All Chapters of Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

SelaThe cold reached Greywater on the fifth night they were gone.I was awake because the leg doesn't let me sleep much, and because somebody has to be awake when everybody else is pretending the quiet is restful and not the held breath it actually is. I was up on the wall-walk with a blanket and a bad attitude when the river stopped.You'd think a river stopping would be loud. It's the opposite. One moment there's the sound a river makes, and the next there's nothing. I looked down and the water had gone to gray glass under the moon, edge to edge, in the time it took me to notice."Rell!" I don't have a fighting body anymore but I've still got the loudest mouth in any building. "RELL. River's froze. It's here."She was on the wall before the echo died.We did the things. We'd drilled the things a dozen times against the chance and now the chance was a wall of white coming up off the ice into the lower town, and the things were: fire and people behind fire and the weak in the middle.

BramSix. They'd left with six. For one breath I let myself think everyone was coming home.Then I counted again, and there were five riders and one shape tied across a saddle, and I knew the shape was Maren.I had the gate open before Rell gave the order. Some things you don't wait to be told.They came in slow, all of them gray and thinned by the road, and the first thing I did was to move down the line deciding who needs me most, and the answer was nobody, the wounds were old and the worst hurt on any of them wasn't the kind I treat. Amara sat her horse like a woman carrying something heavier than herself. There was new white in her hair, a whole streak of it. Zane wouldn't leave her side, close as a guard. And Wren had Maren's rein and wouldn't give it up, even at the gate, even when hands came to help."I've got her," Wren said, to nobody, to everybody. "I had her the whole way. I've got her."Sela came across the yard on her crutch faster than she should have, and she and Amara

Amara It came back four nights later, and I knew the second the coin on my neck went cold that it had changed its mind about what it wanted. The other nights it had reached for me. I'd feel the pull aimed at the center of myself, the hand cupping the back of my skull, come here, come to me. Not this time. This time the cold came up off the river and went past me. I stood on the wall in the middle of it and felt the dead pour into the lower town and felt nothing reaching for me at all. "It's not coming for me," I said. Aldric was beside me, blade out. "Aldric. It's not coming for me." "Then who..." The dead answered him. They came up the ramp in a wedge, ignoring the fires, ignoring the people screaming and stabbing at their flanks, walking through wounds that should have stopped them, and they came straight for the man standing next to me. Not me. Him. "Get back from the wall," I said, and grabbed his sleeve, and it was the first time in a year I'd been the one to grab. "Aldric.

WrenI wouldn't leave the warm knot on the wall. I worked it loose from its peg with my fingers shaking, careful as I've ever been with anything, and I held it in both hands and it was warm, faintly, steady, the only warm thing in a house the cold had taken. The keeper had tied her last and best work into a cord that wouldn't freeze. I didn't know how. That was the point of going to find out."We can't read it here," I said. "Look at me. My hands won't hold still and the light's gone and the cold's coming back up through the floor. I read this wrong, I read it once. There's no second chance with a knot you have to untie to understand." I put it inside my coat, against my chest, the way Maren carried hers. "We take it home. To the one person who might still read what I can't, and to the three who have to use it."Seraphine didn't argue. She got us out of that house and a mile off and we made the warmest camp four soldiers could build, and I slept with my hand inside my coat on the warm

AldricYou don't march everyone you've got into the heart of the thing trying to kill you. That's the first rule, and we broke it, because the keeper's knot didn't leave us a choice... the cage gets made at Orsel's grave or it doesn't get made, and the grave is on the far side of the dead ground, and the dead ground was coming to meet us anyway.So Rell emptied Greywater.Not all at once. The ones who couldn't fight or walk, the children, the old, the cold-bitten still mending... those went west, away from the front, toward country the winter hadn't reached, with a third of the forty to guard them and Bram to keep them alive on the road.That was the first hard thing. Bram didn't want to go."You'll need a medic at that grave," he said."We'll need a medic with the four hundred people who didn't ask to be part of this," Rell said. "You're the only one I trust to get them west breathing. That's the job. It's not the glory job. It's the one that matters."Bram looked at Sela. Sela looke