The final was in three days.
Mav spent the first of them in the hall of records, in his corner on the stone bench, with Thalia’s paper open on his knee.
He had watched Isolde’s duels before, after the ice World. He had watched her first 11 seconds six times then, but he still hadn’t understood them. Now he had Thalia’s notes beside him, with her neat green writing and her drawings of wolves with arrows. He watched all of it again from the beginning.
This time, he understood what he was seeing, and it impressed him more than anything that he had seen in the Nexus.
In her first duel, a boy from Goldgate had sent a herd of rams across the sand. Isolde had pointed at the ground in front of them. A floor of clear ice had appeared under their hooves. The rams had slid into one another in a heap. Three wolves had come out of the snow behind her. Each of them had bitten once, and frost had spread across the rams’ bodies from every bite. That was Rime. The boy had yielded before the frost reached their hearts.
Eleven seconds.
Every duel after that was the same, only longer. Her opponents were good. Some of them were very good. But none of them ever reached her. Ice appeared where they wanted to run, and snow filled the air when they tried to see. Her wolves were always exactly where they needed to be, as if someone had drawn their paths on the sand before the duel began.
Mav watched Isolde herself most of all. She almost never moved. When she did, it was only one or two steps, but she was always out of the way before anything came near her. She never hurried. She never looked surprised.
Behind her, in every duel, 18 white wolves stood in a line and didn’t move at all.
He counted them in every recording. There were always 18. They stood at the edge of her snow like the posts of a fence, with their pale eyes on the fight. They never howled. They never stepped forward.
‘She’s keeping them for something,’ he thought. ‘Or for someone.’
—–
He was watching her semifinal against Stormfall for the third time when someone sat down at the other end of his bench.
He knew who it was before he turned his head, because nobody else in the Nexus sat down so quietly and so straight.
Isolde Frostmere had her hands folded in her lap. She wore the same plain gray-blue coat, with the small white tower on the chest. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the dark wall in front of them, where the Arbiter’s pictures moved.
She had paid her 10 Essence too. On the wall, beside her own duel, a second picture had opened. It showed Mav on the frozen mud of the semifinal, with the roots trapped in the ice around him and the cats coming through the broken wall.
They sat and watched each other’s duels without speaking.
“You’re looking for a weak point,” Isolde said at last. Her voice was as quiet and exact as he remembered.
“Yes.”
“So am I.”
Mav turned his head, but she still wasn’t looking at him.
“Have you found one?” he asked.
She thought about it honestly, the way that she seemed to think about everything. “No,” she said. “You have too many kinds of beasts, and you never use them the same way twice. It’s very messy.” She paused. “Have you?”
“No.”
“Good.” She stood up. “Then neither of us will be bored.”
She walked to the door. Before she reached it, she stopped. She turned around, and for the first time, she looked straight at him.
“At the lake, you froze every hole before it reached me,” she said. “My aunt says that I owe you nothing for it, because the lake wasn’t a duel. She’s right. But I remember it.” Her pale gray eyes didn’t move from his face. “I won’t hold back at the final because of it. I wanted you to know that.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“No. That’s why I’m telling you.”
Then she was gone. Mav was smiling, and he felt more eager for the final than he had felt for anything in weeks.
Mav looked at the empty doorway for some time. Her house had signed his father’s verdict. Her aunt sat in the court that had called Corwin Silkborn a traitor. He should have hated her, and after the ice World, he had tried. It had never worked. She was the only person in his year whom he wasn’t sure that he could beat, apart from Cassian who seems to be a total mystery, and he respected her more than almost anyone in it. That annoyed him.
—–
Tamsin had everything else by that evening.
She spread it across the table in the roof room, five pages of small, tight numbers. She was too excited to sit down.
“Isolde Frostmere,” she said. “First of our year since the day that we arrived. Her World reached rank E in two days. Cassian needed three, and everyone called him a genius.” She turned the page. “She has won every official duel that she has fought this year. Nobody has ever made her yield, and nobody has ever seen her talent.”
“Is her World rank D, like Mav’s?” Ronald asked.
“Yes. I checked the Ladder this morning. It reached rank D nine days after Mav’s, and Cassian’s reached it three days after hers.” Tamsin looked at Mav. “So you’re not alone up there anymore. On paper, the two of you are even. Same World rank, and her Manifestation is as large as your dome. Your body is…” She waved her hand at him, as if his body were a number that she didn’t like to say aloud. “Your body is a step above hers. On paper, you should still win.”
“Then why are the odds four to one for the Tower?” Brann asked.
“Because she has never lost,” Tamsin said. “And paper doesn’t fight.”
Nobody said anything after that.
Then Tamsin went through the other four. The Tower changed the order of its first three fighters in every match, she said, so there was no point in guessing at them. But two things never changed. The blizzard boy always went fourth, and Isolde always went last.
One girl had white foxes, more than 20 of them, small and very fast. A quiet boy had snow owls as big as eagles, which flew without a sound. Another girl had ice bears. There were only four, but each was as big as Birch, with fur so cold that it froze whatever bit it. The fourth fighter, a big, slow boy, had snow lynxes. His Manifestation was a blizzard.
“Nobody has ever seen inside it,” Tamsin said. “It fills his half of the sand with snow, so thick that even the glass eyes can’t see through it. His opponents send their beasts in, and the beasts don’t come out. Then his opponents yield.” She swallowed. “Four of them didn’t yield fast enough. He walked out of the snow and stood in front of them.”
Nell had been sitting in her corner by the window, as quiet as always. Now she spoke.
“I’d like the blizzard,” she said.
Everyone turned to look at her, but Nell didn’t look up from her hands.
“In a blizzard, nobody can see,” she said. “My bats don’t need to.”
Mav looked at her for a while. He thought about the Goldgate match and about the semifinal, where the crowd had called her a coward. She had yielded both times because he had asked her to. She had never once complained.
“Fourth, then,” he said.
Nell nodded once. It was the smallest nod that he had ever seen. But her hands had gone very still in her lap, and he thought that she was glad.
—–
Mav gave Quill his order that night. It was Ronald first, Tamsin second, Brann third, Nell fourth and himself last.
Quill nodded slowly as she read it. “And your water?” she asked.
He had expected that question. Her ice against his water. He had thought about almost nothing else all day.
“I’m bringing it,” he said. “Tamsin has checked every recording. Isolde has never frozen anything bigger than a bridge, and my dome is 150 meters across. If I leave my fish at home, I give up most of my army before the duel begins.”
Quill didn’t answer at once. Her burned face was hard to read in the light of the lamp.
“Recordings show what someone did,” she said at last. “They don’t show what someone can do.” Then she folded the paper into her coat. “But it’s your duel, Silkborn. Bring what you trust.”
—–
He spent the second day in his sea.
Moss was still in the dens, healing slowly. Birch’s wounds had closed. Oak could walk on his leg again, though he still limped a little. Ivy didn’t leave her pups for anything, and Mav didn’t ask her to. He went to each of the others in turn to decide who would come.
The needlefish and the spined fish would fill the dome, under Twelve and Eighteen, with Two over all of them. Seven would float at the top, with Pip and Puddle near the surface. Their eggs had hatched that week, but the young would stay in the dens. Six would stand beside him. Sela and three of her builders would wait at the edge of the water, ready to throw a rope. Birch, Oak and Elm, Log, Fern and Reed and the two hawks would stay at home until he called them.
On his way to the trench, he saw something new. A school of wild fish had started to live in the light of the city. They were small and blue, with bright spots along their sides, and they had come up from the new depths a week before, following the scraps from the larders. They weren’t his. He couldn’t feel them at all. But they had stayed, and the young needlefish had stopped chasing them. Sela said that it was a good sign. A World where wild things chose to live near you was a World that was growing. One of them, larger than the others, held still in the water and watched him go by. Mav thought that it was a clever one, and he was curious to see what it would become.
That night, he sat at the edge of the trench with Two.
“Is she strong?” Two asked.
‘Yes.’
“Stronger than the old man on the terrace?”
Mav thought about it. The Speaker had been rank C, with a staff of bone and a body that was a full letter above Mav’s. Isolde was rank D, like him. She was a first-year girl who never hurried.
‘She’s different,’ he said. ‘He wanted to win. She wants to win correctly.’
Two turned that over in the dark for some time. “I don’t understand,” he said.
‘Neither do I. That’s what makes it interesting.’
He took out Thalia’s paper one more time and read it in the faint green light of One, every line and every drawing, from the beginning to the end. Then he closed his eyes and went through the recordings again in his memory, the 11 seconds and the long duels and the 18 white wolves standing in their line. He thought about the third species that nobody had seen, too.
He was looking for the place where she would make a mistake. He looked until the light of the city dimmed for the night, and he grew more frustrated with every hour.
He couldn’t find a single weak point.