The great hall of the palace had been built to hold light.
Its walls were white stone, its ceiling high and ribbed like the inside of a shell, and along one whole side, tall windows looked out across the gorge to the falls. Lamps hung from chains overhead. The long tables were crowded with Watchers in gray, more than Robin had ever seen in one place, and among them, looking slightly out of place in their good clothes, sat the new merchants of Aranaeth: weavers and stonecutters and a baker with flour still on his sleeve, all of them invited to share what they were building.
At the head of the room stood a tall carved chair for the host of the evening. House Varrow’s crest hung above it.
The chair was empty.
Robin noticed. So did Lyra, across the room. Their eyes met for half a moment.
Corin was everywhere, as usual. Filling cups. Finding seats. Laughing. “Lord Varrow sends his deepest regrets,” Robin heard him tell someone. “A fever, sadly. But he wanted the evening to go on without him.”
Robin sat still and listened to the room.
He knew the feeling before he could name it. He’d felt it in a dungeon once, in the long dark before the guards came. A pressure behind the eyes. A heaviness in the air, the way it gets before a storm, except there was no storm. The lamps hung perfectly still on their chains.
Outside, on the walls above the gorge, twenty of the palace guard stood along the battlements because Lyra had ordered them there. Nobody argued with a Watcher general to her face. But Robin had heard the muttering on the stairs as they went up: old bolts, old stories, a dragon that hadn’t come in forty years. One of them had laughed, once, when she was out of earshot.
There were six old dragon bolts on those walls, great crossbows as long as carts, their iron gone brown with forty years of rust. Peiter went from one to the next with his forge tools and his cracked hands, freeing the winches one stubborn link at a time, with Ezra hauling beside him. By dusk, four of the six would turn. Barely. But they turned.
“One shot,” Henry said quietly. “Maybe two. Make them count.”
Inside the hall, Corin slipped through a side door onto a balcony.
Lyra rose and followed him, without hurry.
At the door, she looked back across the room at Robin, and nodded once.
Robin stood up.
He didn’t shout. Shouting would cause a panic, and a panic in a crowded hall could kill as surely as fire. He walked to where Maren sat, and bent, and spoke in her ear.
Maren listened. Then she stood up on her chair.
“Friends!” Her voice could have carried across a harbor in a gale. “You’ve all heard about the books. Don’t just hear about them. See them. The great stone in the courtyard is big enough to show you my whole hall. Everyone outside. Now, while the light lasts. Bring your cups!”
People laughed, and stood, and began to drift toward the doors, because Maren in her red coat was not a woman people said no to. The Watchers went too, curious. Cal and Kai moved through the crowd, smiling, herding, a hand on an elbow here, a word there.
They had most of the room in the courtyard when Black Ember came.
There was no warning. One moment the sky over the gorge was empty and gold. The next, it was full of him.
He was bigger than Robin remembered. Black as a burnt-out hearth, with wings that blotted out half the sky, and a sound coming from him like a forge drawing breath. He came down the gorge low and fast, past the falls, straight at the palace.
Fire poured from him onto the great hall’s roof.
The lamps inside went out all at once, and then the windows lit up from within, red and orange, and the long tall panes burst outward in a spray of glass. The roof of the great hall caved in with a sound like the end of the world.
In the courtyard, someone screamed. Then everyone was screaming.
“Inside!” a voice cried from one of the small stones set along the courtyard wall. “Back inside the palace, quickly, it’s safest inside!”
People turned toward the burning doors.
Robin knew that voice. Young. Bright. Helpful. He’d heard it all week, saying wonderful and everyone will be there.
“No!” he shouted. “Not inside!”
Kai was already running for the great stone in the middle of the courtyard, the one Maren had promised to show her hall on. It stood taller than a man, dark and smooth as still water. He put both hands on it and spoke, and nothing happened. It wouldn’t answer him.
An old Watcher woman pushed through the crowd beside him, one of the council, her gray robe scorched at the hem. She laid her palm flat against the stone.
“Now,” she said. “Speak.”
Kai spoke.
His crest blazed across the whole face of the great stone, falcon feathers and two hearts, deep blue and gold, the same crest half the merchants in that courtyard had seen all week in the market. And his voice came out of it so loud it rang off the palace walls and carried across the gorge:
“Go down. The tunnels. Now.”
The small voice on the wall was still crying inside, inside. But it had no crest. No name. Nothing anyone knew.
The crowd turned away from the palace doors, toward the stairs that led down into the city, and the old tunnels underneath.
Maren had her own stone out. Her voice went into it, and out of it, and out of every stone in her hall, and from her hall to every stone that had ever stopped at her fire. All over Aranaeth, in kitchens and workshops and on the white bridges, stones lit up at once with the same five words: Dragon. Go below. Go now. People who saw it told the people beside them. Those people told the next. The warning ran through the city faster than the dragon could fly.
Cal had found the servants’ passage. He’d spent the week talking to the kitchen staff, the porters, the boys who carried wood, and he knew every back stair in the palace. He went back in through the smoke twice and came out each time with people stumbling after him, coughing, blinded, holding onto his coat. The second time, he came out with an old Watcher woman over his shoulder, carried with his good arm, his bad hand tucked against his chest.
Hattie couldn’t run. She’d made Kai prop her against the courtyard wall, her stone in her lap, and she was talking into it steadily, calmly, the way she’d talked to the farmer’s wife in the meadow. All over the city, her people answered. Bring the burned ones to the healer on Third Bridge. The cut ones to the house with the blue door. Keep them warm. Keep them talking. One by one, the hurt were carried where someone was waiting for them.
Black Ember wheeled at the end of the gorge and came back for a second pass.
Henry walked the line of crews, crouching beside each one.
“Not the body,” he told them, over and over. “You’ll never get through that hide. His scales will turn a bolt like a shield. Aim for the wings. The skin between the bones is thin as sailcloth. That’s where he’s soft.”
“How do you know?” one of the young guards asked. He looked about nineteen.
“I’ve seen him fly,” said Henry.
On the walls, the four crews had their bolts aimed. Henry was beside the nearest one, watching the dragon come.
“Wait,” he called down the line. “Wait for the wings.”
The dragon came down the gorge, low, his throat glowing.
“Now!”
The bolts went out one after another with cracks like trees splitting. The first went wide. The second struck the dragon full on the shoulder and bounced off his scales in a shower of sparks, exactly as Henry had said it would. The third fell short into the gorge.
The fourth was the young guard’s.
It flew long and true and took Black Ember through the thin skin of his left wing, tearing through it like canvas.
The scream he gave shook the falls.
He lurched sideways in the air. For one moment he hung there, enormous against the darkening sky, and Robin thought he would come for the wall. Then he beat his torn wing once, twice, and turned away down the gorge, lower than before, and slower, and was gone into the dark.
On the wall, the young guard stood frozen, staring at his empty bolt. Then the crews around him were cheering, pounding his back, shouting his name.
Henry didn’t cheer. He just put a hand on the boy’s shoulder for a moment.
Further down the wall, Ezra sat down hard on the stones. His hands were still shaking from the winch.
“Reload,” said Henry quietly. “In case he comes back.”
He didn’t come back.
Lyra found Corin on the high bridge above the falls.
He was standing at the rail with his stone in his hand, speaking into it fast and low. Names. A list of names. Watcher leaders, and the new merchants, and Robin, and Bram.
Lyra didn’t say anything at all. She simply walked up behind him and struck his wrist, once, and the stone flew out of his hand and over the rail and fell, end over end, into the white water far below.
Corin turned. For a moment he looked very young.
Then he ran.
He made it four steps. Lyra moved faster than anyone her age should have been able to move, and then he was face down on the white stones of the bridge with her knee in his back and his wrists pinned together behind him.
“He’ll kill me,” Corin gasped. “If he finds out I failed, he’ll kill me.”
“He would have killed everyone in that hall tonight,” Lyra said. “You included, if it suited him.” She bound his wrists with a cord from her belt, quickly, the way someone does who has done it many times. “You’re safer with us than you ever were with him.”
Two Watchers came running across the bridge. Lyra hauled Corin to his feet and gave him to them.
“Take him to the Tower,” she said. “To her.”
Corin looked back over his shoulder as they led him away. “What will she do to me?”
Lyra looked at him for a long moment, with something in her face that wasn’t anger.
“Give you a choice,” she said. “Which is more than he ever gave you.”
Under the city, in the old tunnels, Elena had her children on her lap and Nessa’s two pressed against her sides.
The tunnels were nothing like she’d pictured. They weren’t built so much as carved, chisel stroke by chisel stroke, by people who’d had a whole generation and nothing else to do. The walls still showed the marks. Passages wound off in every direction, low and narrow, then opened suddenly into rooms the size of a barn, their ceilings blackened by smoke from fires long gone out. Lanterns hung in little niches cut into the rock every twenty paces, and someone had kept them oiled and trimmed. Across some of the side rooms hung old curtains, faded to the color of dust, where families had once made their homes. The air smelled of damp stone and very old smoke.
Every few years, the city sent people down to shore up the beams and clear the fallen rock. Most people never came down at all.
Tonight, they all had.
The tunnels had filled faster than anyone could have believed. Families. Old men. A bride still in her wedding white. They had come down the stairs in a flood when the stones lit up, and now they sat packed together in the low stone rooms, listening to the muffled roar above.
A few of them had moved before anyone else. A stonecutter and his wife. Two old Watchers. A young woman with a baker’s arms. They knew where the old water jars were kept, and the sacks of hard bread that someone always made sure were fresh, and they were already passing them out.
But the fear in the dark was a living thing. A child began to cry. Then another. Somewhere, a man was shouting that they had to go back up, they’d be buried alive down here, and people were starting to stand.
Elena stood up first.
She didn’t know any of these people. But she had spent a week watching a group of strangers become something else, out on a terrace by the falls.
“Mother,” she said to Ezra’s mother, loud enough to carry. “Tell us about the first time. When your people came down here.”
The old woman gave her a long look. “Child, every soul in this room knows that story. They learned it before they could walk.” Then she paused, and something in her eyes changed. “But I’ll tell you one they don’t know.”
The room went quieter.
“After the fire, the elders said no one could go back up. Not for a generation. The dragons might return. So they stayed down here, and they waited, and they grew old waiting.” She looked around at the rock walls. “There was a boy in my family, many generations back. Fifteen years old. He couldn’t stand it. So every night, when the elders were asleep, he took a chisel and a lantern and went to the far end of the east tunnel, and he dug. Up. A little every night. For two years.”
“Two years,” someone whispered.
“When he broke through, it was into a cellar under the old bakery. He climbed out into the moonlight, and he walked through the ruins all night. In the morning he came back down and told the elders he’d found a way up, and that the dragons were gone, and that it was time.” She smiled faintly. “They were furious. And then they followed him.”
She nodded toward the dark at the end of the room.
“That tunnel’s still there. You can still see his chisel marks.”
Nobody was shouting anymore.
The stonecutter and the baker-armed woman took it from there. They moved through the rooms with the water and the bread, and the two old Watchers found the frightened ones and sat with them. Elena moved among them too. A cup of water here. A blanket there. What’s your name? Where are you from? Sit by her, she’s frightened too.
Nobody in that room would forget her.
By the time the roaring above them stopped, the people in the tunnels were not strangers anymore.
An hour later, a horn sounded from the courtyard above, three long notes. One of the old Watchers stood up. “The all-clear,” he said. “Come on. Slowly.”
They came up the stone stairs into the night, holding hands, carrying children, blinking at the torchlight.
The great hall of the palace was a black, smoking shell. Its tall windows were gone. Its ribbed ceiling had fallen in. The east wing was still burning, and lines of people were passing buckets up from the falls.
But the white bridges still stood. The orange roofs still stood. The falls still fell.
The council gathered everyone in the courtyard. The old Watcher woman who had laid her hand on the great stone climbed onto the rim of the fountain, her robe still scorched at the hem, and gave instructions in a voice that didn’t shake once. Healers to the north side. Families with no roof tonight to the Watcher hall on Fourth Bridge. Every house was to send one person to the courtyard by sunrise, so the council could count who was missing.
They worked through the night.
Robin carried water. Henry organized the bucket lines like a quartermaster. Cal and Maren went house to house with lists. Kai found blankets, and food, and more blankets. Elena moved through the courtyard with the children asleep on a pile of coats behind her, and everywhere she went, people knew her face now.
Hattie never left the courtyard. A healer had stitched her side again, scolding her the whole time, and Kai had wrapped her in three blankets against the fountain wall. She talked into her stone all night long, guiding her people across the city. Kai slept sitting up beside her, somewhere after midnight.
By dawn, the fire in the east wing was out. Robin stood in the courtyard with his son on his hip and his daughter holding Elena’s hand, and counted. Hurt, many of them. Burned, some. But the hall had been almost empty when the fire came. Almost everyone who had sat in it the night before was standing in the courtyard now.
Hattie opened her book on her knee and turned to the first page.
Teo’s list was still there. All four hundred and twelve families, in his neat, small hand. Not one letter destroyed.
Bram came limping across the courtyard, soot on his face. He opened his own stone, and spoke his old word into it, and looked at the library for a long time. Every book was on its shelf. Every cover. Every page.
“He burned the palace,” Bram said. “He couldn’t touch anything we built.”
Over by the wall, a young weaver sat with his head in his hands. Robin had seen him at the gathering, one of the new merchants, proud of the book he’d started that week. Now he was shaking.
“I’m done,” the weaver said to no one. “This is what happens. You try something. The dragon comes. I’m going back to the mill.”
Ezra was sitting a few feet away, his hands still black from the winch. He looked at the young man for a long moment. Then he got up and sat down beside him.
“Two winters back, a man came through my daughter’s village, out past Merchant’s Rest,” Ezra said. “He sold us a promise. Then he was gone, and the dragon came the week after.” He held out his scarred hand. “I swore I’d never trust anyone again.”
The weaver looked at the burn.
“Last night the dragon came again,” Ezra said. “And this time, everybody who sold me anything was still here. Standing next to me. Carrying people out of the fire.” He nodded at Hattie, at Cal, at Henry, at Robin. “That’s how you tell the difference. Not by what they promise. By who’s still there when the fire comes.”
The weaver didn’t answer.
“Your first try will miss,” Ezra said. “Most people quit right there.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Don’t be most people.”
After a long moment, the weaver took it.
The sun came up over the gorge.
It came up the way it always had, as if nothing had happened, gold on the white walls and gold on the falling water and gold on the smoking ruin of the great hall. Darkness had held the city for one long night.
That was all it ever got. The morning always came.