The Regent’s Face
The Lord Regent stepped onto his balcony, pulled off one white glove to wave to the crowd, and Rowan saw the ring.
Black. Heavy. A sunburst pressed over a single broken wing.
He had seen it carved in stone a thousand times, on the hand of the statue in Greywater. On the hand of Aldric Vane.
It was not similar. It was not a copy. It was the same ring, down to a tiny notch on the edge of the sunburst, where the sculptor, three hundred years ago, had carved a flaw that must have been real.
Rowan's hands went hot. Beside him, Talia grabbed his wrist and squeezed.
"Not here," she breathed. "Breathe. Not here."
* * *
Dawnspire was the biggest place Rowan had ever seen.
White stone streets climbed a tall hill in rings, and at the very top stood the Cathedral, its great bell tower stabbing into the sky like a silver needle. Every street was hung with gold banners for the Jubilee. Every window had a candle. Tomorrow at noon the Regent would stand on the Cathedral steps and celebrate three hundred years since Aldric slew the Dragon Queen.
Nobody in this city knew she wasn't dead. Nobody knew she was walking through their streets in a borrowed porter's coat, with a hood pulled low over dark auburn hair.
The Ashen Hand hid in a warehouse by the river docks. Hedda's people in the city had brought weapons, food, and maps. The maps were the problem.
"The Sanctuary's joined to the Cathedral by tunnels," Hedda said, spreading them on a crate. "But none of our maps show where. We go in blind, we die."
"Then we don't go in blind." Talia put her finger on a building near the Cathedral. "The Hall of Regents. It's open to the public for the Jubilee, for the first time in forty years. It holds the original plans of the Cathedral. My mother saw them once." She looked up. "I can get them."
"The place will be crawling with knights."
"Which is why no one will notice two more tired servants carrying crates," Talia said, and looked at Rowan.
"Absolutely not," Hedda said. "He's the most wanted person in Aurendel."
"He's a porter in a hood. Nobody looks at porters. I've been a porter, a maid, a flower seller, and once a very short soldier. Nobody ever looked at me once." Talia was already pulling a rough brown coat off a peg. "And if something goes wrong, I'd rather have someone with me who can melt a lock."
Hedda looked at Rowan. Rowan looked at the coat.
"She's going either way," he said. "I'd rather be there."
For a moment Hedda looked like she might argue. Then she sighed and shoved a crate into his arms. "Keep your head down. Keep your hands cold. And if you see the Regent, you walk away. Understand?"
Rowan nodded. Neither of them had any idea, then, how hard that would be.
The streets of Dawnspire were so crowded that nobody glanced twice at two young porters shuffling up the hill with crates on their shoulders. They passed fountains carved like sunbursts. A puppet show where a wooden Aldric chopped the head off a wooden dragon while children cheered. A baker selling dragon-shaped buns with the heads bitten off.
Rowan kept his hands cold. It was harder than it had ever been.
* * *
Inside, the Hall of Regents was cool and hushed and full of paintings.
Eight portraits hung along the main gallery, one for each Regent of the Veyne line, from the founder who had ruled after Aldric's death, to Caddoc Veyne today. Visitors shuffled past them, murmuring respectfully.
Rowan set down his crate and looked at them properly.
The first Regent had brown hair and a beard. The third had a scar on his lip. The fifth wore spectacles. The eighth, Caddoc, had long silver hair tied back.
But they all had the same cheekbones. The same thin mouth. The same pale, patient eyes, following you down the gallery.
And every one of them wore the same black ring.
Talia had stopped beside him. She'd slipped a folded page from her map case, one of Osric's Codex pages, a faded ink sketch labeled in Wyrmscript. Aldric, steward of the Wardens. She held it up beside the first portrait. Then the fourth. Then the last.
"Rowan," she said, very quietly. "It's one man."
He looked. The sketch showed a younger face, rougher, hungrier. But it was the same face. It was always the same face.
"Veyne," Talia whispered. "Vane. He never had descendants. He just changed his name. Every forty years, a new heir arrives from somewhere far away, and the old Regent dies, and nobody ever sees the two of them together." Her voice shook. "Aldric Vane never died. He is the Regent. He's been the Regent for three hundred years."
We can feel him breathing, the Queen had said.
"How?" Rowan whispered. "How is he still alive?"
Talia's eyes went to the far door, where a line of servants was carrying crates toward the Regent's private rooms. Small crates. Padded with straw.
"I think," she said, "I know."
* * *
The plans of the Cathedral were in a glass case in the archive room. Talia picked the lock in under a minute while Rowan warmed the hinges until they stopped squeaking. She memorized the tunnels in three more, and they slipped through a servants' door into a narrow corridor that led, according to the plans, toward the receiving rooms of the Sanctuary.
It was dim and quiet there. It smelled of candle wax and something sharp, like medicine.
A room full of crates. The same red vials Rowan had seen in Greywater, hundreds of them, glowing softly. And on a desk, an open ledger.
Talia read it by the light of Rowan's palm. Her face went grey.
"Extraction record," she read. "Ember drawn from Hollow subjects, refined for the Regent's tonic." She turned a page. "Hollow. That's what they call people after… after the ember is taken out. They don't die. They just…"
"Sleep," Rowan said. "With their eyes open." He didn't know how he knew. The Queen knew. He could feel her grief like cold stone in his chest.
"He's been drinking them," Talia whispered. "Three hundred years. Every child who ever turned the flame gold. He's been drinking their dragons to stay alive."
She turned another page. And stopped.
Teo Morrow, 15. Hollow. Reserved for the Rite.
Talia made a sound Rowan had never heard a person make.
"He's alive," Rowan said fast, gripping her shoulders. "Talia. He's Hollow, not dead. That means there's still time. Look at me."
She looked. Her eyes were wild. Then, slowly, she dragged in a breath, and another, and turned the pages again with trembling fingers. "There's more. Older ones. Someone kept them all." A line near the back. "Maren Rook. Hollow. Year 290. That's the name from Greywater." She glanced up. "There was a guard in the hall earlier. Talking about the Lantern. He said Cassian's mother died of fever when he was ten. Eight years ago. Year 290."
"She didn't die," Rowan said slowly. "She's here."
Footsteps in the corridor. A heavy tread. A voice, cold and clipped: "Check the receiving room. The Regent wants every vial counted before the Rite."
"High Lantern Morrec," Talia breathed.
They dove behind a stack of crates. Rowan pressed his palm to the lock of a side door and poured heat into it until the metal softened. It gave with a tiny click, and they slipped through just as the door behind them opened.
* * *
They came out, somehow, on a rooftop.
The city spread below them in rings of candlelight, glowing for the Jubilee. The Cathedral rose opposite them, close enough to throw a stone at, its bell tower black against the stars. Tomorrow at dawn, somewhere beneath it, the Rite would begin.
"Five months," Talia said suddenly. "Teo's been in there five months. He used to be scared of the dark. When he was little, I'd sit up with him and draw the stars on the wall with chalk, so he'd have something to look at. He learned all their names before he could read." She swallowed. "He wanted to be a map-maker. Of the sky."
"He still can," Rowan said.
"You keep saying things like that."
"Because I keep believing them." He looked at his hands. "Somebody has to. You believe in the truth. I'll believe in the ending. That seems fair."
She almost smiled.
They sat with their backs against a chimney, waiting for full dark to climb down. Talia had the ledger pages clutched in both hands.
"If I lose my name again," Rowan said quietly, "down there. If I go gold, like at the lake. Don't let me hurt anyone. Promise me. Whatever you have to do."
Talia stared out at the city for a long time.
"Then don't make me choose," she said. "Don't make me choose between you and everyone else. Because I don't know what I'd pick."
He didn't know what to say to that. So he just nodded, and the silence between them was full of something neither of them had a name for yet.
Then the tag at his throat went warm.
Rowan looked up.
On the roof of the Cathedral, directly across from them, a man was standing alone. Tall, thin, elegant. Long silver hair tied back. A high dark collar. White gloves.
He was looking straight at them. As if he had known exactly where they would be.
Lord Regent Caddoc Veyne smiled. When he spoke, he didn't raise his voice at all, but somehow every word carried clear across the gap between the rooftops, soft and patient and old.
"Hello, little Queen," said Aldric Vane. "I have waited three hundred years for you to ripen."