Bound to the IceDragon

e

around. It wasn't true. The road ahead was black and clean and covered in salt, and it wound up the mountain like a dropped ribbon. He didn't want to

was a small trunk. My mother had packed it the night before and

to your knees. This cold was clean and sharp, and it felt like it was looking over at

ight into the side of the mountain, with towers so tall that their tops vanished in the clouds. Above it the glacier hung down the slope as if

y trunk and s

my fingers, but I reached the iron gates. A guard in a silver-trimmed cloak re

, and frowned. "I do

ouse. It's ju

while longer, then

them wore the academy blue, a deep navy coat with silver thread at the collar and cuffs, in cloth that moved like water. My uniform was scholarship grey, p

headed for the nearest

k. Is th

ouse amuses a cat. I should have kept walkin

ll and golden, with the face of someone who had never once bee

or twenty people to hear. "The Council's li

did,"

stveil. Half of us can pull lightning out of a

eagerly, the way people do wh

he carriage a dozen different ways, and some of them were clever. But when I opened

the written exam in four provinces," I sai

hough I ought to curtsy. "Reme

I said, and I walked through the

fear. It was the stupid, humiliating fact that my eyes were stinging. I had promised myself I would last three weeks without

n I was cornered. You don't have to be strong, Zeph. Yo

at the stove, with the soup boiling over behind her, and she didn't even notice. She just kept reading. Then she set it down o

aste all that on a

map and a folded timetable, and told me the scholarship rooms were on the third floor of the eas

oommate"

lready had two complaints made agai

raight up at the glacier, glowing blue under the first stars. A girl sat cross-legged on the left bed with her

veryone else on this floor is either asleep or in love with themselves. I'

e a pencil, ink on both cuffs, and a grin far too

I said. "Ze

I caught it, mostly by luck. "I heard you

n't what

be a speech. Maybe

l and cracked and surprised, and Nysselle looked very pl

he far end, a smear of grey among all that blue, and nobody sat near us. Nysselle talked enough for four people. I only half li

t my speciality was. I said I didn't have one, and the

lty," Nysselle said brightl

my bowl so nobody

a crystal that lit up for every child who touched it. The children lined up in the market square, and it glowed for each of them in turn, like lamps being lit one by one. When he

r. Eleven years of being t

about the crystal at all. She made tea, and she cut the heel off the loaf, the good part she always saved for he

whistling snore she would later deny with her whole heart. I lay awake and listene

s called it a birthmark and moved on. My mother kept it covered with high collars all my life and never told me why, and I never pushed, because so

at had been in a pocket. I told myself it was the room,

m I was wal

lour of polished silver, and there was no wind. There were people everywhere, hundreds of them, standing in the streets exactly as they'd been when it happened: a woman with a basket on

turn. My feet took me left at the fountain, right at the tall ar

ery old, and it seemed to come from many mouth

olv

ody, only the silent cr

again, closer, almos

ke a glove that had been waiting years for my hand, and my chest ached

up ga

me Nysselle's breath rose in small white puffs. It to

atched. In the middle of it, in lines too neat to be an accident, someone had drawn lett

d read

said, the way you know your own name without sp

could see a faint silver glow, pulsing in time with my hea

ingle bell tolled, and eve