The Sunken Chapel
Talia woke up in the empty sewer tunnel with the plans of the Cathedral in her map case and a scrap of paper on her knee.
Two words, scrawled in charcoal.
Get Teo.
She stared at it. Then she crushed it in her fist so hard her knuckles went white.
"You idiot," she said to no one. "You absolute, complete, unbelievable idiot."
The archer at the tunnel mouth looked back at her. "He went an hour ago. I tried to stop him."
"No, you didn't." Talia was already on her feet. "But that's all right. Nobody ever can."
* * *
There were six of them. Six against the Order of the Silver Dawn.
Talia stood in the dripping tunnel and looked at them, the archers and the dockhands and the one-handed smith, and understood something she'd been trying not to understand for five months.
She could not do this alone.
She had always done everything alone. After her mother died, she'd taught herself to pick locks and read maps and lie to guards. When Teo was taken, she'd walked the length of Aurendel by herself. She'd been proud of that.
But Rowan was in a collar somewhere above her head, and Hedda was in a cell, and Teo was lying with his eyes open in a room she'd never seen, and pride was not going to get any of them out.
"Listen," Talia said. "I have a plan. It's a bad one. I need all of you."
Nobody laughed. They leaned in.
* * *
The first part of the plan was Cassian Rook.
She found him where she'd guessed she would: guarding the knights' gate at the side of the Sanctuary, where the wagons of red vials came and went. He stood alone in the grey pre-dawn light, looking at nothing, his hand resting on the locket at his throat.
Talia walked straight up to him with her hands open.
He drew his sword. "Stop there."
"You asked him a question," she said. "On the steps. Why would he let you go? I think you've been asking yourself that all night."
His blue eyes narrowed. He didn't lower the sword.
She held out a folded page. The one torn from the ledger in Greywater, and the one from the receiving room here. "Read it. Then decide whether you want to kill me."
Cassian took them. He read them. She watched his face as he read, and she saw the exact moment he reached the name.
Maren Rook. Hollow. Year 290.
For a long time he didn't move. Then, slowly, with fingers that didn't seem to work properly, he opened the silver locket at his throat. Inside was a tiny painting of a woman with fair hair and kind eyes.
"They told me it was a fever," he said. His voice was very quiet. "I was ten. They wouldn't let me see her. They said it was catching. The Regent took me into his own house that same week. He said he'd look after me." He closed his eyes. "He said he'd be my father now."
"He was drinking her," Talia said. It came out harder than she meant. She didn't take it back.
Cassian's scarred eyebrow twitched. He opened his eyes. They were wet, and furious, and for the first time since she'd met him, completely uncertain.
He sheathed his sword.
"The knights' passage," he said. "It goes straight into the Hollow ward. Follow me. And keep your heads down."
* * *
The Hollow ward was very quiet.
It was a long white room lit by soft lamps, with rows and rows of clean narrow beds. The blankets were neat. The floor was swept. It looked peaceful. That was the worst part.
In every bed lay a person. Most were young. They lay on their backs with their eyes open, looking at the ceiling, breathing slowly. They didn't blink when the lamps flickered. They didn't turn when the door opened. They looked like they were dreaming with their eyes open, a dream that went on and on and never ended.
Cassian walked down the rows reading the names on the little cards at the foot of each bed. Near the far end he stopped. He knelt beside a woman with fair hair gone thin and grey, and took her hand, and didn't say anything at all.
Talia found Teo three beds from the door.
He was thinner. His curly black hair had been cut short. His amber eyes, the same as hers, were open and staring at the ceiling, and when she said his name, they didn't move.
"Teo," she said again. She took his hand. It was cool. "Teo, it's me. It's Tali. I came."
Nothing.
She sat with him for exactly ten seconds, because she'd promised herself she'd allow ten seconds. Then she stood up and wiped her face and went to open the cells.
* * *
Hedda was in the third one, bruised and furious and alive. Pim was with her, and a dozen others. And in the last cell, sitting on a bench with his spectacles cracked, was Brother Osric.
He looked up as the door swung open, and his old face crumpled.
"Ilse's girl," he whispered. "Of course. Of course it would be you."
Hedda was out of the cell before the door had finished opening. "Where's the boy?"
"Beneath the Cathedral. The Rite starts at dawn." Talia met her eyes. "Your uprising. The one you planned for noon. Can you start it now?"
Hedda looked at her for a long moment. Then she grinned. It was not a nice grin.
"Give me the tonic," she said.
* * *
From a high window in the passage, on the way down, Talia saw it begin.
The Jubilee crowd had been gathering in the square since before dawn. Now, on the Cathedral steps, a broad figure with grey-streaked red hair climbed onto the rim of a fountain. She held up a crystal vial of glowing red liquid in one hand and a page of the ledger in the other, and her voice carried over the whole square like a battle horn.
"Do you know what your Regent drinks?"
The crowd went still. Then it began to murmur, then to shout.
A line of Dawnknights marched out of the Cathedral doors and formed a wall of silver across the steps. They lowered their spears. The crowd pushed forward. Neither side moved.
Nobody had struck yet. But it was like watching two storms meet.
Talia turned away from the window. There was nothing she could do up there. Her fight was below.
* * *
"The chapel has a second stair," Osric panted as they went down, him leaning on Cassian's arm. "Nobody knows about it. I copied the plans of this place forty years ago, when I was young and brave. And then I spent forty years being too afraid to use them."
"You're using them now," Talia said.
"Yes." He sounded surprised. "I suppose I am." He stopped on a landing to catch his breath, and gripped her arm. "Listen to me. There's something else, something I never told the boy. The Voice. In the Covenant. It isn't just someone who says a name. The Codex is clear. The Voice must step into the fire and speak the oath and name the dragon. And the fire takes its share of you. Always. You carry its mark for the rest of your life."
Talia looked at him. Her stomach turned to ice.
"Why are you telling me this?" she said.
"Because I think you already know," said Osric gently, "who his Voice has to be."
* * *
The Sunken Chapel was a cave.
The stairs spiraled down into a vast, dark hollow in the rock beneath the Cathedral, lit by a ring of silverflame braziers. In the center stood a stone platform. And above it, hanging from chains of black dragonsteel, turning slowly in the cold white light, was the Hollow Crown.
It was exactly like the mural. Black. Jagged. Like broken glass.
From it ran dozens of chains, stretched out like the threads of a spider's web, to a ring of low stone tables around the platform. On each table lay a Hollow Scaleborn, brought down from the ward. Talia saw Teo among them. His eyes were still open. The chain on his wrist glowed faintly red.
And in the center of the platform, on his knees, in a collar of dragonsteel, was Rowan.
Beside him stood Aldric Vane.
The Regent took off his white gloves and folded them neatly. He lifted the Hollow Crown from its chains and placed it on his own head. And then, gently, almost kindly, he reached down and unlocked Rowan's collar.
"Now," he murmured. "Come home."
Rowan screamed.
A river of golden light poured out of him. Out of his chest, his eyes, his hands, up into the black points of the Crown. The light flowed into Aldric. And as Talia watched, the Regent's silver hair began to darken. His pale skin smoothed. His thin shoulders straightened. He was getting younger.
"No!" Talia screamed, and ran.
Rowan's head jerked up. And with a sound like the world tearing, he fought back the only way he had left.
Shadow exploded out of his shoulders. Wings, vast and dark and smoking, too big for the cave, and the chains that bound him snapped like thread. The gold light stopped flowing into the Crown. Aldric staggered.
But Rowan's eyes had gone gold. Completely gold, with nothing human left in them.
He turned. He looked across the cave at Talia. Fire was rising in his throat, bright and terrible.
"Rowan!" she cried. "Rowan, it's me!"
He looked at her the way a storm looks at a tree.
He did not know her name.