The light poured down the Door like water.
Everyone inside the new ring of frosted stones stood still and watched it. Eleven thousand people from Frosthold had come through that same Door a little over two weeks ago. They remembered the light. They remembered what had come after it.
Corvin stood at the foot of the Door, beside Ainen's fire and the ice-blue shoot, with his feet planted and his frozen arm in its sling. Big D stood beside him.
"Who do you think it is?" Corvin asked.
"Doesn't matter," Big D said. "They'll be cold and scared and they won't know anything. Same as all of us."
The light reached the ground.
People began to walk out of it.
They came out slowly, a few at a time at first, and then in a great crowd. They wore red and black and dark bronze. They carried no weapons that glowed, and no cards, and they looked around at the frosted grass and the pale rings in the night sky with wide, lost eyes.
The first of them stopped dead a few paces out from the Door.
