Scales Beneath the Skin
The dragonsteel chain touched Rowan's wrist, and his scales sank back into his skin as if something had sucked them out of him.
It was the worst feeling of his life. Worse than the pain of them growing. It was like being emptied. The warmth in his chest guttered like a candle in wind, and his knees buckled.
Then a lantern full of silverflame oil sailed over the crowd and smashed against the thatched roof of the festival stage.
The roof went up in a sheet of white fire.
"Fire!" someone shrieked. "The stage is burning!"
Rowan looked up through the smoke and saw Talia at the edge of the square, already reaching for a second lantern, her face fierce and terrified at once.
The square exploded into chaos.
* * *
People ran in every direction. The rope barrier snapped. The knight holding Rowan's chain turned to shout an order, and a fist the size of a hammerhead caught him across the jaw.
Master Bram stood over the fallen knight, breathing hard. Another soldier grabbed for him. Bram shoved the man into a water trough without even looking.
"Go, boy!" he roared. "Go!"
From the garrison tower, the fire bell began to clang wildly. Rowan caught a glimpse of straw-colored hair at the bell rope. Nell was hanging off it with both hands, ringing it for all she was worth.
A thin hand gripped Rowan's arm. Brother Osric, cane forgotten, bent over the chain with a small iron key.
"Chapel keys open Order locks," the old man panted. "Nobody ever remembers that. Hold still."
The lock clicked. The chain fell away. Warmth flooded back into Rowan so fast it made him dizzy.
Talia skidded to their side. Osric pressed a leather pouch into her hands, thick with folded pages.
"The rest of the Codex," he said. "Everything I've hidden for forty years. Your mother could read the rest. So can you."
"Come with us," Talia said.
"I'd only slow you. The chapel cellar has a second door that opens onto the lane behind the forge. Go through it. I'll hold the first." He looked at Rowan, and his old eyes were wet. "I saw the mark on your palm the night Bram brought you in, sixteen winters ago. A crescent. I knew then. I should have told you. I was a coward, boy. I'm sorry."
"You knew?" Rowan's voice cracked. "The whole time?"
"Run," said Osric.
* * *
The cellar's back door was barred with an iron plate, rusted solid. Talia heaved at it. Nothing.
Rowan put his left hand on the metal.
He didn't know how he did it. He only knew he wanted the door open more than he had ever wanted anything. The pain came again, the tearing, blooming pain, and copper-red scales spread over his fingers and up his forearm. He pushed.
The iron plate bent like wet leather. The door burst outward into the lane.
"Oh," said Talia faintly. "Well. That's useful."
Rowan didn't answer. He couldn't. His arm felt skinned alive.
They ran down the lane toward the river gate. Behind them the fire bell kept ringing. Soldiers were shouting, but everyone was running toward the square, toward the burning stage, and not toward them.
The river gate was a narrow arch where the fishing boats came in. It was always guarded. Always.
Tonight it stood open. Nobody there.
Talia slowed, frowning. "That's lucky."
"I don't get lucky," Rowan said.
He looked back once. Through the smoke, framed in the chapel doorway, he saw Cassian Rook seize Osric by the collar. The old man didn't fight. He just stood there, small and grey, with his arms spread across the door.
Then Cassian turned his head. He looked straight down the lane toward the river gate. Straight at Rowan.
Rowan's heart stopped.
A rider galloped up beside Cassian and bent to say something in his ear. Cassian's face tightened. For a long moment he didn't move.
Then he turned away and dragged Osric toward the square.
"Rowan!" Talia hissed from the gate. "Now!"
They ran through the empty arch and into the dark.
* * *
Beyond Greywater lay the Blackfen, a swamp of black water, reeds taller than a man, and mud that tried to steal your boots with every step. They waded through it for hours, following the stars, until the lights of Greywater were only a smudge behind them.
Talia led. She moved through the swamp like she'd been born in it, testing each step with a broken reed before trusting her weight to it. Twice she yanked Rowan back just before he stepped into water that turned out to have no bottom.
"How do you know where you're going?" he asked.
"I don't. I know where we're not going, which is back." She pointed up with the reed. "The Lantern Star. Keep it on your right shoulder and you're heading south and east. Mother taught me that too. She said a scholar who can't read the sky deserves to get lost."
"Your mother sounds terrifying."
"She was wonderful," Talia said. "Which is sometimes the same thing."
Behind them, far away, a horn sounded. Long and low, rolling over the reeds. Then another answered it from further west.
"Search parties," Talia said. "Spreading out."
"They'll bring dogs."
"Dogs can't track through water." She glanced back at him. "Can dragons?"
"I don't know," Rowan said. "I don't know anything about dragons. Yesterday I thought they were monsters that died three hundred years ago."
"And today?"
He looked down at his left arm, at the dark coin-shaped marks where the scales had been, and didn't answer.
The horns faded. The stars wheeled slowly overhead. The mud got deeper, and the cold crept up through his boots, and still the heat inside him didn't go away. It was building.
Somewhere past midnight, Rowan fell down.
He didn't mean to. His legs just stopped. The scales on his arm had faded, leaving dark marks under his skin like bruises shaped like coins, and the heat that had come with them hadn't faded at all. He could feel it in his chest, in his throat, behind his eyes. The reeds around him began to steam.
"You're burning up," Talia said, kneeling beside him. She touched his forehead and snatched her hand back. "Rowan, you're actually burning up."
"Sorry," he mumbled.
"Don't apologize, you idiot, just— hold on." She looked around wildly, then grabbed him under the arms and hauled, and he found himself sliding sideways into a pool of black swamp water.
It was freezing. It hissed when it touched him. Steam rolled up around them both like fog.
Slowly, slowly, the heat inside him ebbed.
"How did you know that would work?" he asked when his teeth stopped chattering.
"I didn't. But fire goes out in water. It seemed worth trying." She sat back on a hummock of moss, soaked to the knees, and pushed her wet braid over her shoulder. "Mother wrote about it. In her notes. Scaleborn fevers. She said cold water helps."
"Your mother studied people like me?"
"My mother studied dragons. The real history, she called it. She could read Wyrmscript, the old dragon writing. She taught me when I was little. We used to do it like a game." Talia stared at the black water. "Three years ago, the Order came for her. They called it heresy. They held a trial that lasted an hour."
She didn't say the rest. She didn't need to.
"I'm sorry," Rowan said.
"Everyone's sorry." But she said it gently.
They sat for a while listening to the frogs.
"I don't know who my mother was," Rowan said at last. "Somebody left me at the garrison gate when I was a baby. Wrapped in a blanket. Bram found me. The garrison stamped a number on a tag and that was my name, pretty much." He touched the iron disc at his throat. Forty-seven. It was cold again now, just ordinary iron. "Bram's the only one who ever called me son. And Nell. And now they're back there and I can't…"
He stopped, because his voice wasn't working right.
Talia was quiet. Then she opened her map case, took out the last half of a bread roll, squashed and slightly damp, and held it out to him.
"It's the last one," she said. "Don't make it weird."
He took it. It was the best thing he had ever eaten.
* * *
Later, while Talia slept curled against a tree root, Rowan lay awake and listened.
The frogs. The wind in the reeds. And under it, very softly, the voice.
We are awake now, it said. Not singing this time. Watchful. They will come for us.
"Who's they?" he whispered. "Who's we? Please. I need to know what I am."
The voice didn't answer. But he felt it there, vast and patient and sad, like a mountain keeping watch over a very small boy.
* * *
He woke at grey dawn to the sound of a crossbow being cocked.
Then another. And another.
Rowan sat up very, very slowly. Talia was already awake beside him, frozen, her knife half out of her boot.
Seven crossbows pointed at them from the reeds. Behind them stood seven people in mud-colored cloaks, and one of them stepped forward. A broad woman with grey-streaked red hair shaved at the sides and one notched ear. On the side of her neck was an ugly old burn, a scar where someone had burned away a brand.
She looked Rowan up and down.
"So," she said. "You're the boy who set Greywater on fire. Get up. Slowly."