The Iron Isles did not possess a sun; they possessed only a varying scale of gray. As Sienna followed Valerius into the heart of his fortress—a monolithic structure of basalt and salt-crusted iron—the air grew so thick with the smell of sulfur and old blood that she had to press a lace handkerchief to her nose.
Valerius led her to a chamber that overhung the churning sea. The floor was a single sheet of reinforced glass, showing the jagged rocks and the swirling foam hundreds of feet below. It was a room designed to induce vertigo, to remind every visitor of their precariousness.
"You speak of head and heart," Valerius said, his back to her as he stared at the horizon. "But the North is a body of stone. It does not die because its leaders are soft. It dies when the spirit of the land is
