The Boy Who Didn’t Burn
The first time Rowan Thale put his hand into the forge fire, it was an accident. The second time, it was a choice.
Nell's coat caught on the eve of Dawnday, an hour before midnight, while the whole garrison of Greywater was still hammering the festival stage together. She had come across the yard with a pot of soup for the smiths, humming, her straw-colored hair stuffed under a cap two sizes too big. She leaned too close to the open forge to wave at him. A coal spat. The hem of her coat went orange.
For a heartbeat, nobody moved.
Then Nell screamed, and Rowan was already there.
He didn't think. He grabbed the burning cloth with his left hand, tore it away from her legs, and shoved the whole flaming bundle back into the forge. His fist went into the fire up to the wrist. He held it there, pressing the coat down into the coals until the flames stopped jumping, because that was the fastest way to smother it, and because Nell was still screaming and he needed her to stop.
"Rowan!" Master Bram's voice cracked across the forge like a dropped anvil. "Your hand, boy — your hand!"
Rowan pulled his arm out of the fire.
The sleeve of his shirt was gone, burned away to the elbow. His skin was red with heat and black with soot. Smoke curled off his knuckles.
It did not hurt.
He stared at his hand. He turned it over. In the center of his left palm, the old pale mark he'd had since he was a baby, a crooked little crescent like a fingernail moon, was glowing. Faintly. The way a coal glows after you think it's gone out.
Then it faded, and there was nothing but a dirty palm and a smell like burnt wool.
"I'm fine," Rowan said. His voice sounded strange to him, far away. "Nell? Nell, are you hurt?"
Nell had stopped screaming. She stood in her singed stockings with her mouth open and her gap-toothed face white as flour. "You put your hand in the fire," she whispered.
"I pulled your coat out of the fire. It's different."
"It's not different."
"It's a little different."
Bram was beside them in three strides. He was a huge man, black-bearded, with forearms like tree roots, and the skin of both arms was mottled with thirty years of old burns. He looked at Nell's legs first. Only a red patch on one ankle. Then he took Rowan's wrist in his enormous hand and looked for a long time at the palm.
The forge crackled. Somewhere across the yard, a soldier was singing a bad song about the Hero-King.
"Nell," Bram said quietly, not taking his eyes off Rowan's hand, "go to the kitchen. Tell Cook you knocked the soup over. Tell her you tripped. That's all that happened."
"But he—"
"Nell."
She went. She looked back twice.
When she was gone, Bram let out a breath that seemed to come up from his boots. He reached for the bandage roll on the shelf, the one they kept for real burns, and began winding it around Rowan's hand. Tightly. Thickly. Hiding every finger.
"Master Bram, it doesn't hurt. You don't have to—"
"It hurts," Bram said. "It hurts terribly. You'll keep it wrapped through the festival, and if anyone asks, you were a fool who grabbed hot iron. Understand?"
Rowan understood. That was the problem. Every child in Aurendel understood.
Tomorrow was Dawnday. And on Dawnday, the Order of the Silver Dawn lit the silverflame in the square, and every boy and girl of fifteen and sixteen held their hand above it. If the fire stayed silver, you went home. If it turned gold, you were Scaleborn: dragon-tainted. And the Scaleborn were taken to the Sanctuary in Dawnspire to be cleansed.
Nobody ever came back to say what cleansing meant.
Rowan had passed his first Trial last year. He'd been sure he would pass again. He was a garrison foundling, a forge apprentice with the number 47 stamped on the iron tag around his neck. He was nobody. Nobody wasn't supposed to be anything at all.
"Go to bed," Bram said. His hand rested on Rowan's head, heavy and warm, just for a moment. "Sleep. Maybe it'll be gone by morning."
Neither of them believed it.
* * *
Rowan didn't go to bed. He walked.
Greywater at night smelled of river mud and pine smoke. Lanterns had been strung between the rooftops for the festival, and a huge banner stretched across the main street: THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF DAWN. Painted beneath the letters was the Hero-King, Aldric Vane, sword raised, a dragon dying at his feet.
In the town square stood the statue.
Rowan had walked past it ten thousand times. Aldric in stone armor, one boot planted on the severed head of Vyrmathra, the last Dragon Queen, the monster who had burned the old capital of Caldris to ash three hundred years ago. Children were told to spit at the dragon's head for luck. Rowan never had. He'd always thought the carving looked strange.
Tonight, under the festival lanterns, he finally saw why.
The sculptor had carved the dragon's eyes half-closed. And from the corner of each one ran a long, smooth groove, down across the stone scales of her cheek.
Like tears.
Rowan stood very still. His bandaged hand throbbed, not with pain, but with warmth, as if something inside it had heard him looking.
He shook his head. He was tired, and feverish, and stupid. Statues didn't cry. Monsters didn't cry.
He turned back toward the garrison.
* * *
He was cutting behind the chapel when he heard the window.
It was a soft sound: the scrape of a latch, the creak of old wood. The chapel archive was on the second floor, and Brother Osric, the old archivist, locked it every night. Rowan looked up.
Someone was climbing out.
A small, quick figure in a dark cloak swung one leg over the sill, found the drainpipe, and slid down it like they'd done it a hundred times. They landed in a crouch three steps from Rowan.
They both froze.
It was a girl. His age, maybe. Brown-skinned, freckled across the nose, with a single long black braid tied off with copper wire. A battered leather map case hung across her body. Her fingers, he noticed, were stained with ink.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
A knife appeared in her hand. Small and very sharp, pointed at his stomach. "Don't shout. Don't run. Don't be a hero."
"I wasn't going to be a hero," Rowan said. "I was going to ask what you were doing in the archive."
"Reading."
"At midnight. Through the window."
"The door was busy being locked."
Somewhere near the gate, boots crunched on gravel: a patrol, coming this way. The girl's eyes flicked toward the sound. Rowan saw his chance, and he took it without thinking, the way he'd taken Nell's coat. He caught her wrist.
She gasped and dropped the knife.
Not because he'd squeezed. He hadn't. It was his hand. Even through the bandage, it was hot. Hot like the handle of a poker left in the coals.
She stared at him. Her eyes were amber-brown, and wide, and for one second she didn't look dangerous at all. She looked afraid, and then, very quickly, curious.
"What are you?" she whispered.
"I'm the forge boy," Rowan said. "I burned my hand."
"Liar."
The patrol lantern swung around the corner of the chapel.
The girl twisted free, snatched up her knife, and ran. She went over the garden wall in one leap and was gone into the dark before the soldiers saw anything but Rowan, standing alone with his bandaged hand.
"You," one called. "Forge boy. What are you doing out?"
"Couldn't sleep," Rowan said. "Festival nerves."
The soldier laughed. "Worried about the Trial? Don't be. It's only the tainted ones who need to worry." He tapped the sunburst on his breastplate. "Get to bed."
As the patrol walked away, Rowan looked down. Something pale lay on the gravel where the girl had landed.
A sheet of paper, folded twice. He picked it up and opened it.
It was covered in writing, but not any writing he knew. The letters curled and hooked like claws, like flames, like the tracks of something with wings. It had been copied carefully, by hand, and at the bottom, in ordinary letters, someone had written a single line:
Ask the archivist what happened in the year before the Burning.
Rowan folded the paper and slipped it inside his shirt.
* * *
When he finally lay down on his cot in the loft above the forge, the fever came.
It wasn't bad. It felt like lying too close to a hearth. His bandaged hand pulsed slowly, in time with his heart. He could hear everything: the river moving under the bridge, a mouse in the rafters, Bram snoring below, the far-off clink of sentries changing at the gate.
And beneath all that, the song.
He'd heard it his whole life, only ever in dreams. A voice too big and too gentle to belong to anyone, singing a lullaby no one had ever taught him. When he was small, he'd thought it was his mother. When he got older, he stopped telling people about it, because they looked at him strangely.
Tonight the voice was clearer than it had ever been.
Seven stars fell, but the Queen did not, it sang. She sleeps in the ember, she waits in the heart…
"Who are you?" Rowan whispered into the dark.
The song paused. Something vast seemed to turn toward him, the way the sun turns toward you when you step out of a cave.
We remember fire that did not burn, the voice said. We remember a boy who walked into it for someone else. We have been waiting a long time for that.
"We?" Rowan said. "Who's we?"
But the voice only went back to singing, low and endless, until he fell asleep.
* * *
He woke at dawn, soaked in sweat, with the fever gone.
For one bright second, he thought Bram had been right. Maybe it was gone. Maybe it had been a dream, the fire and the tears and the girl with the knife.
Then he looked at the folded paper still tucked inside his shirt, and his stomach dropped.
Slowly, he unwound the bandage.
His palm was whole and unburned. The crescent mark was pale and quiet. But a little higher, on the inside of his left forearm, just below the elbow, something was pressing up beneath his skin.
Small. Hard. Smooth as polished metal.
The color of dark copper, the color of coals.
A scale.
Rowan stared at it while outside, over the rooftops of Greywater, the great bell of the garrison began to ring. Once. Twice. Three times.
The Trial of Silverflame had begun.