In winter you can hear the ice sing on the lakes north of the mountain, if you put your ear to it. The fishermen say it sings brighter the thicker it gets. None of them will walk out on it until it has sung for three nights.

Sayings and Weather Signs, collected by a village schoolmaster

Chapter 5

The City on the Other Side

The next morning I woke because the sun was hitting my face through a window I hadn't noticed the night before. The guest dormitory was half empty. Ahra was still asleep with his face buried in the pillow and one arm hanging over the side of the bed.

The clothes from my bag had lain on the chair by my bed all night. They were dry now, and stiff, and smelt of the Little Belt. I put them on and went down to the First-Year Room. The fire had gone out, but the room was still warm, and it smelt of ash and of the apples someone had left in a bowl on the table. By the door there was a new number on the board, written in fresh chalk: River: 107 m. Last night it had said 109.

I sat down in an armchair by the window. It was set so low that the river was right outside, so close that I could see little eddies drifting past in the clear water. It was narrower than yesterday. Or perhaps it was the light. Or perhaps everything in this place simply followed its own rules, and the board knew it.

The key was in my pocket. I took it out and turned it over between my fingers. It was still warm, as if it had never gone cold since it slid into my hand on the edge of my bed back home.

It was the only thing I had. I owned two T-shirts, a pair of socks, a pair of trainers and a key to something I couldn't name. Not a single krone. And the kroner I might have had weren't worth anything here anyway.

At breakfast Retia was sitting at the bottom table, and this time she was the one who raised her hand when she saw us coming. Just a hand. Ahra sat down beside her before she had time to put it down again.

He had no list. He had a small leather purse from his grandmother and three errands he knew by heart, because she had said them every evening for a month, and he said them in her voice, sitting a little too straight: "The robe from Hartia and nowhere else. The books from The Golden Book. And the blood at the smith's, and look away while he does it."

"The blood?" I said.

"For the sword," said Ahra, as if that explained something. "The smith takes a drop and forges it to you. You don't buy it. It comes when it's ready."

Retia had been given the same three errands by her mother and hadn't needed to practise them. Between the teapot and the bread basket they started planning a route through the city, and they couldn't agree on where it should begin. They talked over each other, and Ahra corrected Retia twice and got a look that made him stop, and I sat and drank my tea.

It wasn't the errands that were the problem. It was that someone had sent them off with them.

"What do you need?" asked Retia.

"I don't know. There was nothing about it in my letter."

"What about money?"

I opened my hand. The key was lying in it.

Ahra leant across the table so fast that he nearly knocked over the teapot. "That's a Hitlaro key," he said. "Where did you get it?"

"It was in the letter."

Ahra and Retia looked at each other. It was a short look, but it was there.

"Then you've got a vault," said Ahra. "In Tés Aváir. And there's something in it." He said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For him it probably was.

We went down towards the quay an hour before the ferry. I still had the key in my hand, and I was turning it over between my fingers as we went down the wide staircase, without thinking about it.

Professor Haltora was standing at the foot of the stairs. He stood with the wolf at his side and his gaze out over the entrance hall, and then his eyes fell on my hand.

He went completely still. It was as if everything in him stopped at once.

Three seconds. I counted them. Ahra was right behind me, and neither of us moved. Then I felt it in his scent. It didn't flare up, the way it had by the river. It went cold. The embers under the ash were still there, but it was as if someone had opened a door onto a winter night, and iron and night air settled over them, heavy and still.

"Look after it," he said.

"Professor," I said. "Who put something in that vault?"

Haltora looked at me with those black eyes. He looked for a long time.

"The ferry leaves at eleven," he said.

Then he turned and walked away, and the wolf followed him like a shadow.

He hadn't answered my question. I was starting to get used to that.

The ferry was already rocking at the quay when we arrived. It was broad and flat with room for over a hundred, and we found a spot on deck and sat down. The sun stood low over the island, and the air was cool and had the salty, coppery scent I was beginning to recognise as the place itself.

Ahra was in the middle of explaining the currency to me ("Gold dalers, silver talents and copper coins. Ten of one kind makes the next. Dead simple.") when Retia came walking over to us with her robe over her arm. The same red jumper as last night. She had sat with us at breakfast, but on the quay she had walked on her own, as if she didn't want to take anything for granted.

"Is this seat free?" she said. It was my own line from last night, and she knew it.

"Of course," said Ahra, and shifted along. His scent drifted over to me in the sea air, warm bark and honey, and it had already started to mean something to me. It meant I wasn't alone.

Retia sat down, pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees. She looked out over the water. It was quiet for a while. The wind off the sea caught our hair and carried a smell of salt and seaweed and sun-warmed stone with it, and the sun lay pale and mild on my hands where they stuck out of my sleeves. Not awkward. Just three people looking at something beautiful without needing to talk about it.

"I'm going to the same places as you," she said after a while, without looking at us. "If that's all right."

"Of course," I said.

Retia looked at me. Not suspiciously this time. Just searchingly. She was trying to work out whether I meant it, or whether I was just saying it.

I meant it.

The ferry docked at a quay of black stone, and when we walked down the gangway and stepped onto land, I stood still and forgot to keep walking.

Tés Aváir wasn't just a city. It was a city ablaze with magic.

The houses stood close together along narrow streets, and they were built of stone in colours I had never seen on a house. One that was deep red. One that was golden. One that was green like a mossy forest floor. Balconies hung out over the streets with plants flowering in colours you couldn't name, and some of the plants moved as if they were following the conversations beneath them. Women walked up and down the quay in robes of every colour, most of them brown, but some green, some blue, some silver. Children ran between them with animals at their feet and laughter in their mouths.

And there were hardly any men. I noticed that after a minute or so. Women and children everywhere, but the men were missing.

"Where are all the men?" I asked.

"At work," said Retia. "Most of them work for the Council or in the businesses. They're not home until the evening."

A woman with curly brown hair and green eyes came running towards us from one of the stalls on the quay. She threw her arms around Retia and held her close. Retia's shoulders sank, as if something heavy had slid off them, and her hands took hold of her mother's back and wouldn't let go yet. It wasn't a hug someone gave because they had to. It was a hug that meant something. They held each other a little too long, and it was that little bit that said everything.

I looked away. Not because it was embarrassing. But because it hurt a little to see something you have never had yourself.

"Retia! It's so lovely to see you again!"

"Mum, I've only been at school for a day," said Retia, but she was smiling anyway.

Retia's mother looked up and noticed us.

"Who's this, darling?"

"Some friends. Chris and Ahra. This is my mum, Arvia Caritas."

"How do you do, Mrs Caritas. Ahra Retonk."

"Chris Godrand," I said.

Arvia smelt of freshly baked bread and warm linen and garden flowers, the kind of smell a home has when somebody who lives in it really loves living there. She smiled warmly and said it was a pleasure. She saw me looking down the quay and said, a little lower, that the War had taken a great many. Then she asked whether we needed her to come round the city with us. Retia said no. Arvia said we must come by and eat later, and then she was gone again, down the quay with quick steps and a wave over her shoulder.

"She's nice," said Ahra.

"Yes," said Retia. Just that. Just yes.

There was more she wasn't saying. I heard it in the little pause after the word, a pause that lasted half a second too long, a door opened and shut again in the same movement. Her fingers tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, quickly and nervously, as if she were hiding something back there along with the hair. But I didn't ask. Sometimes it's more important to hear what people don't say than what they do. And sometimes the best thing you can do is just let them know you heard the silence, without demanding that they fill it.

The Hitlaro Bank stood at the end of a side street, and it was easy to walk past.

It was a low building of grey stone, squeezed in between a herbalist's and a house with closed shutters, and the gate was of old oak, black with age and so low that Ahra had to duck his head. Above it two words had been carved into the stone. The letters had been worn soft by weather and rain, but you could still read them.

"Cave," I read half aloud. "Nunquam solus es."

I had never done Latin. Nobody did Latin at Fjordskolen. But I understood it, the same way I had understood people in the Fonté Hall, without knowing how. The words just settled into my head with their meaning attached, as if they had come with the water.

"Beware," I said. "You are never alone."

"It's old Anglîsh," said Ahra. "It's over all their doors."

I took a step back and looked up at it. It wasn't a pleasant sentence to stand reading on your way into a bank. Retia stood beside me with her hands in the pockets of her robe, and Ahra stood behind us, shifting from foot to foot. The gate opened by itself, and warm air rushed out towards us.

Inside, the ceiling was low and it was as warm as a bakery. There were no counters, no queue, no ledgers. Just a stone room with a long bench along one wall, a black iron stove crackling in the corner, and a door at the far end. It smelt of warm stone and of something mineral and dry, like when you crush one stone with another.

At a low wooden table by the stove sat a dwarf.

He was short and broad, with big hands and a face that was hard and alert, and he didn't get up when we came in. He looked at us with dark, calm eyes, as if he had plenty of time, and as if he wanted us to know it.

"Key," he said. His voice was deep and rumbled like stone being pushed against stone.

Retia gave him hers. He laid it on his broad palm, didn't close his hand around it, just let it lie there, and looked at it.

"The Sun Coast," he said. "The silver was mined this year." He got up.

Behind the door there was a long corridor with doors on both sides. All of them were the same, smooth and grey, with no handles. The dwarf put Retia's key into the first door he came to, and when he turned it, the door changed. It became new and fine and shiny, with silver hinges and a handle that gleamed as if it had been polished that morning. Retia went in and came out again with a small, heavy pouch, as if she had done it many times before.

"Key," the dwarf said to Ahra.

He weighed Ahra's key in his hand. "The Deep Forests. Old silver." Then he put it into a door further down the corridor, and this time the door changed into something completely different. Solid mahogany, darkened with age, with iron hinges that were rusty and worn and a handle that had seized up. The dwarf heaved at the door, but it wouldn't give. Ahra and I went over and helped, and in the end we got it open with a long, protesting shriek from the hinges.

Inside stood chests and old cupboards and things covered in canvas, and on a shelf lay a row of leather pouches side by side. It smelt of old wood and camphor.

"The Retonk line is very old," said Ahra apologetically. He took one of the pouches and came out again.

"Key," the dwarf said to me.

I gave it to him.

He laid it on his palm, and there it lay. He looked at it for a long time. He didn't touch it. He just let it lie there, and I saw his thumb move a tiny bit towards the shaft and then keep away again.

"Nordmark," he said at last. "A long time ago." He looked up at me, and it was the first time he had looked at me and not at the key. He said nothing more.

He walked all the way down to the end of the corridor, to the last door, and put the key in.

What happened to the door this time was different from the other two times.

The wood grew older. Not just old. Ancient. Cracks ran down through planks so dark they were almost black, and the hinges weren't iron but something that looked like bronze, and they were so worn that I couldn't understand how they still held. The handle was covered in verdigris, but it was made of something heavy, something that might once have been gold, and it was worn smooth in the place where a hand would take hold.

The dwarf stood with his hand on the door without opening it. He laid his palm flat against the wood, the way you lay a hand on a horse to feel whether it is calm.

"This one has been sleeping," he said.

Then he opened the door. It swung open with a long, deep creak, and the dust whirled up in the light falling inside.

I stepped in.

The air in the room was cold and dry and old. It smelt of dry leather and old metal and something more, something I couldn't place, something that lay under all of it like a note you can hardly hear. It was air nobody had breathed for a very long time.

The room was small. There were no heaps. There were no chests. In a corner on the floor lay a pile of coins, gold dalers and silver talents mixed together, no more than I could have gathered in two hands. The ones at the bottom were dark and dull. The ones on top were shiny, as if someone had put them there not so long ago.

But it wasn't the coins that made me stop.

On one wall hung a shield with the same symbol as on my letter. The sword through the stone, the dagger across it, the wreath of hawthorn. Under it stood a shelf of books bound in black leather, with gold lettering on their spines in a language I couldn't read, even though I could read everything else here. And in the corner, half buried under the coins, lay a small pile of papers with the same black wax seal as my letter.

I didn't look more closely at the papers. I was too overwhelmed to look properly at anything. I still regret it. I took a handful of the shiny coins and put them in my pocket and backed out of the room as if I were afraid to turn my back on all of it.

The dwarf shut the door. The key came out. The door went grey and smooth again, like all the others.

He gave me the key. When it touched my hand, it was warm.

We sat down on a bench out in the street before we went on. The stone was cold under my thighs, and from the herbalist's next door came a smell of dried mint and something bitter.

"Your door was older than Ahra's," said Retia quietly.

"No door is older than ours," said Ahra. He didn't say it to boast.

"That one was," said Retia.

Ahra said no more. He and Retia started talking about the errands again, but I wasn't really listening. I sat feeling the key in my pocket and thinking about the ancient door and the shield with the sword and the wreath of hawthorn and the sealed papers I hadn't looked at, and about the shiny coins on top of the pile. Someone had kept a vault for me my whole life. Someone had put a shield and a stack of books and a pile of coins in there for me. And then they had left me in a care home by a fjord and never come to fetch me.

What sort of people kept a shield for a child and then disappeared?

Retia touched my arm. "Chris. Shall we go on?"

I nodded and got up. The key sat heavy in my pocket for the rest of the day.

We spent the next hour shopping. Miss Hartia's shop was small and low-ceilinged and full of bolts of cloth standing up against the walls like tree trunks, and it smelt of wool and starch and an iron that was too hot. Miss Hartia herself was a short, energetic woman with pins in her mouth, and she looked at the three of us for exactly one second each and then disappeared in among the shelves.

She came out with a white robe and held it up in front of me.

"On with it," she said through the pins.

I put it on. The fabric of the robe was white and heavy and fell over my shoulders, and it knew where it was meant to lie. Up the back ran a pattern that took the shape of a sword. I stood still, and she walked once round me. Then she took the robe off me again, with both hands, the way you take a blanket off someone who is asleep. She held the collar up to her nose and smelt it. She closed her eyes while she did it.

"Fine," she said. "It fits."

Under the robe there was to be a school uniform: a white shirt, black trousers with a greyish pattern winding up the sides. She put them in a pile on top of the robe without measuring anything at all.

"The clothes will be sent to the school."

I paid with two of the shiny coins and got something back that I didn't know the value of, and Ahra took it out of my hand and counted it and nodded.

We walked on down the street. Retia and Ahra were talking about the next shop, and it was then that Ahra said it, with a casual delight that can only come from someone who has been looking forward to something his whole life:

"Shall we go to Surain's Animal Shop? We all need an Amícûs, after all."

"What's an Amícûs?" I said.

Ahra and Retia both looked at me. Apparently I had just asked what water was.

"It's your animal," said Retia. "Your companion for life. Bound to you by magic."

"You'll find out when we get there," said Ahra, and grinned. "Come on."

We started down the street towards a shop with a sign that said SURAIN'S ANIMAL SHOP, and behind the window something large and orange and inexplicable was moving.