DAYS LATER, THE ENDLESS rain and lubricious fog turned suddenly to ice. Harrowhark woke up in the unfamiliar annex where she now slept, red and chapped with cold. The Second’s chambers had been deemed the least leaky of all their rooms on offer, helped by their placement quite low down Canaan House’s southmost side, and Lieutenant Dyas had invited them to move in with no enthusiasm whatsoever. They had arrayed makeshift beds and mattresses on the floor of her parlour, the broken furniture pushed into corners and stacked up at the sides, and there they all lay like victims after a massacre.

They were a ragtag bunch: Abigail Pent and her husband, who shared the decomposing four-poster that the dead Judith Deuteros had slept in; Protesilaus the Seventh and his intubated adept, who slept like a healthy baby swaddled in carpet rugs, and robes, and all her spare clothes; Dyas, who seemed never to want to sleep again, but only to sharpen her rapier, to the point where it must have held around nineteen edges; and Ortus; and herself. Ortus had placed his mattress between all concerned and the door—“I will be that bulwark,” he’d said portentously, although Harrowhark had noticed that it was the driest and warmest spot. That was that, that was all of them. When she had asked after the remnant Fourth children, Pent had remarked a little cagily that she had already moved them on. Harrow read between the lines and found that she could not resent their being—squirrelled away—so that the rest of the group presented a larger and juicier target.

Her breath sparkled in front of her mouth, and her fingers ached, even though she’d slept in gloves. The sun shone thinly through lacy patches of feathery, tessellated mist on the glass, glass on glass: ice! All at once Harrow was homesick for Drearburh. The fog outside was so thick that Canaan House seemed to have ascended into the heavens overnight—risen up into the atmosphere within a thick wet fleece of cloud and mist, a dirty ovine colour. Harrow could not see the sea or sky. She thought the rain was falling less heavily outside—but then she perceived that instead of the dreary, murmurous fall of precipitation, each drop had hardened into a pellet of ice. The wind whipped them up against the thick plex window, and they sounded like shot from the barrel of a gun.