They used a doubled segment of rope and the grappling hook to cross to the roof of the drüskelle sector. Wylan had to be looped into a sling, but Jesper and Kaz moved easily across the rope, hand over hand, with unnerving speed. Matthias approached with more caution, and though he didn’t show it, he did not like the way the rope creaked and bowed with his own weight.
The others pulled him onto the stone of the drüskelle roof, and as Matthias stood, he was struck by a wave of vertigo. More than any place in the Ice Court, more than any place in the world, this felt like home to him. But it was home turned on its head, his life viewed at the wrong angle. Peering into the dark, he saw the massive pyramid skylights that marked the roof. He had the disconcerting sense that if he looked through the glass he would see himself running drills in the training rooms, seated at the long table in the dining hall.
In the distance, he heard the wolves barking and yapping in their kennel by the gatehouse, wondering where their masters had gone for the night. Would they recognise him if he approached with an outstretched hand? He wasn’t sure he recognised himself. On the northern ice, his choices had seemed clear. But now his thoughts were muddied with these thugs and thieves, with Inej’s courage and Jesper ’s daring, and with Nina, always Nina. He couldn’t deny the relief he’d felt when she’d emerged from the incinerator shaft, dishevelled and gasping, frightened but alive. When he and Wylan had pulled her out of the flue, he’d had to force himself to let her go.
No, he would not look through those skylights. He could afford no more weakness, especially on this night. It was time to move forwards.
They reached the lip of the roof overlooking the ice moat. From here it looked solid, its surface polished bright as a mirror and illuminated by the guard towers on the White Island. But the moat’s waters were ever shifting, concealed only by a wafer-thin skin of frost.
Kaz secured another coil of rope to the roof’s edge and prepared to rappel down to the shore.
“You know what to do,” he said to Jesper and Wylan. “Eleven bells and not before.”
“When have I ever been early?” asked Jesper.
Kaz braced himself for the descent and vanished over the side. Matthias followed, hands gripping the rope, bare feet pressed against the wall. When he glanced up, he saw Wylan and Jesper gazing down at him. But the next time he looked, they were gone.
The shore surrounding the ice moat was little more than a slender, slippery rind of white stone.
Kaz perched there, pressed against the wall and frowning out at the moat.
“How do we cross? I don’t see anything.”
“Because you are not worthy.”
“I’m also not near-sighted. There’s nothing there.”
Matthias began edging along the wall, running his hand over the stone at hip level. “On Hringk?lla the drüskelle finish our initiation,” he said. “We go from aspirant to novice drüskelle in the ceremony at the sacred ash.”
“Where the tree talks to you.”
Matthias resisted the urge to shove him into the water. “Where we hope to hear the voice of Djel.
But that’s the final step. First, we have to cross the ice moat undetected. If we are judged worthy, Djel shows us the path.”
In truth, elder drüskelle simply passed the secret of the crossing along to aspirants they wished to see enter the order; it was a way of culling the weak or those who had simply not meshed successfully with the group. If you’d made friends, if you’d proven yourself, then one of the brothers would take you aside and tell you that on the night of the initiation, you should go to the shore of the ice moat and run your hand along the wall of the drüskelle sector. At its centre, you would find an etching of a wolf that marked the location of another glass bridge – not grand and arching like the one that spanned the moat from the embassy wing, but flat, level, and only a few feet wide. It lay just under the frozen skin of the surface, invisible if you didn’t know to look for it. Commander Brum himself had been the one to tell Matthias how to find the secret bridge, as well as the trick for crossing it undetected.
It took Matthias two passes along the wall before his fingers found the carved lines of the wolf. He rested his hand there briefly, feeling the traditions that connected him to the order of drüskelle, as old as the Ice Court itself.
“Here,” he said.
Kaz shuffled over and squinted across the moat. He leaned out and Matthias yanked him back.
He pointed to the guard towers on the top of the wall surrounding the White Island. “You’ll be visible,” he said. “Use this.”
He scraped his hand along the wall and his palm came away white. The night of his initiation, Matthias had rubbed his clothes and hair with the same chalky powder. Camouflaged from the view of the guards in their towers, he’d crossed the slender path to the island to meet his brothers.
Now he and Kaz did the same, though Matthias noticed Kaz tucked his gloves neatly away first. Inej must have returned them.
Matthias stepped onto the secret bridge, then heard Kaz hiss when the icy waters of the moat closed over his feet.
“Chilly, Brekker?”