The incident was a harbinger of what was to come. In many ways the next was the most treacherous portion of the journey. They navigated the unreliable ice, feeling the pulsing of the day’s thaw and night’s freeze and the traps this set for them. Hanish had scouts sent before the army with great iron poles they used to test the surface, a thing done both by sound and feel and by instinct. On a few occasions he walked out alone before the host, feeling his way forward, scanning the far horizon. Why he did this he was never sure. It just felt right. There was something comforting in looking into a frozen expanse and imagining for a moment that he was alone upon it, that this quest began and ended with him and his strengths or weaknesses. Of course, it was never long before he heard the scouts smacking the ice with their rods, like some strange herders that lashed the ground before their wards instead of following them. He was not alone, a thought that each time it came upon him was at once a disappointment and a reassurance.

When they reached the break ice, everything changed again. It came more quickly than Hanish had expected. There before them was a black line of open water. This became a blue-brown seething mass, draining the melting lake on which they had traveled and slipping away to the south to become the River Ask. Chunks of the pack ice broke away slab by slab. The army spent the morning in a fury of activity, trying to switch from ice to waterborne travel.

The first of the ships had scarcely gotten men, horses, and supplies aboard before the ice began to groan and shiver beneath them. The men, who had for days driven the oxen, dropped their whips and clambered on the vessels. The oxen, so long bound to labor, milled about, anxious, unsure what their sudden abandonment suggested. It was not until the first vessel lunged forward, tail end jutting into the air for a precarious moment, boards groaning as if the ship were about to snap at its midpoint, that the oxen turned with angry tosses of their great horned heads and sprinted for the north. Nobody stopped them. That first ship managed to slide forward and find its purchase on the water, to catch the current, and begin to move away.

Hanish’s was the third vessel to drop into weighty buoyancy in the water. He was not able, at that moment, to pause and pass news of it to the Tunishnevre, as he had wished to do. Chinks between the frozen boards of the hull let in jets of water. His captain shouted assurances that the boards would swell to watertightness, so Hanish put it out of his mind. He did not have the leisure to do anything about it anyway. The river this far north was barely manageable, swollen as it always was this time of the year by the melt just gathering force in the Sinks. Hanish had wished to enter Acacia with the spring, and it appeared he had timed things correctly. The flood rose well up into the trees on either bank, rushing downstream as if every drop of water was clawing its way past its fellows in the race to the sea. At times they rode up and over and down the backs of waves as large as those during an ocean storm. In other places whirlpools, rips in the current, and roiling eddies turned the ships and sucked the sides of them, tipping men into the froth. What seemed like clenched fists of water took hold of the oars and snapped them, cracking more than one skull in the process.

Most treacherous, however, were the places where the river flowed over obstructions usually above the water. Some of these were normally islands, now nothing but treetops reaching from the depths like the fingers of drowning giants. There were stone ledges that nearly ripped open the hull of one boat and massive boulders over which water fell into churning chaos. One of the leading vessels went over such a fall. It dug down into the froth and then rose, bow high in the air, poised a moment as if it might shoot into the sky. But then-sickeningly, despite the protesting groans of all those watching-it slid backward. The stern of the ship caught in the down-rushing torrent behind it. The whole thing somersaulted backward, sending men hurtling into the air out to all sides, then tumbling into the froth. The ship went end over end for a few seconds, then disappeared. When the hull of the vessel emerged, it was a living ship no longer. It broke the surface as a lifeless hulk, like the underbelly of some dead leviathan.

They were swept on. They rode on the back of a watery serpent. Hanish loved it. He had been too long cooped up! How wonderful to be free, even if that freedom led to death. He did not pity those he lost or mourn for them. This serpent just charged a heavy toll for the service it rendered. All that mattered was that he was getting close to his goal. Close enough that he prepared to try a thing he had previously experimented with only in the seclusion of Tahalian.

Aliver began to dream nightly of dueling with nameless, faceless foes. Unlike the whimsical imaginings of times past, when swordplay was a fanciful clash with mythic foes, these visions were of a dark nature, each moment humming with fear. They always began innocuously enough: with him walking the alleys of the lower town, talking with his companions over breakfast, searching in his room for a book he knew he had placed somewhere. But at some point events always pivoted to sudden violence. A soldier would appear at the end of a passageway with sword unsheathed, calling him by name; the dining table would overturn and when the bulk of it cleared his view, the scene behind became one of enemy warriors swarming into the room like a thousand spiders-in through the windows, clinging to the ceiling with swords clasped between their teeth in enormous, metallic grins. Often he simply sensed that behind him was a formless, seething malice he would have to confront.

In these dreams he fought well enough up until the moment he had to sink his weapon home. Then, with the realization that he was about to slice into a living creature just like him, the flow of time snagged. Motion slowed. His muscles lost their strength and became useless ribbons of tar beneath his skin. He never watched his blade cut into the flesh of these dream enemies. Instead he awoke, panting, body tensed and trembling as if the fight had just taken place in the real world. Only then did the slow stink of reality creep over him. He had not woken from an ill dream to a welcoming world; he had opened his eyes once more to a waking nightmare that daily shrugged off his efforts to deny it.

His father was dead. This meant a thousand things to Aliver, all of them confusing. Not even his ascendance to the throne was straightforward. The Akarans were strict monarchists, but the larger situation was so confused as to delay Aliver’s rise to fill his father’s place. The same reverence for ritual that allowed the people to accept a monarchy also demanded a rigid adherence to tradition. New kings were crowned only in autumn, at the same time as the deceased king’s ashes were released. It was on that day that Tinhadin had first ascended, and it was deemed necessary that all others follow his venerable example. On almost every occasion in the years thereafter there had been a pause between the ruling monarch’s death and the new one’s crowning. A wait of several months was not at all without precedent. The unprecedented action would have been to crown a king on a date other than the summer solstice and to do so without a full, sitting contingent of governors. The priestesses of Vada found the time inauspicious for a crowning and refused to bless any ceremony. And the machinery of government seemed to have no interest in thrusting an inexperienced adolescent into a role so fraught with import. Perhaps some other prince would have grasped power anyway. But not Aliver. Despite himself, he felt something like relief that a crown had not been set atop his head immediately, though he would not admit this. Thaddeus was better suited to serve as the royal voice for the time being.