For two days after that evening, Mav said almost nothing to anyone.
He wasn’t sad. He didn’t have a word for what he was. For eight years, he had hated the houses that killed his father, and he had never been allowed to defend him. Now he knew that he had been right to hate them, but it didn’t make him feel lighter. It made the hate heavier.
He told Ronald and Tamsin on the third day, because they were going to notice anyway.
Ronald hugged him without asking, which hurt his ribs. At first, Tamsin didn’t say anything.
"Then somebody has that proof," she said at last. "He said that he could prove it. A man like that doesn’t keep only one copy."
Mav hadn’t thought of that. He looked at her with new respect.
"We can’t look for it yet," she went on quickly. "You’re ranked 96th, and three houses are watching you. If you start asking about your father, they’ll know why. First, you have to be strong enough that asking is safe."
"So what do we do?"
She turned her slate around. She had already written it down.
[Ice. Rank D. Potential C. Three weeks left. 300 Essence a day.]
"The marsh is almost empty of mire jaws. You said yourself that Ashgrove knows we hunt there. This one is cheap, because it’s about to break. So it’s crowded. More than 200 people go in every morning." She looked up. "Nobody can wait for us quietly in a crowd."
"What’s on it?" Ronald asked.
"Snow stags, ice beetles and white bears. The bears are rank D."
Mav thought of his land fighters. He had Six, Log, three stalkers and three wolves, but against a second-year, that wasn’t enough. Log was the strongest of them, and he was slow in the cold. Mav needed something big that could fight anywhere.
He had been preparing for it. For two weeks, Seven had stunned fish and lobsters for his six free seaweeds, and two of them had reached rank E-. They were in his canteens.
"We go tomorrow," he said.
-----
The arch opened onto a white plain, and the cold hit him at once.
Mav had lived for three months at the bottom of a sea, so he had thought that he knew what cold was. He had been wrong. The wind came across the ice with nothing to stop it. It went through his jacket as if he were wearing paper. Blue cliffs of ice stood all around the plain, under a small pale sun.
"I can’t feel my nose," Ronald said. He sounded interested, as if it had happened to someone else.
The landing place was a wide shelf of ice at the edge of a frozen lake. It was full of people. Tamsin had been right. Students in the coats of every school on the Row were pushing past each other, and whole parties were already running toward the cliffs. Mav saw Evergrove’s dark green, Emberhall’s red, and a group of six in ash-colored cloaks who didn’t look at anyone.
He noticed the cloaks and felt uneasy, so he borrowed Ivy’s nose. But 200 people had crossed this shelf since dawn, and their trails lay on the ice like a tangled net. He couldn’t read anything in it.
’A crowd hides us, but it hides everyone else too.’
But he had faced worse than six cloaks, they had paid 900 Essence to be here, and the bears wouldn’t wait.
They crossed the lake on foot and went up into the cliffs. Tamsin’s sheet said that the caves there went deep, and that the best prey lived at the bottom.
It was hard work. Tamsin’s moths hated the cold. They stayed in her piece of dark forest with their wings folded. Ronald’s boars slid on the ice until he taught them to break it with each step. Mav’s fish couldn’t leave the dome at all, because there was no open water anywhere. For the first hour, his whole army was Six, three stalkers and three wolves. Log was with them too, but the cold made him so slow that he was more weight than help.
The wolves saved the morning. Oak, Ivy and Elm had been born in mud and rain, but they ran on snow as if it were the same thing. They found two snow stags in a side tunnel and drove them straight onto Six’s claws.
Then they went deeper, but someone was already there.
-----
The tunnel opened into a cave as large as the hall of Wildroot, and it was full of dead ice beetles.
There were at least 40 of them. Each beetle was as big as a boar, with a blue shell that looked as hard as iron. Every one of them had been killed in the same way. There was one bite at the joint behind the head. The flesh around that bite was white and frozen.
Nine white wolves were working at the far end of the cave.
Mav had seen wolves before. He owned three. These were something else. They were as tall as his shoulder, with fur like new snow and pale blue eyes. They moved together like the fingers of one hand. A beetle came out of a crack in the wall. Two wolves turned it, a third one bit once, and it was over before the beetle had finished coming out. None of the wolves made a sound.
A girl stood in the middle of the cave with her hands behind her back.
She was tall and straight, with black hair cut at the jaw and a plain coat of gray-blue. There was a small white tower sewn on her chest. She wasn’t giving orders. She was only watching her wolves, the way a craftsman watches his own hands.
Tamsin made a very small, frightened sound.
"That’s Isolde Frostmere," she whispered. "She’s first of our year. She reached rank E in two days."
The girl turned her head. Her eyes were pale gray. They went over the three of them without hurry. They stopped on the green scarf, and then on the bent harpoon.
Mav didn’t lower his eyes. He had decided long ago that he would never do that for a noble again. He watched her closely, because this one was different from the others. Dorian had needed people to look at him. This girl didn’t seem to need anything.
"You’re the one from Wildroot," Isolde said. Her voice was quiet and exact. "The one who made his builder fight."
"Yes."
"It was clever. It won’t work a second time, because everyone has seen it."
It wasn’t an insult. She said it the way Tamsin said a number.
"I know," Mav said.
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she nodded toward a dark opening on the left side of the cave.
"This cave is mine until noon. That passage goes down to a lake, and I haven’t touched what’s there. You can take it."
Mav was surprised. In his experience, nobles didn’t give anything away, and the Imperial Houses gave even less.
"Why are you telling us?" he asked.
"Because you were going to ask me whether you could pass, and I don’t like to waste time." She had already turned back to her wolves. "You haven’t done anything to me. I have no reason to stand in your way."
Ronald waited until they were well inside the passage before he spoke.
"She’s terrifying," he whispered.
"She has 30 wolves," Tamsin whispered back. "I’ve read every record. She brought nine today. She cleared that whole cave with nine."
Mav said nothing. He was thinking about the frozen bites. He was also thinking about something else that she had said, and it interested him.
’She hasn’t touched what’s down there. She’s the best of our year, and she left it alone.’
The passage went down for a long time. The walls turned from white to a deep, clear blue, and the air became so cold that it hurt to breathe. Then the floor became flat, and the passage ended.
They were standing at the edge of a cavern so large that Mav couldn’t see its roof. A frozen lake filled the whole floor. Light came up through the ice from somewhere below, and it turned everything blue.
In the middle of the lake, something was lying on the ice.
It was white, and it was as big as Ronald’s stone wall. Its sides rose and fell slowly.
It was asleep.