Act II, Chapter 6: Cael Takes the Black Oath at the Wall of Sorrows

The torches burned without warmth.

Cael had expected this, abstractly — he had read the accounts, three of them, written by men who had stood where he now stood and felt the need to record that particular disappointment. The Wall of Sorrows rose seven hundred feet behind him, black ice compressed over centuries until it was harder than most stone and darker than any night he had known in the south, and the torches the wardens had planted in a semicircle before the gate burned with a fierce and furious light that the cold simply refused to accept. Ten feet from any flame, his breath still crystalized. Twenty feet, his fingers ached with a purposeful malice that felt less like weather than intent.

A hundred men stood with him in the frozen arc of that light. He did not know their faces. He had spent three days' march north from the nearest garrison town in the company of stragglers and volunteers and the occasional man whose expression suggested he was running from something rather than toward anything, and in those three days he had not learned a single name. This had seemed, at the time, like discretion. He understood now, looking at the faces nearest him — a thick-necked man of perhaps thirty with the scarred hands of someone who had once worked iron, a boy younger than Cael by visible years whose jaw had set hard against whatever expression it wanted to make — that the namelessness was not discretion but preparation. You did not burden yourself with names you might have to carry.