The winter the war came to Fallowford was the coldest winter anyone could remember. The river Ambreth froze from bank to bank in the first week of Darkmonth, and the ice was so thick that old Fennick the ferryman dragged his boat up onto the shore and said he would not put it back in until the spring thaw, and maybe not even then.

Kestrin was fourteen that winter. He was the son of Doran the smith, and he spent most of his days in the forge at the end of the village, pumping the bellows and hauling iron and getting yelled at for daydreaming. He was tall for his age and skinny, with black hair that stuck straight up no matter what he did to it, and his hands were already covered with little white burn scars from the sparks. He liked the forge. He just didn't like it as much as he liked thinking about what was on the other side of the mountains.

The mountains were always there. You could see them from every door in Fallowford, the Stoneward Mountains, rising up white and gray and enormous on the far side of the river, so high that their tops were usually lost in the clouds. On the near side of the river were the fields and the villages of the River Kingdoms. On the far side was the land of the Hallaskar, the mountain folk, who lived in great halls cut into the rock and who, everybody said, would cut your throat as soon as look at you.

Kestrin had never met a Hallaskar. But in the fall, soldiers from Kell had marched through Fallowford with their banners of the Silver Pike, hundreds of them, on their way to fight in the mountain passes, and since then there had been raids along the river, and fires, and people from the north villages coming through with everything they owned on carts. Everybody in Fallowford had an opinion about whose fault the war was. Kestrin's father's opinion was that nobody was to talk about it in his forge.

"The well's frozen again," Doran said that afternoon, without looking up from the horseshoe he was shaping. "Take the axe and cut a hole in the river. I need water for the quench barrel before dark."

Kestrin was out the door before his father could change his mind.

Pell was waiting for him at the bottom of the lane, the way she always was, like she could tell when he was going to come out. She was thirteen, the miller's daughter, with a long red braid and about a thousand freckles, and she carried a leather sling tucked into her belt everywhere she went. She could knock a crow off a fence post from forty paces. Kestrin had seen her do it.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"To chop a hole in the river."

"Can I come?"

"You're going to anyway."

"That's true," said Pell, and fell in beside him.

The river was a wide white road under the gray sky. The wind came down off the mountains and went straight through Kestrin's coat like it wasn't there. They walked out onto the ice about twenty paces from the bank, where the water would be deep, and Kestrin swung the axe. The ice was so hard that the first blow bounced right off and nearly took his foot with it. Pell laughed. He swung again, and again, until the chips flew and his arms ached.

And then he stopped.

"What?" said Pell.

"Look."

Down in the ice, under his boots, deeper than the hole he had made, something was shining. It was gold, or almost gold, and it caught the last of the daylight and glowed like a coal in a fire. It was just a little to the left of where he'd been chopping, frozen solid, maybe two feet down.

Pell got down on her knees and put her face right on the ice. "It's a coin."

"It's too big for a coin."

"Then it's a lot of coins."

Kestrin started chopping again, carefully this time, all around it. It took them almost an hour. Pell took turns with the axe until her hands blistered, and she never complained once, which Kestrin noticed. By the time the sun was going down behind the mountains, they had chopped a hole as big as a washtub, and Kestrin lay down on his stomach and reached into the freezing black water up to his shoulder and closed his fingers around something hard and pulled it out.

It was half of a crown.

It was made of a metal Kestrin had never seen in his father's forge, something between gold and silver, that seemed to have light inside it. The points along the top were shaped like mountain peaks. There were three red stones set along the band, each one as big as a thumbnail. And one end of it was jagged and torn, like it had been broken in half by something terribly strong.

But that wasn't the strangest part. The strangest part was that it had been frozen in the river ice, maybe for years, maybe for a hundred years, and when Kestrin held it in his bare hand, it was warm.

"Kestrin," Pell whispered. "That's a crown."

"Half a crown."

"Nobody just finds half a crown!"

Before Kestrin could answer, a horn blew, far off down the river road. Both of them turned. Coming along the road from the south, in the blue dusk, was a line of riders, maybe twenty of them, with torches. Even from that far away Kestrin could see that they all wore long gray cloaks.

"Grey Cloaks," Pell said. Her face had gone white under her freckles. Everybody on the river knew about the Grey Cloaks. They were the Warlord of Kell's own riders, and they went where they wanted and took what they wanted, and nobody asked them why.

Kestrin shoved the half crown inside his coat. It lay against his chest, warm as a live coal. He grabbed the bucket, filled it, and they ran.

The Grey Cloaks came into Fallowford just after dark. Kestrin was in the forge, pretending to sweep, when the door banged open and the cold came in, and a tall man stepped into the light of the fire. He had a long white scar running down one side of his face, from his eyebrow to his chin, and a silver pin shaped like a pike fish on his cloak. He was smiling.

"Smith," he said. "I am Captain Malgrave, in the service of Lord Vexmoor of Kell. We are looking for something that was lost in this river a long time ago. Something that may have been found." His eyes went around the forge, slowly. "Has anyone in your village found anything in the river?"

Doran put down his hammer. "Not that I know of," he said, and it was the truth, because he didn't know.

The captain nodded. Then he looked straight at Kestrin.

"And you, boy?"

Kestrin's mouth was dry. "No, sir," he said. "Nothing."

The second the lie came out of his mouth, the crown under his coat went hot. Not warm. Hot, like iron straight out of the fire, so hot that Kestrin had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out. He stood very still and held the broom and stared at the floor.

Captain Malgrave watched him for a long moment. His smile got a little wider.

"We'll be staying in Fallowford for a while," he said. "Until we find it."

And he went out into the night, and left the door open behind him, and the cold came in.

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