The Queen’s Lullaby
Rowan was humming without thinking about it, the way he always did when he was nervous, and Talia's pen stopped moving.
"Say that again," she said.
"Say what?"
"The song. The second line. What you just hummed." She was already flipping through her notebook, back to the damaged section of the mural, the part about the Voice. "Rowan. Sing it. The words."
He felt his face go hot. "It's just a lullaby. I've heard it in dreams since I was little. It's nothing."
"Sing it anyway."
So he did, quietly, embarrassed:
"Seven stars fell, but the Queen did not;
she sleeps in the ember, she waits in the heart.
Say my name and I'll carry your sky;
hold my fire and I'll never go dark."
Talia stared at her notebook. Then at the cracked wall. Then at him.
"Rowan," she said. "That's not a lullaby. That's an oath."
* * *
It took her an hour to be sure. She laid the words of the song alongside the broken fragments of Wyrmscript on the damaged panel, and one by one, the gaps filled in.
"The Covenant of Scales," she said, tapping the page. "This is how it was sworn. A dragon and a human. The human speaks the dragon's true name. Say my name. That's what a Voice is. Someone who names you, and holds you to yourself. And in return—" she traced the last line "—the dragon carries their sky. Protects them. Forever."
"Why would a dragon need someone to say its name?"
"It says here that without a Voice, a dragon slowly forgets what it is. It goes wild. Like a fire with nothing to hold it." She looked up. "The Voice is what keeps them them."
Rowan thought about the voice in his head. The one that always said we.
"Seven stars fell," he said slowly. "Seven stars. In the last panel. There were seven lights rising up around the Queen."
Before Talia could stop him, he got up and walked to the final panel, where the great dragon lay with the crescent on her brow. He lifted his left hand. The mark on his palm was already glowing.
He pressed it to hers.
* * *
The world went away.
He was standing on a hill above a burning city. The smoke was black and endless. The sky was full of dragons, circling, crying out in voices like thunder and grief. And in front of him, so close he could have touched her, lay the Queen.
She was the size of a house. Of a hill. Her scales were red as embers and gold underneath, and her eyes, when she opened them, were the same gold he'd seen in the silverflame.
Vyrmathra, he thought, and knew it was her name.
We will not fight them, she said. Her voice was the voice from his dreams, but now it came from her, rolling through the ground beneath his feet. We promised. If we break the Covenant, we become exactly what he says we are.
Seven young dragons huddled close around her, barely bigger than horses. Her children. The last of the brood.
So we will fall, the Queen said. Not into death. Into them. Into the children of this land. We will sleep in their blood, and hide in their hearts, until the lie is finished.
The young dragons began to glow. One by one, they dissolved, like sparks lifting off a bonfire. Seven stars, rising into the smoke and scattering across the land.
The Queen watched them go. Then she turned her great head and looked straight at Rowan.
We will wait, she said, for someone who walks into fire for another. Not for glory. Not for power. For someone else. Only then will we wake.
Her body began to glow, too.
You pulled a child from a fire, Rowan Thale. We have been waiting three hundred years for you.
* * *
He came back to himself on the floor of the hall, with Talia shaking his shoulders.
"Rowan! Rowan, say something—"
"She didn't die," he gasped. "Vyrmathra. Aldric never killed her. She chose. She and her children. They hid inside people." He looked down at his palm. The crescent was fading back to pale. "She's in me, Talia. Not a piece of some dragon. Her. The Queen."
Talia sat back on her heels. For once in her life, she didn't have anything to say.
* * *
Hedda didn't much care that he carried a queen.
"Then she can teach you faster," she said, handing him a bucket of cold lake water. "Again."
They trained on the shore, away from the camp, where there was nothing to burn but mud and stones. And something had changed. When Rowan reached for the fire now, he didn't grab. He listened. The way Talia had said. He felt the heat in his chest like a slow tide, and when he breathed out, it came in a rush of gold, controlled and aimed, scorching a boulder black.
It was nothing like the bridge. That had been a flood, a dam bursting. This was a river inside its banks. He could feel exactly how much fire was in him, the way you can feel how much water is left in a bucket by its weight. He could feel where it wanted to go, and he could say no, there, and it went.
"Better," Hedda said. It was the first time she'd said it. "Why?"
Rowan thought about it. "Before, I was trying to hold the fire down," he said. "Like a lid on a pot. Now I'm just… letting her help me aim."
"Her."
"The Queen."
Hedda looked at him strangely, but she didn't laugh.
His throat stung. But he could still talk.
"Again," Hedda said.
He breathed fire a second time. A second boulder cracked in half from the heat.
Pim, watching from the rocks, whooped.
Rowan grinned. He felt strong. Stronger than he'd ever felt. And under the strength was the Queen, huge and warm, and so much more power than he'd touched yet, waiting like a sea behind a wall.
One more, he thought. Just to see.
He reached deeper.
Something spread behind his shoulders. A shadow, a weight, a shape of heat and smoke that unfolded like enormous wings. His vision sharpened until he could see every ripple on the lake, every beat of every bird's heart in the trees. Everything turned gold.
And then he couldn't remember why he was standing on this shore.
There were small, soft creatures nearby. One of them was making noise. It was annoying. It was prey. The fire in his throat rose, hot and hungry, and he turned toward the smallest one, the one on the rocks—
"Rowan!"
A hand caught his. A small, ink-stained hand, gripping hard, even though his skin was hot enough to hurt.
"Rowan Thale," the girl said. She was right in front of him, amber eyes huge and fierce. "Rowan Thale. Look at me. Your name is Rowan Thale."
Rowan. The word meant something. He couldn't remember what.
"Rowan Thale," she said a third time, and it hit him like cold water.
The wings of shadow collapsed. The gold drained out of the world. He was on his knees on the muddy shore, gasping, and Talia was holding his hand, and Pim was standing frozen on the rocks, white-faced, ten feet away.
Rowan had been about to breathe fire at him.
"I forgot," he whispered. "Talia, I forgot my own name. I forgot all of you."
"I know," she said. Her voice was shaking. "I saw your eyes. They went gold."
He looked down at their hands, still joined. His skin was cooling. She hadn't let go, even when it burned.
The iron tag around his neck was warm again, pressed between them. Talia glanced at it, frowned faintly, and filed the thought away somewhere. Then she seemed to notice she was holding his hand, and let go quickly, and neither of them said anything about it.
"That's the next stage, isn't it," Hedda said quietly behind them. She'd seen everything. "Wings."
"I'm never doing it again," Rowan said. "Never. Not unless there's no other way."
Hedda looked at Pim. Then at him. And something in her face changed. "No," she agreed. "I don't think you should."
* * *
The scouts came back that evening with news that turned the whole camp silent.
"Something's happening at the Jubilee," one said. "Something called the Rite of Dawn. Secret. At dawn, beneath the Cathedral. The Sanctuary's been told to prepare the Taken. All of them." He looked at Talia. "There's a list. Your brother's name is on it."
Talia went still.
"Then we go," Hedda said. "Tonight. There's a hay barge leaving from the lake mouth for the river Grey. Four days to Dawnspire." She looked at Rowan. "Not as a weapon, boy. As a key. You get us into the Sanctuary. That's all I'll ask."
* * *
That night, lying on bales of hay under the stars as the barge drifted down the dark river, Rowan listened for the voice.
Talia lay on the next bale over, awake too. He could tell by her breathing.
"Four days," she said to the sky. "Four days, and then I'll see him. Teo."
"We'll get him out."
"You don't know that."
"No," Rowan admitted. "But I'm going to try really hard. And you're going to think of something clever. That's two things. Two things is almost a plan."
She huffed a laugh. After a while, her breathing slowed, and she slept.
It came at last, quieter than he had ever heard it. Not singing.
Afraid.
The one who wears the crown has never died, the Queen whispered. We can feel him breathing.