Kestrin waited until the Grey Cloaks' torches had gone up the lane toward the inn. Then he closed the forge door and barred it, and took the half crown out of his coat, and put it down on the anvil in front of his father.

He had expected his father to be angry. He had expected him to ask why Kestrin had lied to a captain of Kell. He had not expected what happened, which was that Doran the smith, who was the strongest man in Fallowford and maybe on the whole river, went as white as ashes and sat down hard on the bench like his legs had stopped working.

"Where did you get this?" he said. His voice was strange.

Kestrin told him everything. The ice, the shining, the hour of chopping, the cold water. How the crown was warm. How it had burned him when he lied.

His father picked it up very carefully, with both hands, the way you would pick up a baby bird. He turned it over in the firelight. He ran his thumb along the mountain peaks, and over the three red stones, and along the jagged edge where it had been broken. His hands were shaking.

"Do you know what this is?" he said.

"No."

"Do you remember the song your mother used to sing? About the king with two sons?"

Kestrin remembered. His mother had died when he was five, and he didn't remember very much about her, but he remembered her voice singing in the dark, a slow song about a king in a golden hall and a crown that broke in two. He had always thought it was only a song.

"Three hundred years ago," his father said, "the mountains and the rivers were one kingdom. The High King was named Thalorn, and he wore a crown that the first smiths of the mountains made for him, the greatest smiths who ever lived. They put something into it. Some kind of power. Nobody knows exactly what anymore. When Thalorn died, his two sons both wanted the crown, and they fought, and the crown was broken in half. That was the Sundering. One son took his half up into the mountains. The other took his half down to the rivers. And the two halves were lost, and the two peoples have been enemies ever since."

He held up the half crown. The red stones glowed in the firelight.

"This is the mountain half of the Crown of Thalorn," Doran said. "You can see the peaks. I don't know how it ended up in the river. But I know what the Grey Cloaks want with it. Lord Vexmoor has been looking for both halves for twenty years. The old stories say whoever joins the crown together again will rule the mountains and the rivers both. If Vexmoor gets this, there won't be a war anymore. There will just be Vexmoor."

Kestrin stared at him. "How do you know all this?"

His father was quiet for a long time. The fire popped. Outside, the wind moaned around the corner of the forge.

"Because I wasn't born in Fallowford," Doran said at last. "I was born in Durrowhold, under the mountain. I'm Hallaskar, Kestrin. So are you, half of you."

Kestrin felt like the floor had dropped out from under him.

"I came down the mountain when I was nineteen," his father went on. "I wanted to see the world. I met your mother at the spring fair in this very village and I never went back. I never told anybody here what I was. If they knew, they'd have run us out of Fallowford a long time ago. Maybe worse, with this war." He held out his big scarred hands. "Why do you think I can work iron the way I do? Mountain hands. Your grandfather was a smith in Durrowhold, and his father before him."

"You never told me."

"I was going to. When you were older." His father almost smiled. "I guess you're older."

That was when somebody knocked on the forge door. Three slow knocks.

"Smith," called the voice of Captain Malgrave. "I had a thought, on my way up the lane. I thought I might ask your boy again. Open the door."

Doran was on his feet in an instant. He pushed the half crown into Kestrin's hands, and grabbed a pack off the hook by the coal bin, and stuffed it with bread and a blanket and flint and steel, moving faster than Kestrin had ever seen him move. Then he took down his small hammer, the good one with the ash handle, the one Kestrin had learned to work with when he was eight, and put it in Kestrin's belt.

"The coal chute," he whispered. "Out the back. Cross the river and go up into the mountains and don't stop. Find Durrowhold. Find the Stone Council, and give the crown to them, and nobody else. Tell them you're Doran's son. Tell them Doran Emberhand sent you. They'll know the name."

"Come with me!"

The knocking got louder. Something heavy hit the door, and the bar jumped in its brackets.

"Somebody has to hold the door," Doran said. He put his hand on the back of Kestrin's neck, just for a second, the way he did when Kestrin was little. "Go. I'll find you. I promise."

Then he picked up his great hammer, the one nobody else in Fallowford could even lift, and turned to face the door.

Kestrin went down the coal chute in the dark. He came out behind the forge in the snow, covered in black dust, with the crown inside his coat and his heart pounding so hard he could hear it. Behind him he heard the door crash open, and men shouting, and then a sound he would remember for the rest of his life: the ring of his father's hammer, like a great bell, again and again.

He wanted to go back. He turned around to go back.

Somebody grabbed his arm. It was Pell, in her coat and her mittens, with her sling in her belt and a sack over her shoulder.

"What are you doing here?" he hissed.

"I saw the Grey Cloaks go up your lane," she said. "I'm not stupid. Come ON."

"My father..."

"Your father is the biggest man on the river and he has a hammer. He told you to go. So GO."

They ran. Down the back path, through the frozen reeds, and out onto the river, slipping and sliding, past the hole they had chopped that afternoon, which was already freezing over again. It began to snow, big heavy flakes, so thick that by the time they got to the middle of the river they couldn't see the village anymore. They could only see the orange glow where the forge was, and then they couldn't see that either.

They reached the far bank and climbed up through the bare trees, and the ground started to go up, and up, and Kestrin realized they were in the foothills of the Stoneward Mountains, on the Hallaskar side of the river, where no one from Fallowford ever went.

Pell stopped, out of breath. "Kestrin," she said. "Where are we going?"

Before he could answer, a light came bobbing toward them through the snow. A lantern. Kestrin pulled the hammer out of his belt. Pell already had a stone in her sling.

The lantern stopped. Behind it was an old man, very thin, in a patched brown cloak with the hood up, leaning on a crooked staff. He had a long white beard with snow in it, and his eyes were bright and sharp and amused, like he had just heard a joke nobody else had heard.

"Well," said the old man. "You two are going the wrong way to get warm, and the right way to get killed. Which means you must be going the right way. Come along. My name is Grennick, and I've been waiting for you since the river froze."

* * *