By noon the body had been carried to the family chapel, washed, dressed in the grey and silver of the house, and set upon a bier of black stone ringed with fresh-cut ice.
The dragon-headed cane was not with him.
It lay across Isfrid's arm as he stood at the head of the bier, still and white, in a coat that did not quite fit.
Three days of rites. Faust, at the back of the pews in funeral black, black bandage tight over his eye, understood perhaps one word in five.
Candles of blue wax.
Old Latin laced with older German.
A bell of black iron rung nine times from the highest point of the estate.
Each Patriarch of the Concord came forward in turn and laid a shard of ice at the dead man's feet, and each one murmured a single sentence that made the ice smoke.
He counted them as they came.
Ottilie Brandt, the tall woman in grey, Warden-Elder of the Concord.
The more Faust tried to read her, the more puzzled he became. She was like a closed door.
Three elders in dark fur.
A thin man in black who never lifted his eyes from the floor.
And last, almost hidden behind the others, a woman with hair the white of birch bark and a face that might have been forty or four hundred, who laid down her shard without a sound and went back to her place without a glance at the dead.
And standing a pace behind the elders, hands folded, expression one of delicate sorrow, was Reinhardt.
On the third evening, by the light of a hundred blue candles, the rites drew to their close.
"Before the Frost line is closed," Ottilie Brandt said, in a voice that carried without being raised, "the Concord must hear any claim upon the seat."
Isfrid stepped forward, and Faust saw him square his shoulders.
"I am Isfrid Ernst Frost," he said, and his voice shook only a little. "Son of Rita, daughter of Isbert. By his word and by the blood, I claim the seat."
"A fine claim," said Reinhardt.
He stepped from behind the elders with a sad smile and a graceful bow, a man who regretted everything he was about to do.
"Forgive me, cousin. It grieves me to speak at such a time. But I must invoke the Right of Challenge. The boy is in his early twenties, untested, and the son of a ducal house. I do not doubt his grief. I only doubt that grief is a qualification." He laid a hand upon his heart. "I claim the Frost seat, with great reluctance, for myself."
Steel rang.
It happened so fast that Faust, who saw everything, almost missed it. Along both walls of the chapel the knights of the Frost line had stood all three days like grey statues, hands folded on pommels. Now twelve swords left twelve scabbards in a single breath, and twelve points of white steel settled around Reinhardt's throat, ribs, and spine, so close that frost bloomed on the velvet of his coat.
Not one of the knights had spoken.
Not one blade shook.
"The Right of Challenge," said the eldest of the Frost family's own elders, rising from the bench beside the bier, an old man with a voice like cracking ice, "may not be raised against a Successor upon his Accolade. Before his death, our late Patriarch bestowed that mission upon his grandson. It is written in his hand. It is sealed in his blood."
A murmur went through the chapel.
The Patriarchs of the Concord exchanged glances.
Reinhardt did not move.
His pale eyes had slid, slowly, to Isfrid, and they rested there, fixed and unblinking, the way a jeweller studies a stone for the flaw that will let him split it. Isfrid met the stare, jaw tight, knuckles white on the cane.
Neither of them blinked.
"The Accolade," Ottilie Brandt said at last, "is a matter for the Concord and Adepts alone. And I think," she added, and her gaze moved with deliberate slowness across the chapel and came to rest on the back pew, "that we cannot discuss its particulars while a stranger sits among us."
Every head turned.
Faust, who had been rather enjoying the theatre, inclined his own with grave courtesy.
'Quite right. I always did make a poor audience.'
The Patriarchs drew together at the head of the nave, speaking in low voices.
Faust did not rise.
He sat very still and let his sight slip quietly loose from his body, the way a thread slips from a hem, and drift along the stone floor toward the huddle of grey and fur.
A man cannot be blamed for his chief affliction.
He had nearly reached them when something slapped him.
It was a precise, almost courteous blow.
His sight recoiled as a hand recoils from a hot kettle, and for an instant the whole chapel went white.
When it cleared, the woman with the birch-white hair was looking directly at him.
At the exact spot in the air, six paces from the Patriarchs, where his vision had been.
Her fingers were still half-raised from a small, idle flick of the wrist.
She smiled, gently, as one smiles at a child who has wandered into the wrong room.
Then she turned her back on him.
Faust sat in the dark of the back pew with his heart going hard.
Something similar happened to him when he tried to use his vision to spy on Isbert.
'What are you,' he thought, looking at the straight white back, at the grave still faces of the Concord. 'What exactly are you people hiding?'