She considered the wardrobe for a little while. But its spare, box-like shape and pine-plank construction made her think of it as an upended coffin. This was not a new thought for Lirael. She had always had what her cousins considered a morbid imagination. As a small child she had liked to playact dramatic 22

death scenes from famous stories. She had stopped playacting years ago, but had never stopped thinking about death. Her own, in particular.

“Death,” Lirael whispered, shivering to hear the word aloud. She said it again, a little louder. A simple word, a simple way to avoid all the things that plagued her. She could avoid Annisele’s Awakening, but she probably couldn’t avoid all the ones that would come after that.

If she killed herself, Lirael reasoned, she wouldn’t have to watch girls increasingly younger than herself gaining the Sight. She wouldn’t have to stand with a bunch of children in blue tunics. Children who all peeked at her under their lashes during the Awakening ceremony. Lirael knew that look and recognized the fear in it. They were afraid that they might be like her, doomed to lack the only thing that really mattered.

And she wouldn’t have to put up with the Clayr who looked at her with pity. The ones who always stopped and asked how she was. As if mere words could describe how she felt. Or as if even if she had the words, Lirael could tell them what it was like to be fourteen and without the Sight.

“Death,” Lirael whispered again, tasting the word on her tongue. What else was there for her? There had always been the hope that one day she would gain the Sight. But now she was fourteen. Who had ever heard of a Clayr Sightless at fourteen? Things had never seemed quite so desperate as they were today.

“It’s the best thing to do,” Lirael pronounced, as if she were informing a friend of a vital decision. Her voice sounded confident, but inside she wasn’t so sure. Suicide wasn’t something the Clayr did. Killing herself would be the final, terrible confirmation that she just didn’t belong. It probably was the best thing. How would she actually do it? Lirael’s eyes strayed to 23

where her practice sword hung in its scabbard on the back of the door. It was blunt, soft steel. She could probably fall on its point, but that would lead to a very slow and painful death. Besides, someone would almost certainly hear her screaming and get help.

There was probably a spell that would still her breath, dry up her lungs, and close her throat. But she wouldn’t find that in the school texts, her workbook of Charter Magic, or the Index of Charter Marks, both of which lay on the desk a few paces away. She’d have to search the Great Library for such a spell, and that sort of magic would be locked away by charm and key.

That left two reasonably accessible means of ending it all: cold and height. “The glacier,” whispered Lirael. That would be it, she decided. She would climb the Starmount Stair while everyone else was at Annisele’s Awakening, and then throw herself onto the ice. Eventually, if anyone bothered to look, they would find her frozen, broken body—and then they would all realize how hard it was to be a Clayr without the Sight.

Tears filled her eyes as she imagined a great crowd silently watching as her body was carried through the Great Hall, the blue of her child’s tunic transformed to white by the ice and snow encrusted upon it.

A knock at the door cut short her morbid daydream, and Lirael jumped up, relieved. The Nine Day Watch must have finally Seen her, for the first time ever. They’d Seen her climb out onto the glacier and go plunging down, so they’d sent someone to prevent that future, to tell her that she would gain the Sight one day, that everything would be fine.

Then the door opened, before Lirael could say “Come in.”

That was enough to tell her that it wasn’t a Nine Day Watcher concerned for her safety. It was Aunt Kirrith, Guardian of the Young. Or more the other way round, since she never treated Lirael any differently from the others, and particularly didn’t show her the affection you might expect from an aunt.

“There you are!” boomed Kirrith unnecessarily in her annoying, falsely jolly voice. “I looked for you at breakfast, but there was such a crush I just couldn’t find you. Happy birthday, Lirael!”

Lirael stared at Kirrith and at the present she was holding out. A large, square package, wrapped in red and blue paper dusted with gold. Very pretty paper, too. Aunt Kirrith had never given her a present before. She explained this by saying that she never accepted presents either, but Lirael thought that this missed the point. It was all about giving, not receiving. “Go on, open it,” exclaimed Kirrith. “We haven’t got much time till the Awakening. Fancy it being little Annisele!” Lirael took the package. It was soft, but quite heavy. For a moment, all her thoughts of killing herself were gone, driven away by curiosity. What could the present be?

Then, as she felt the package again, a terrible presentiment stuck her. Quickly, she tore a hole in the corner of the paper, and saw the telltale blue. “It’s a tunic,” said Lirael, the words seeming to come from someone else, and a long way away. “A child’s tunic.”

“Yes,” said Kirrith, resplendent in her own white robe, the circlet of silver and moonstones secure on her white-blond head. “I noticed your old one was too short, not really seemly, with the way you’ve grown. . . .”

She kept on talking, but Lirael didn’t hear a word. Nothing seemed real anymore. Not the new tunic in her hands. Not Aunt Kirrith talking away. Nothing.

“Come on then, get dressed!” Kirrith encouraged her, straightening the folds of her own robe. She was a large and tall woman, one of the tallest of the Clayr. Lirael felt very small in front of her, and somehow dirty compared to the great expanse of white that was Kirrith’s robe. She stared at that whiteness and began to think again of ice and snow.

She was lost in her thoughts when Kirrith tapped her on the shoulder.

“What?” Lirael asked, realizing that she’d missed most of Kirrith’s words.

“Get dressed!” repeated Aunt Kirrith. A slight frown folded the skin on her forehead, making her circlet move down and shadow her eyes. “It would be terribly rude to be late.”

Mechanically, Lirael pulled off her old tunic and slipped on the new one. It was heavy linen, stiff with newness, so she struggled a little with it, till Aunt Kirrith pulled it down smartly. When her arms were through and the tunic settled on her shoulders, it reached just above her ankles.

“Plenty of room for growth,” remarked Aunt Kirrith with satisfaction. “Now we really must get on.”

Lirael looked down at the sea of blue cloth that swathed her entire body, and thought that there was more room than she could ever possibly fill. Aunt Kirrith must expect her never to wear the white of the Awakening, for this tunic would fit even if she kept on growing till she was thirty-five.

“You go on—I’ll catch up in a minute,” she lied, thinking of the Starmount Stair, the cliffs beyond, and the waiting ice. “I have to go to the toilet.”

“Very well,” said Kirrith as she hurried back out into the corridor. “But be quick, Lirael! Think of what your mother would say!”

Lirael followed her, turning left towards the nearest water closet. Kirrith turned right, clapping her hands to hasten on a 26

trio of eight-year-olds who were dressing as they walked, their tunics half over their heads, smothering giggles.

Lirael had no idea what her mother would have said about anything. She had been teased about Arielle often enough when she was younger, before she became too much of an outsider to be teased. It was quite normal for the Clayr to seek casual lovers from visitors to the Glacier, and not even that uncommon to find one outside. But it was unheard of not to record the parentage of children.

Her mother had compounded her strangeness by leaving the Glacier—and a five-year-old Lirael—called by some vision she had not shared with the other Clayr. Years later, Aunt Kirrith had told Lirael that Arielle was dead, though no details ever came. Lirael had heard various theories, including Arielle being poisoned by jealous rivals in the court of some barbarian lordling in the frozen wastes of the North or killed by beasts. Apparently she’d been serving as a seer, something that no Clayr would think was a suitable occupation for people of their Blood.

The pain of losing her mother was locked away in Lirael’s heart, but not so deep it could not be uncovered. Aunt Kirrith was an expert at bringing it back.

Once Kirrith and the three suddenly chastened girls were gone, Lirael doubled back to her room and got her outdoor gear: a coat of heavy wool, greasy with lanolin; a cap of double felt with earflaps; oilskin overshoes; fur-lined gloves; and leather goggles with lenses of smoked green glass. Part of her said it was stupid to get these things, since she was going to her death anyway, but another small voice inside her said that she might as well be properly dressed.

Because all the inhabited parts of the Clayr’s domain were heated by steam piped up from the deep springs, Lirael carried 27

her outdoor gear, the smaller items wrapped in the coat. It was going to be hot enough climbing the Starmount Stair without wearing all that wool. As a last-minute gesture of defiance, she pulled off the new tunic and threw it on the floor. Instead, she chose to put on the neutral garments worn when the Clayr were on kitchen or scullery duty in the Lower Refectory, a long grey cotton shirt that came down to the knees, over thin blue woollen leggings. There was a canvas apron that went with this ensemble, but Lirael left that behind.

It was strange slinking down the Northway with no one in sight. Normally, there would be dozens of the Clayr going about their business on this busy thoroughfare, either heading to or from the Nine Day Watch or engaged in the myriad more mundane tasks of the community. The Clayr’s Glacier was really a small town, albeit a very strange one, since its primary business was to look into the future. Or, as the Clayr had to constantly explain to visitors, the numerous possible futures. At the point where the Northway met the Zigzag, Lirael made sure she was unobserved. Then she went a few steps along the first zig of the Zigzag, looking for a small, dark hole at waist height. When she found it, she took out the key she wore on a chain around her neck. All the Clayr had such keys, and they opened most of the common doors. The Starmount Door was not often used, but Lirael didn’t think it needed a special key.

There was no sign of a door around the keyhole until Lirael put in the key and turned it twice. Then a faint silvery line spread from the floor and slowly traced a doorway in the yellowish stone.

Lirael pushed the door open. Cold air rushed in, so she went through quickly. If there were any other people about, they would notice a cold breeze more quickly than anything 28

else. The Clayr might live in a mountain that was half smothered by a glacier, but they didn’t revel in the cold.

The door swung shut behind Lirael, and the silver lines that marked its outline slowly faded. Ahead of her, the steps rose up in a straight line, the Charter marks above them providing light that was dimmer than that in the main halls. The risers were higher than usual, something Lirael hadn’t remembered from a class excursion many years before, when all steps had seemed high. She grimaced as she started to climb, knowing that her calf muscles would soon protest the extra sixinch rise.

There was a bronze handrail for the first hundred or so steps, where the Stair went up in a dead straight line. Lirael gripped it as she climbed, the cool of the metal soothing under her hand. As was her habit, she started counting steps, the regular rhythm temporarily banishing the mental images of herself falling down an endless slope of ice.

She hardly noticed when the handrail stopped and the steps began to turn inwards, into the long spiral that would take her to the top of the mountain, Starmount. Its sister peak was Sunfall, and the two mountains held the glacier between them. The glacier had once had its own name, but it was long forgotten. So for thousands of years it had been called after the Clayr who lived above, beside, and sometimes beneath it. Over time that name had come to be extended to the Clayr’s realm as well, so both the great mass of ice and the halls of stone were known as the Clayr’s Glacier, as if they were all one.

Not that the Clayr chose rooms too close to the glacier as a rule. They had lived in the mountain for millennia, following the tunneling of the now almost extinct drill-grubs or carrying out their own magical or physical excavations. At the same time, the glacier had continued its inexorable march down the 29

valley, and into the mountains that gripped its sides. Ice ground down and broke through stone, and the glacier was indifferent if that also meant crashing through the tunnels of the Clayr. Of course, the Clayr could See where the glacier was going to have its unthinking way, but that hadn’t stopped various ambitious builders of bygone days. Obviously they had felt their extensions would last as long as they did, and probably for at least three or four generations after them—time enough to make the work worthwhile.

Lirael thought of all those builders and wondered why the Stair had been made with such uncomfortably high steps.

But after a while, even mechanically counting steps couldn’t keep her imagination under rein. She started to imagine how Annisele would be looking right at that instant. Perhaps she was standing at the children’s end of the Great Hall, a single figure in white amidst a field of blue. She would be staring down the other end, no doubt, barely aware of the ranks and ranks of white-clad Clayr, sitting in the pews that lined both sides of the Hall for several hundred yards, twenty-one ranks deep. Pews made from ancient dark mahogany, with silk cushions that were replaced every fifty years, with considerable ceremony. At the far end of the Hall, there would be the Voice of the Nine Day Watch, and perhaps some of the Watchers too, their business permitting. They would be standing around the Charter Stone that rose up from the floor of the Hall, a single menhir swarming with all the glowing, changing marks of the Charter that described everything in the world, seen or unseen. And on the Charter Stone, higher than anyone could reach, save the Voice with her metal-tipped wand, there would be the circlet of the new Clayr, the silver and moonstones reflecting the Charter marks of the Stone.