Harrow floundered, not toward the shore, but to the island in the centre—to the black mausoleum of glass and ice, sitting silently and reflectively beneath that sea of dead worms. She hauled herself to shore and lay there, skin crawling, frozen half-solid, shivering and numb in that strange heat presaging hypothermic death. And yet Harrow felt no pain; she felt nothing, in fact, but a welcome sense of homecoming—the strange, tiny, pleased familiarity of finding an old book once beloved, or some other antique of childhood.

Eager now, she hauled her freezing meat to stand. She passed beneath those pillars as she had as a child, followed the pathway she still traced in dreams. She was exhausted more than cold; her head filled with the soft, heavy tiredness of too much waking and not enough sleep, of a long day on the job without rest or break. She walked into the mausoleum, and she approached the Tomb itself.

The chains in their great holes were snapped and broken. The ice crawled up the sides of the empty altar. Within that bed of ice and glass, on the stone-shaped pillow to prop the head, that final resting place of Harrowhark’s one true love, lay a sword.

It was the two-handed sword that had lain at the bottom of the Sleeper’s coffin, just as Dyas had seen it.

Harrowhark had come home, and she was not afraid. She did not know why she did it, but she climbed inside that empty coffin, and she took the sword within her arms. She was filled with a drowsy, comfortable certainty, as though rather than an icy tomb she had been tucked into a bed with a pillow fluffed beneath her. Her eyelids felt as heavy as the chains that lay broken around the outside of the bier. The sword she embraced shamelessly; those six feet of steel held no fear for her now.

Something rustled at her side. She had not seen it when she climbed in; it had been tucked to one side of the coffin. When she reached out to hold it in front of her face, she found a shiny mass of magazine flimsy. The crumpled front page showed a woman in a Cohort uniform that was so far from official it did not merely strain credulity, but snapped it in two pieces: a white jacket at least three sizes too small, boots, and nothing else.

The ice felt kind and warm; the stone gave as though it were cotton. Harrow lay where the Body had lain, perfectly at her ease, perfectly comfortable, and she peered blearily at the header.

“Frontline Titties of the Fifth,” she read, and found she was smiling helplessly to herself. She murmured: “Nav, you ass, that’s not even a real publication.”