Chapter 71

The fourth year came in with frost, and nothing else.

On the stair, at the change, the guards still talked sometimes about the spring and the Chancellor’s girl. The council had not yet named a day; the north kept the King in the saddle, and the talk came and went with him. I heard it the way I heard everything, in pieces, through stone. I found I did not need to make anything of it. I put it in the ledger and closed the page.

***

By then, I had been on the lower row for longer than I had been Luna.

I had worked that out one night, counting, and then wished I hadn’t. Ten months of hills and horses and a man reading to me in a terrible voice. And then this, which was longer, and which had no end written anywhere, because nobody had found Lyra and nobody had proved she was dead, and the verdict had been built so that it would never have to stop.

I had become very still. I noticed it the way you notice your own handwriting has changed: not on any one day, b