Every Road Leads to Dawnspire
When Rowan and Talia got back to the warehouse, the door was hanging open, Hedda's crossbow lay snapped in half on the floor, and the iron tag around Rowan's neck was burning hot, like it had just been pulled from the forge.
The warehouse was empty.
Crates overturned. Maps torn. A lantern still rolling slowly across the boards, its flame guttering out. The smell of smoke and horses.
"No," Talia whispered. "No, no, no—"
"Hedda!" Rowan shouted. "Pim! Anyone!"
Silence.
Then a scrape from the floor. A drain cover shifted, and a filthy face peered up at them. A woman from the camp, one of the archers. Behind her in the sewer tunnel crouched five more, bruised and wide-eyed.
"Knights," she said hoarsely. "An hour after you left. They didn't search. They didn't even knock. They just knew. Came straight in through both doors." Her voice cracked. "They took Hedda. They took almost everyone. Pim, too."
* * *
They sat in the sewer tunnel in the dark, eight of them, while Talia turned the question over and over like a stone.
"How?" she muttered. "How did they know? Greywater. Then Hollowmere. The knights found the causeway on the first night we were there. Now here." She was talking to herself, fast, the way she did when she was thinking too hard. "Every time. Every single place we've been."
Rowan's hand had gone to his throat without him noticing. The tag was still warm.
"Maybe someone told them," one of the others said. "A spy. Someone in the camp."
"Nobody in the camp knew about this warehouse except Hedda's people," the archer said. "And Hedda's people are the ones who got taken."
"Then someone followed us from the river."
"Nobody followed us," Talia said. "I checked. Three times. I always check." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "It's not a spy. It's something else. Something we keep bringing with us. Something that was with us in Greywater and in Hollowmere and here."
Everyone was quiet. Water dripped somewhere in the dark.
Talia looked at it.
She went very still.
"It gets warm," she said slowly. "Doesn't it. Your tag. I felt it at the lake, when I held your hand. And you touched it in Greywater, right before the Lantern rode in. And at Hollowmere, before the knights came, you were holding it." Her eyes lifted to his. "Rowan. Give it to me."
"Talia—"
"Give it to me."
He pulled it over his head. She held it up to the light of his palm. The iron disc, stamped with the Order's sunburst and the number 47, the only name he'd had for sixteen years. Then she slipped her knife into the seam around its edge and pried.
The iron split. Inside, where there should have been nothing, was a tiny core of black metal with a dull red sheen.
Dragonsteel.
"It calls to other dragonsteel," she said. Her voice was flat. "Every knight carries some. Every chain. Every collar. When they're near, it warms. And when you use your fire, it warms, and they feel it too." She looked at the black core like it was a poisonous insect. "He knew, Rowan. He always knew where you were. Every garrison servant wears one of these. He's been able to find you your whole life."
"The river gate," Rowan said. His voice didn't sound like his own. "In Greywater. Nobody was guarding it."
"He let you run."
"He let me run." It came out of him like something breaking. "So I'd get stronger. So I'd ripen. And so I'd lead him straight to everyone who helped me." He pressed both hands against his face. "Hedda. Pim. Everyone at Hollowmere. Osric. I did this. I brought them here. Me."
"You didn't know."
"It doesn't matter that I didn't know!"
The tunnel echoed. The others looked away.
Rowan took the broken tag from Talia's hand. He looked at the number stamped on it one last time. Forty-seven. He'd been proud of it once. It had been proof he belonged somewhere.
It had been a leash.
His scales bloomed over his fingers, copper-red and gleaming in the dark. He closed his fist. The iron and the dragonsteel core crumpled together with a sound like a snapping bone, and when he opened his hand, there was nothing left but a twisted lump of metal.
He dropped it into the sewer water, and it sank.
* * *
Near midnight, the criers came.
They walked the streets ringing hand bells, and even down in the tunnel, their voices carried through the drains.
"Hear the word of the Lord Regent! At noon on this Jubilee day, the traitors of the so-called Ashen Hand will be executed on the Cathedral steps, in celebration of three hundred years of Dawn!"
Talia closed her eyes.
"Unless," the crier went on, "the Scaleborn of Greywater surrenders himself to the Order before the bell. If he does, the Lord Regent in his mercy will spare them all."
Noon was twelve hours away. And the Rite of Dawn, whatever it was, would come even sooner.
Nobody in the tunnel said anything. They didn't have to. They were all looking at Rowan.
"No," Talia said. "No. Absolutely not."
"Talia—"
"It's a trap! Obviously it's a trap! He wants you, Rowan, he needs you for the Rite, whatever it is, and the second you walk up those steps he'll put a collar on you and he won't let anyone go. Men like him don't keep promises. They don't have to."
"Then what else do we do?" Rowan's voice cracked. "Six of us. Against the whole Order. They'll kill Hedda. They'll kill Pim. He's fifteen."
"We find another way!"
"There's no time to find another way!"
"You don't get to decide alone who's worth saving!" She was on her feet now, fists clenched, eyes blazing. "You don't get to just— throw yourself into the fire every time someone's in trouble and call it a plan!"
"I'm the only one he wants!" Rowan shouted back. "It's me. It's always been me. If I go, everyone else has a chance. If I don't, they all die, and it's my fault. Again."
They stared at each other, breathing hard.
Then Talia's face crumpled, just for a second, before she hid it.
"Fine," she said. Her voice shook. "Fine. Then I'll think of something better. I'll think of something before dawn. Just— give me time."
* * *
She thought for hours.
She sat with Osric's Codex and the stolen Cathedral plans spread across her knees in the tunnel, muttering to herself, tracing routes with her ink-stained finger. Rowan watched her. He watched her eyes get heavier, and heavier. She hadn't slept in two nights.
Sometime in the dark hours, her head tipped against the wall, and she was asleep.
Rowan sat for a long time, looking at her.
Then, very carefully, he took the plans of the Cathedral, found the tunnels beneath the Sanctuary, and marked them with a charred fingertip. The servants' door. The corridor. The receiving room. Every turn he remembered. He folded the plans and tucked them into her map case, next to the ledger pages with Teo's name on them.
He tore a scrap from the edge of an old map and scrawled two words on it with a burnt stick.
Get Teo.
He left it on her knee.
At the tunnel mouth, the archer from the camp caught his sleeve. "She'll never forgive you," the woman said quietly.
"She'll be alive to not forgive me," Rowan said. "That's enough."
* * *
The sky was just starting to go grey when he climbed the Cathedral steps.
The square was already filling for the Jubilee. Merchants setting up stalls. Children running with paper sunbursts. And at the top of the steps, in front of the great doors, a line of Dawnknights in silver armor.
In their center stood Cassian Rook.
The walk across the square felt a hundred miles long. A little girl with a paper sunburst bumped into him and said sorry. A baker was laying out his dragon-shaped buns. Somewhere a band was practicing the Jubilee hymn, badly, over and over, the same wrong note every time.
Nobody looked at him. He was just a boy in a borrowed coat.
He thought of Bram, winding the bandage around his hand. It hurts terribly. He thought of Nell hanging off the bell rope. Of Pim on the bridge. Of Talia asleep against the tunnel wall, ink on her fingers.
He thought: this is the right thing. He was almost sure of it.
The knights at the top of the steps saw him coming. One by one, they drew their swords.
Rowan walked up to him. He knelt on the cold stone, and held out his wrists.
"I'm here," he said. "Let them go."
Cassian stared down at him. For a moment, something moved in his face. Something that wasn't fair or calm or certain at all.
Two knights came forward with a black collar. Dragonsteel.
As they bent to lock it, Rowan looked up at Cassian and said, "He let me go, you know. In Greywater. The river gate. You didn't know, did you?"
Cassian's jaw tightened. He didn't answer.
The collar snapped shut around Rowan's throat.
And all the warmth in him went out.
It was like falling into a black lake. The fire in his chest shrank to nothing. The song he'd heard every night of his life, the vast, patient presence of the Queen, went silent. Completely. For the first time since he could remember, there was nothing inside him but himself.
He had never felt so alone.
The knights hauled him to his feet. As they dragged him toward the great doors, Rowan heard Cassian speak. Not to him. Barely to anyone. So quietly it might have been a question he was asking himself.
"Why would he let you go?"