two giants took him by the arms and hauled him upright, and his boots kicked and slipped on the ice, and his scream went on and on, cracking in the middle, until the cold took it.
Orm raised the axe. He did not hurry. The blade caught the green light of the sky and held it, and in the pause before the blow the whole borderland was silent.
The axe came down.
The sound was not loud. It was a single clean note, like a stone striking ice, and the man's head left his shoulders and rolled across the frozen plain, coming to rest at the feet of the first rank. His body stood upright for a long moment, blood steaming in the cold, before it folded and fell. The giants kicked the corpse aside.
Orm wiped the blade on his forearm and turned to face the shimmering barrier. The green light in the sky had guttered. The barrier itself had thinned, its faint distortion gone almost transparent, and through it the mortal forest showed clear, every branch, every furrow, every silence of snow.
"Forward," said Orm.
And the army began to move. A thousand feet, two thousand, ten thousand, falling into step as one, a slow and patient thunder that shook the frost from the plain. Orm walked at their head with the axe over his shoulder, and his pale eyes never left the world beyond the wall.
He stepped through first.
March ended the way it had begun, in a white silence that refused to break. The calendar on the wall of their rooms said the twenty-eighth. The window said winter, and winter was not listening.
The mocks were done. Roebull had sent the results by hand, a folded sheet of cream paper for each of them, and Aliandra had read hers standing in the corridor with the cold seeping through her boots. Exemplary. Both of them. Top of the year, her and Jenny, with the higher marks going to the girl who had grown a rose from her own cunt for an examination. The college had talked of little else for a fortnight.
She held Jenny's hand as they walked the grounds. The paths had been cleared again that morning, and the gravel crunched under their boots like broken teeth. The bare trees stood in black lines against the grey sky, their branches furred with rime. The lawns, what could be seen of them, lay under a crust of ice that had not lifted in a hundred days.
"Spring," Jenny said. The word sat in the air and did nothing.
"I know."
"The crocuses were supposed to come up in March. My mother's garden, they always did. By the last week you couldn't see the soil for them." Jenny's voice was quiet, carefully even. "She wrote to me. She said there's no sign of them. Just frost."
Aliandra squeezed her hand. The Serpent in her belly lay coiled and still, watching the ground as if it could hear something moving beneath.
They walked to the edge of the grounds, past the old dovecote, past the frozen fountain with its bowl of solid ice. The woods began there, a stand of pines and bare oaks that sloped down toward the river. The snow between the trunks was untouched, waist-deep in places, glittering faintly in the flat light.
"That's it, then," Jenny said. "Term's over in three weeks. After that, the world goes back to the way it was, or it doesn't."
"The way it was isn't coming back." Aliandra said it flatly, the way she had been thinking it for weeks. "The towers are still standing, but the Tower fell a long time ago. We just haven't stopped falling yet."
Jenny pulled her to a stop at the treeline. She turned to face her properly, green eyes behind her round glasses, cheeks pink with cold. "We have to do something. Not Roebull's wards, not Groats' messages. Us. Before it's too late."
"You're right."
The voice came from the trees, twenty paces ahead of them.
Mr Cucumber stepped out from between the trunks. He looked worse than he had at Christmas. His snow had greyed, and his coal eyes had sunk deeper into his face, and his carrot nose had cracked halfway down, a fissure running the length of it. But he stood upright, and his stick arms were steady, and a thong of leather was bound around his chest like a strap.
Behind him, in the shadow of the pines, she caught the shapes of the three others. They stood in a row, patient, their coal eyes fixed on the two women.
Mr Cucumber walked toward them, his steps crunching in the snow, until he stood close enough that the cold of him reached them like an open grave.
"It has begun," he said.
Three words. No more.
Aliandra heard the wind move through the pines, and the silence after it was larger than the college, larger than the woods, larger than the whole frozen world.
"How long do we have?" she asked.
Mr Cucumber's coal eyes held hers. Snow began to fall again, fine and dry, settling on his shoulders.
"The seasons do not turn here anymore, Aliandra. The Jarl is coming. He will reach the mountain passes before the week is out." He looked past her, toward the college's spires, where the wards glittered faintly and invisibly in the cold air. "Your masters think they have time. They have until the thaw that will not come, and then they have the Jarl's axe."