Hellen went out into Ivath and reminded herself she once used to do this for midnight prayer. Back then, she imagined that the darkness would recognize her, and let her pass. Her hood was up, her hands tucked close. Her breath was measured so her fear wouldn’t start to show in the little betrayals of her body, the too-fast steps, a turn taken too wide, her shoulder twitching at every sound.

  She never intended to become a thief.

  In fact, she’d only ever wanted to be obedient, which was its own kind of theft if she thought about it long enough – her time, her will, her mouth full of words she never got to speak. The Dagorlind had raised her on the idea that obedience was a holy thing, a shape she could press herself into and be made useful. She had believed them. She had done the gestures and spoken the lines and let the world be simple.

  Then they had decided she would do all that, but on her knees, with a collar biting her throat, and the bell-song threaded through her bones until her voice belonged to something older and hungrier than any of them.

  She hadn’t volunteered.

  Her guilt kept running into that like a wall. She could feel it now as she walked, the old training that said, Sister, Sister, you are straying, and the newer, quieter truth that answered back, They would have called it sacred while they killed you.

  The street under her feet was uneven from the recent shakes, patched with rubble that no one had finished hauling away. Lanternlight made the dust look like smoke. Somewhere down the slope a dog barked as if it could keep the earth from opening again by sheer insistence. Hellen’s breath fogged pale in front of her face.

  She moved along the narrower lanes, which kept her out of the widest pools of light. The city was unrecognizable to her. Doors were barred, voices lowered. What had once been a community was now a place of suspicion.

  Every few streets she passed a Brighthand posted near a corner, mail dull under their cloaks, helmets tucked under an arm. The men kept their hands close to their weapons in the way men did when they were trying to look like law. Hellen kept her head down and her pace steady and trusted her gray robe to do what it had always done: turn a human woman into a symbol.

  Tonight that robe felt like a noose.

  The bell had become the city’s favorite object to argue over, the thing men pointed at when they wanted to make fear sound like principle.

  Hellen tightened her grip on the little bundle hidden beneath her cloak, wrapped in cloth so it would not make any sound against her ribs. Her tools felt absurd against her skin, like toys. Like a child’s imitation of a grown woman’s work. She thought of the bell’s interior, the place her hands would have to go, and nausea rose in her throat.

  She slowed at the corner where she would have a line of sight. They’d moved the Bernane Bell to a counting house that had once held coin for guilds, now repurposed into a shrine with a locked door and guards.

  The street in front of it stayed brighter than the ones around it. Two lanterns hung at the door, their light throwing a wide stain across the cobbles. They hung in front of several scale lamps that had died with the absence of the Underserpent; much of the city had fallen into similar darkness without the Serpent lighting their doorways.

  A pair of Brighthand sat on a pair of stools, playing cards set up on a crate, their helmets propped against the wall. They were there more for show than for violence; they didn’t appear to anticipate anyone arriving in the middle of the night.

  Hellen watched long enough to learn what she could from them. They were distracted, disinterested. They rarely glanced at the street, even. They never glanced at the roofline.

  Hellen’s hands tightened under her cloak. The little bundle against her ribs was impossible to forget. She made herself breathe until the fear stopped trying to rush her into a mistake. She backed away, slipping into the narrow lane that ran behind the counting house, where the buildings leaned close enough to turn the sky into a strip. The ground here was broken with rubble that hadn’t been cleared. She moved slowly, placing her feet like she was walking through a chapel during a vigil, careful not to kick anything that would skitter.

  There was a back wall, half-repaired after the first day of chaos, patched with fresh mortar that looked pale against older stone. A scaffolding frame still stood there, abandoned by whatever guildhand had been pulled away to some other emergency. The planks were damp, the rope lashings frayed.

  Hellen had never thought herself afraid of heights, but looking up, she tasted bile.

  She grabbed the lowest crossbar and hauled herself up. The wood creaked under her weight. She froze, pressed close to the wall, heart loud enough she felt certain it would carry. The night held. She climbed again. By the time she reached the second platform, her breath was trapped high in her chest. She paused, forehead pressed against the cool stone, and told herself a prayer she did not mean: Steady the hands. Steady the jaw. Steady the pitch. There is no self.

  Even so, the Dawn Litany did its work. She moved sideways along the plank until she was above the narrow window that had been barred from the inside. The bar was iron, and very old. The shutters were closed, but not properly. The bottom edge didn’t meet the frame. A small wedge of dark remained, a perfect gap for her fingers to slide into.

  The shutter lifted a fraction, then caught.

  She bit down on the inside of her cheek and forced herself to keep the motion slow. It took more patience than strength, working the old hinge until it gave, the wood complaining in small grudging sounds that made her skin crawl. When the shutter finally opened, she found herself staring into darkness.

  A room. Close, tight, the sort of place that absorbed sound.

  She eased herself through the opening and dropped into it, landing with her knees bent, the impact sending a brief ache up her legs. She stayed crouched, listening. She heard nothing.

  She gave her body a moment to sag with relief before she pulled the shutter nearly closed, leaning only a narrow crack so she could still hear the street.

  Shelves lined the walls of ledgers and seals. Everything was labeled with careful ink. An unlit lantern sat on the table in the center of the room.

  Sena had offered to do this task herself, if only because her night vision would have allowed her to see what the humans could not in the darkness. Sena was also a skillful climber, and took little pause when making decisions. Then Rhalir had offered himself, but had been dismissed out of hand by both of them, his bulk a strong fortification but hardly stealthy, with antlers rising white over his head like a beacon.

  Hellen knew what would have happened to Sena, should she be caught by Brighthand guards. So she left the lamp unlit, and took a moment of pride in her decision to risk this, and then there was the shame, too, and she did her best to hold both without letting it distract her.

  She moved mostly by touch, fingers brushing the spine of a ledger, the corner of a box, the edge of a doorframe. She found the hallway, the draft of cool air sliding under a door, light leaking from its edges. She pressed her ear to the wood and listened again. This would have been another moment better served by a Kelthi’s strong hearing.

  She knew both Sena and Rhalir were likely at their predetermined meeting points, waiting for her signal.

  She heard voices, farther in. One man speaking low. Another answering with a bored grunt. The clink of metal that meant a sword being shifted, or a canteen being placed on a table, maybe.

  They’d staked out the place for only one night after the bell was moved; still, she was fairly certain there were only two guards inside. She kept her ear to the door until her cheek went numb anyway. A canteen sloshed. A man cleared his throat and spat, the sound wet and casual, as if the building belonged to him and wasn’t housing a sacred relic, locked in here like a hostage.

  Hellen drew back and let her palm rest against the wood. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the layout Sena had drawn for her on a scrap of paper: hall, bend left, second door, narrow stair to the counting rooms, then down again, then the vault space where the bell had been laid like a dead thing.

  She hadn’t been trained for this. The Dagorlind trained her to enter rooms she was invited to, to kneel when she was told, to bow her head and be grateful.

  But she was learning the opposite now: to enter anyway.

  She slid her bundle of tools into her hand and moved along the wall with her breath held shallow. The hallway swallowed her. The darkness in here was deeper than the streets, thick with paper and old seal and the stale, sour hush of closed coin chests. She found the bend by memory and by touch, her fingers skimming the paster until it changed texture and she knew she was at the corner.

  A sound from the front made her stop. It was a small clatter of wood on stone, then a second, then a third – as if someone outside had dropped something carefully. That would be Sena’s signal.

  She hadn’t seen Sena when she climbed. A Kelthi in the street would draw eyes, doubly true for the Warden; a Sister would not. So Sena had stayed away, somewhere in the shadows, with Callahan’s agreement purchased in inconvenient favors, almost certainly.

  Hellen crossed the hallway to the next door, the one Sena had marked. It was locked. Hellen set her shoulder to the wall beside it and listened again. She heard nothing. She knelt, more out of habit than strategy, and slipped a thin pick into the lock. Her hands shook. She steadied them, found the tension point, and breathed. Rhalir had shown her this. They’d practiced over and over, on different doors. The metal clicked once, faint as an insect whirr. She froze, then continued.

  The lock gave with soft surrender.

  Hellen eased the door open, barely wide enough for her body. The room beyond was colder. She stepped into it and pulled the door nearly shut behind her, leaving a finger-width of space for sound.

  This room had once been a counting chamber, a place where men sat late at night with ink-stained hands and hard eyes, deciding who would eat and who would go hungry. Now it held none of that. The center of the room was cleared. A strip of wool runner had been laid down. And there, against the far wall, half in shadow, was the bell.

  They’d laid it on its side in thick timber braces, the mouth angled toward the room as if it were waiting to speak and had been gagged.

  Even broken, it owned the space.

  Hellen crossed to it without allowing herself to think about what her hands were about to do. If she thought, she would stop. She would kneel and pray and be the woman they had made her. She couldn’t afford that.

  She crouched by the mouth of the bell and leaned in, her shoulders brushing the metal. The air inside smelled like old smoke and something mineral, like rain trapped in stone. Her fingers found the inner curve. She reached deeper, searching for the clapper chain, the iron bracket.

  Her hand met emptiness.

  Hellen gasped. She reached again, farther. Nothing. Only the smooth, cold interior and the faint grit of dried plaster under her nails. She withdrew and stared at the bells mouth as if it had lied to her. Her mind tried to make a new story immediately – it was deeper, she’d missed it, maybe –

  But no. There was no maybe. The place where the clapper should have hung was bare. The bracket was there. The pinholes were there. But the piece itself had been taken clean away.

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  Hellen’s stomach rolled.

  She lifted her gaze to the bell’s outer rim. The Dagorlind had tried to make it theirs in every way they could. They had plastered over old markings, gilded certain seams, painted symbols of their rites. They’d done it for so long that she’d only learned, in the last few weeks, that there had ever been anything beneath their story.

  Her fingers searched for one of the bands that had been wrapped around the bell’s shoulder, copper hammered thin, riveted in place like jewelry. She ran her thumb along it and felt the edge where it had been cut.

  It wasn’t there.

  Someone had removed the copper bands. They hadn’t been torn off; they’d been removed carefully, with tools.

  Hellen sat back on her heels, the bell looming above her.

  They’ve done it, she thought. They have the clapper. They have the copper. They have everything they need to make chains.

  She tried to swallow and found her throat too tight for it. She didn’t know what to do.

  Hellen pressed her forehead briefly against the metal of the bell, eyes closed. The pressure grounded her. It reminded her of the comfort of the Dawn Litany. She whispered the words now, so soft, her lips barely moving.

  “Let the flesh fall quiet. Let the breath be still. Let the shoulders release. Let the throat be open.”

  A sound from the hall snapped her back: boots, closer, the scrape of a chair as it moved. The distraction was working. The guards were moving. Good. That meant the timing had been right.

  But she’d arrived too late anyway.

  She turned back to the bell, anger leaking through the fear. This was why she was here. She wasn’t trying to play at being brave, or prove herself useful to Sena. She was here because the Dagorlind did not get to take another serpent and make it their captive. Because they did not get to turn the world into a leash again and call it safety.

  She should go, she thought.

  The room was not entirely dark; moonlight slipped through a high window, pale enough to be almost nothing, yet enough to catch on metal where metal wanted to be seen.

  And then she noticed it. Along the bell’s rim, beneath a thick layer of plaster and paint, a faint glimmer that didn’t match the gilding. It was duller than gold, and it wasn’t warm like gold. It was something embedded, catching the moon and throwing it back with a colder, finer light.

  Hellen leaned closer. Her fingertips brushed the plastered band and felt a hairline crack. The plaster had been laid over something raised. She found the edge of it with her nail and scraped. A thin curl of plaster flaked away.

  Underneath was a scale.

  Not a decorative scale stamped in brass, but real scale, set into the bell’s skin in a pattern so precise it made her breath stall. The scale caught moonlight with that familiar sheen she’d seen on Kelthi bodies, an iridescent shift that made color look alive even in shadow. She thought of Sena’s scales, that gorgeous shifting blue.

  Hellen’s hand trembled as she scraped again. More plaster came away, dusting her lap like ash. The pattern beneath was a line of small sigils, each one made of inlaid scale, each one shaped with intent. The Dagorlind had covered them the way they covered everything that didn’t belong to their story: bury it, repaint it, or burn it, but whatever the case, insist it never existed.

  Hellen stared until her eyes burned. She didn’t know Kelthi writing, but she knew enough to recognize a mark of craft and origin. Her guilt surged in an odd direction, away from Sena and the betrayal of her robe, and toward something older. Toward Lain, who she’d watched others treat like an animal. Who’d been called slewfoot and goat behind her back, and sometimes to her face. She thought of Lain walking with her head held high toward the chamber of the Underserpent, wrapped in white robes, with the white wool of a sacrificial lamb.

  Hellen went to her tools. She didn’t have time to unearth the whole band, or to make it tidy. She chose one sigil, one that looked complete, framed by a natural seam in the bell’s metal. She worked her chisel under the scale edge, prying slowly, listening for any sound that would give her away.

  The scale held stubbornly. Hellen pressed harder, jaw clenched, terrified of cracking it. The tool bit, and the scale shifted a fraction. She breathed out shakily and levered again, slightly to the left, then to the right, wedging her chisel beneath it a centimeter at a time.

  Finally the scale popped free in her hand with a soft snap that seemed far too loud for that room.

  She froze.

  She could only hear the murmur of voices moving down the hall, distracted by whatever Callahan had sent them toward.

  Hellen tucked the scale into her cloak, right against her chest.

  She wanted to take more, strip the bell bare until the Dagorlind’s paint lay in flakes on the floor. But she didn’t have time.

  Hellen rose and backed away from the bell, her mouth forming a prayer, a desperate plea that was half fury, half hope.

  Saints, she thought. It felt childish and necessary, all at once. If you ever listen to women like me, please tell me I’m not too late.

  The room stayed silent.

  She turned toward the door.

  A sound in the hall changed the air before she even understood what it was: a heavy footfall, the jingle of a swordbell.

  Hellen’s breath hitched. She crossed the room in two swift strides and pressed her ear to the door.

  A man spoke, terrifyingly close. “ –Thought I heard something.”

  Another answered, irritated. “It was the alley. Rats. Or that Sister again, wandering like she owns the street.”

  She slipped her tools deep into her cloak and eased the door open a fraction, just enough to see the sliver of corridor beyond. Lanternlight from somewhere down the hall bled across the floorboards. A shadow shifted.

  She closed the door again without letting it click. A profound sense of desperation encircled her as she realized she’d lingered too long. Her mind raced through options and found very few. If she ran, they would chase. If she hid, they might find her. If she did nothing, she’d be found in a locked counting chamber beside the city’s most argued-over relic.

  Then she heard them coming, boots pounding down the hall.

  Her heart leapt to her throat. She stared around again, as if some new door had magically appeared, but there was nothing. No escape. She rushed to the bell, then to the moonlight pouring through the too-narrow windows, and saw there was no way out.

  A hand fell to the latch outside.

  Hellen lowered herself to her knees.

  The door opened.

  Light spilled in. A Brighthand stood in the doorway, lantern held high, his face squinting as it adjusted. His gaze swept the room, snagging on the bell, then dropped to Hellen kneeling on the floor.

  “What in the seven –” he began, then stopped himself, because a Sister on her knees made men like him remember his tongue. His expression tightened into suspicion instead. “You’re not meant to be in here.”

  Hellen lifted her eyes slowly, letting fear show only as much as it served her. “I heard… noise,” she said, trying her best to come up with a lie and realizing she was terrible at it. “I came to pray. The bell has been moved so many times. People have been arguing over it. I thought –”

  “You thought you’d trespass,” he snapped. His eyes flicked to her cloak. “How did you get in here? I locked this door myself. And what’s in the bag?”

  Hellen’s hands tightened in her lap. Her fingers found the edge of the scale, the size of her palm, tucked against her ribs, and she felt, horribly, how easy it might be for a man like this to crush it between his thumb and forefinger without meaning to.

  “It’s my incense kit,” she said, and the word tasted like panic. “A prayer offering –”

  “We don’t need offerings,” he said. He stepped into the room, boots heavy on the wood. “Stand.”

  Hellen rose, slow, her knees aching from the climb and the crouch and the sudden drop to prayer. The Brighthand’s gaze stayed on her hands, on her cloak, any place a woman might hide something.

  “Give me your satchel,” he said.

  And then, from somewhere across the city, an alarm bell tore through the night.

  Another answered it. Then another, cascading across rooftops, each one taking up the cry and throwing it farther.

  The Brighthand froze mid-reach. His head snapped toward the window, the lantern in his hand wavering.

  “What was that?” he breathed, and for a moment he sounded like a boy, hearing disaster and realizing disaster didn’t care about rank.

  A shout rose from the street outside. Boots hit the cobbles. Someone yelled for Captain Callahan.

  The Brighthand strode to her, eyes on the exit, and pulled her gently to her feet. He kept his other hand on his sword hilt. “Come, Sister. It’s not safe. Let’s get you back to the other Glinnel.’

  She did as he directed, playing the role of a good Sister as his hand closed around her forearm.

  “Come,” he said again, already steering her toward the hall. His lantern swung as he moved, throwing light across the ledger shelves and the bell’s hulking curve. He didn’t look at her bag again. Whatever he’d suspected had been swallowed by the alarms.

  Hellen let her face settle into an expression she’d worn a thousand times: grateful, relieved to be told what to do.

  The corridor beyond had filled with motion. Men ran past with helmets half-secured. A voice shouted for the outer watch. Another called for the gate. Someone swore, loud and unfiltered.

  Hellen kept her gaze lowered and her steps small. They reached the front room, the counting house’s entry chamber, where the air smelled like ink. The outer door had been thrown open, and night poured in along with a rush of wind that carried distant shouting and the raw, vibrating voice of the alarm bells.

  Suddenly, Hellen realized what this was: the Dagorlind troops had arrived.

  In an instant her mouth went dry and she could only think of Sena and Rhalir.

  The Brighthand paused on the threshold, scanning the street. She scanned it, too, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t see them, or any of the Ashborn.

  “Head down,” he murmured to her, the tone full of a sickening self-importance. “Stay close.”

  Hellen stepped out into the lantern stain and immediately felt exposed, as if the city had turned its face toward her. The street in front of the building had become a corridor of urgency, Brighthand moving in all directions, some running toward the sound, others jogging back with orders. A few citizens had opened doors and leaned out, drawn by fear’s need to witness.

  Someone shouted from farther down the slope. “They’re at the west gate –”

  Another voice answered, high and frantic. “How many? How many –”

  A third voice cut through the overlap. “Clear the lane! Clear it!”

  Hellen recognized Callahan’s voice, his obvious authority. The Brighthand at her side turned his head sharply to listen. His grip on her forearm tightened just enough to remind her he felt responsible for her, whether she wanted that or not.

  “Which way are the Glinnel keeping?” he asked her.

  “Near the old infirmary,” she said, and it was true enough. Hellen had slept there more than once since the Spire fell. “By the south lane.”

  They didn’t get ten paces before a runner nearly collided with them, young and breathing hard, helmet in hand, hair sticking damp to his forehead.

  “Brighthand Hensley!” the runner barked, spotting the man beside Hellen. “Captain says you’re needed at the corner. Now. There’s –” he hesitated, eyes flicking to Hellen and then dismissing her almost at once. “There’s a press of people at the west lane and the gates aren’t holding the line.”

  Hensley frowned. Duty pulled him in two directions and he hated being made to choose, clearly. He looked at Hellen, then toward the street, then back again. “Sister,” he said, almost apologetic. “Go straight. Don’t stop.”

  Hellen nodded quickly. “Yes.”

  He hesitated only a moment more, his gaze dropping to her satchel again, curiosity flickering then being smothered by the rising roar of the city. Then he released her, moving with the runner, boots striking the cobbles.

  Hellen stood alone for a fraction of a moment. Then she drifted into the shadows at the edge of the street without making it obvious. A Sister out alone after dark looked odd. A Sister pressed up against a building looked odder. She wanted to go to the rendezvous point, to find Sena, to have Rhalir drag them both somewhere safe. And even as she headed in that direction she hoped desperately that they weren’t there, that they were already fleeing the city.

  She’d heard rumors of the Dagorlind of the northern reaches. Their ruthlessness was storied, destroying one Kelthi village at a time, eliminating wyrmrot until hundreds of miles of Cloudspine had been cleansed of villages. They took no prisoners. After all, who would imprison an infected herd?

  The alarms kept ringing, the city answering itself until the night felt full of metal. At the first intersection she found a cluster of civilians gathered around a man with a bleeding forehead. “They’re here by force,” he kept saying. “I saw the banners –”

  A woman grabbed his arm. “Who? Who is here?”

  “Ashborn,” he spat, the word landing on the group like a lit coal. “From the south road. From the damn sea if they’ve found a way, I don’t know. But they’re here.”

  Hellen frowned. Ashborn? But the Ashborn were already here.

  But then her thoughts caught on Lord Morgan Balthir. Of the way his presence filled the road, when she’d seen him up close, then the way he’d enveloped Lain as if they were long-fraught lovers. Of the way Ashborn loyalty moved like a tide around him.

  He must have gathered more of his own. They’d returned.

  She pushed past the group, keeping her face turned down, listening as she went. A Brighthand sergeant yelled at a knot of his men. “Form up at the west lane. If you see cloaks, you stop them. If you see antlers, you cut them down.”

  As she neared the bend that would take her to the rendezvous point, under the alarms came a deep roar, like many feet, carts being dragged, a gate being forced open. Fear climbed in her chest as she recalled the sound of the Ashborn arriving the night Morgan had descended upon them with his horrifying Bloodwyrms.

  People began to move, not in an organized line but in that instinctive surge that made a street become a churning river. Someone ran past Hellen, nearly knocking her down, eyes wide.

  “They say it’s Lady Catherine,” the runner gasped to his companion, the words tumbling out. “They say she’s come herself.”

  The name meant nothing to her. But the way it was spoken carried the weight of someone whose arrival could rearrange the city’s guts.

  Hellen felt suddenly, sharply, that she was out of her depth, the way she’d felt it off and on ever since she’d been brought down to the chamber of the Underserpent to be sacrificed.

  She let the crowd carry her partway, then slipped into the lee of a doorway as a column of Brighthand pushed past at a jog. Their faces were pale and set. Their weapons were drawn.

  It was happening all over again.

  A tortured cry left her before she could stop it. Her hands tightened at her chest as if she could hold it. Hellen’s prayers rose reflexively and met the memory of the collar, the ritual, the bell-song that had almost poisoned her to the marrow.

  They would have called it sacred while they killed her.

  She had to find Sena. If this Lady Catherine was after the Dagorlind, then surely Sena and Rhalir would protect her.

  Hellen lost all sense of calm, running toward the place her lovers had said they would wait.