Crown of Hidden Scales novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Flue

Sabine and the Warden escape through the smoke flues, and the crown ties them within thirty paces.

I did not sleep, and neither did the lock.

All night I held my palm against it, and all night it glowed a dull red and refused to give.

At the fourth bell Rhain came back down the stair.

He carried a lantern, and he had taken off his coat.

Without it he looked thinner, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.

"I'm not going to burn you," he said.

I did not lower my hand from the lock.

"Say that again."

"I'm not going to burn you."

I watched his glove.

Nothing glowed at all.

My knees almost went, and I locked them and glared at him instead.

"You could have said so at noon."

"The walls carry," he said. "The Dowager's people sit behind them. Tonight they changed shifts, and the Pit is mine for one hour."

He fitted a key into the lock and turned it.

"There are flues behind the east cells. They vent the smoke from the pyre. Nobody has climbed them in a hundred years."

"Why now?"

"Because the crown woke, and you are the only one it woke for."

He said it like a fact he did not like.

"And because I have done this before, with others. Forty of them. Never one the Dowager marked herself."

I stared at him.

"You've been letting them go?"

"I've been hanging them in the morning and burying them empty." He shrugged, a small stiff movement. "The village that takes them is two days north."

I thought of the throne hall, and the way he had looked at the crown.

I thought of the thirty-one.

"You said thirty-one."

"The ones I could not save."

I walked out of the cell.

It was the first door I had opened myself in my life, and I did not look back at it.

We were halfway across the round hall when the iron door at the top of the stair banged open.

"Warden!"

A captain of the palace guard came down in his breastplate, six men at his back, his sword already out.

He looked at the open cell, then at me, and he understood everything at once.

"Stand away from her, Rhain."

"Captain," said Rhain.

I had a better idea than a speech.

I lifted the crown, and I put my other palm flat on the captain's blade as it came toward me.

I have no memory of deciding to.

The steel heated, then glowed, then slumped, and the captain dropped the hilt with a shout and a ruined hand.

"She's on fire," a guard breathed.

"I'm not on fire," I said. "I'm in a hurry."

Rhain took my elbow with his gloved fingers and ran.

He pulled me through a narrow door behind the cells and into a black shaft that stank of old ash.

Iron rungs ran up the wall.

He put me in front of him and went up behind, and I climbed with the crown hooked over my arm, my hands scraping on soot.

Below us the guards were pouring in.

I heard a bolt shoot and a man yell that the stair was blocked.

Halfway up, Rhain stopped.

"There's a grate at the top. Stay here. Let me go ahead and cut it."

He climbed past me.

I counted rungs, twenty, then thirty, and then the heat hit my hands.

The crown seared my wrist, and the scales on my arms flared white.

I cried out and nearly dropped.

Above me, Rhain made a rough sound and stopped dead, his gloved hand on the grate.

"Come up," he gasped.

"I can't," I said. "It's burning."

"Then come up and see why."

I climbed.

At every rung the heat fell away, until I got within a yard of his boots, and the iron cooled under my palms.

He looked down at me with soot on his face and fear in his eyes, plain as a child's.

"Thirty paces," he said slowly. "It lets us go thirty."

"Then don't go anywhere," I said.

He cut the grate with his knife, and we crawled out onto a roof of wet slate under a thin grey sky.

A cart waited in the alley below, stacked with flour sacks, and a small figure in a grey dress was standing on the seat with a lantern.

"Lady Sabine!" the figure hissed.

"Bronwyn?" I said.

My maid's red-brown curls stuck out from under her kerchief like a scrub brush, and she was grinning like a lunatic.

"Come down, my lady! They've bolted every gate but the mill road, and we've got till the bell."

We dropped onto the flour sacks and the cart lurched forward.

Bronwyn looked at Rhain, and then at the crown in my lap, and then back at his face.

"Is he coming?" she asked. "Because I thought he was the hangman."

"He's coming," I said. "We're tied to each other."

Behind us, over the palace roofs, every bell in the city began to ring.

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