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meant everything.
    Lirael.
    Lirael of the Clayr.
    The elders had taken the message, but had not sent it. The foreign sorcerer had not always been accurate in her foretellings, and they thought there was a chance she was wrong.
    But then the Witch With No Face was killed, and she came back from Death, and two moons past, the messengers had come with the new demands that were exactly what the foreign sorcerer had said would lead to the end of the Athask people.
    So the elders had belatedly decided they must send the message to the Clayr. And who better to take it than the Offering, the best of her people, whose life was in any case forfeit?
    Ferin had that message now, secure in her head and safely memorized, for anything written could be stolen or lost. She had to get across the river and go to the glacier, to deliver the message and save her people.
    Without being killed by those who served the Witch With No Face, who almost from the moment she had left the mountains to cross the steppe had pursued her as if they knew what she was, and where, if not where she intended going.
    But Ferin didn’t spare any thought for how her enemies were always close behind, or on anything else, like the fact that she had no idea where the Clayr’s Glacier was on the other side of the Greenwash. She lived in the moment, and was entirely focused on her immediate goal.
    To get across the river.
    She looked out over the water. The snow was still falling, but lightly, and the last sliver of the sun was disappearing in the west, so she couldn’t see very far, certainly not to the other side of the river. The Greenwash was at least three thousand paces wide here, and was roaring with snow-melt, its furious current made visible by the chunks of ice that whirled past, remnants of winter that had lingered in the more sheltered parts of the banks until the spring floods scoured them out.
    There was no way Ferin could swim across, even if she were uninjured. The current was far too swift, and the water too cold. She would be drowned or frozen before she got even part of the way.
    The bridge was now out of the question. The only way onto it was through the North Castle, and the shaman and his keeper would have been only the vanguard of other nomads who would be watching there, waiting for her to approach. If there were enough of them, they might even start searching along the riverbank and to the north, in case she’d doubled back. But it was more likely now they’d wait till morning, and light.
    Which meant Ferin had to somehow get across this great, swollen, ferociously cold river in the darkness.
    She tore off a strip of the alder bark—it was good for wounds—and chewed on it thoughtfully, looking along the riverbank in thefading light. There was a large clump of some kind of rushes nearby. Not the same as the ones that grew in the high alpine lakes of her home, but similar.
    Ferin lifted her head and listened to the noises about her. The rushing waters of the river were so loud she had to focus deeply to hear anything else. But her hearing was acute, and well trained. She stood silently, behind the alder trunk, putting all the small sounds together. None of them suggested other people, particularly people sneaking up on her.
    Ferin left the alders and crawled carefully along the bank, making her trail look like some small animal’s so she left no obviously human marks in the snow and mud. When she reached the reeds, she stopped and listened again, while watching for any signs of movement in the knee-high grass beyond the riverbank.
    Again, there was nothing untoward. Ferin drew one of the tall reeds down and examined it as best she could in the fading light, and by touch. Its long stem was hollow, like the lake reeds she knew, but it had a large, flowery head instead of a closed, spearlike point.
    Ferin cut it off close to the base with her knife and laid it down in front of her. Again, she waited and listened, then