CHAPTER ONE
RAYNA WAS CONFIDENTLY LEADING THEM in the wrong direction. Anders hurried through the crowd after her, ducking as a woman nearly sideswiped him with a basket of glistening fish. The stink washed over him like a cloud, and then he swerved away, leaving it behind as they ran through a stone arch.
“Rayna, we’re—”
She was already turning the corner and running out across Helstustrat, nipping in front of a pair of chestnut ponies that were hauling a wagon full of barrels over the cobblestones. Anders jogged from one foot to the other, waiting as they rumbled past, then took off after his twin sister again. “Rayna!”
She could hear him—he knew that when she flashed a quick grin over her shoulder, white teeth gleaming in her brown face. But she didn’t slow down, her thick black braid bouncing as she jogged. He was stuck trying to catch up again. This always happened.
“Rayna,” he tried, one final time, just as they rounded the corner to see the roadblock ahead, manned by guards clad in gray woolen uniforms. Without breaking stride, Rayna whirled back the way they’d come, grabbing Anders by the arm and yanking him with her around the corner. His heart thumping at the close shave, he leaned back against the cool stone wall.
“Guards,” she said, tugging her coat straight.
“I know! They’re on every street on the north side of the city,” he told her. “Checking everyone who comes through.”
Her gaze flicked back toward the corner. “Was there another dragon sighting? Or are they just doing extra patrols before the Ulfar Trials?”
“There was a dragon in the sky just last night,” he replied. “I heard them talking about it in the tavern when we were climbing down from the roof first thing.” He didn’t point out that Rayna had missed that information because she’d been too busy telling him their plans for the day. “They said they saw it breathe fire and everything.”
That silenced even Rayna for a moment. Dragons had been gone from Holbard for ten years now, but lately they had been seen in the sky overhead. Anders and Rayna had seen one themselves six months before, on the night of the last equinox celebrations.
It had breathed pure white fire as it circled above the city, then vanished into the darkness. An hour later, a set of stables in the north of the city was ablaze with the ferocious, white-and-gold dragonsfire that was almost impossible to put out, leaping from place to place faster and fiercer than normal flames.
By the time the buildings had been reduced to ashes, the dragon was gone, and with it the son of the family that lived above the stables. Dragons always took children, the stories said. The weak, the sick, and the defenseless.
“Maybe the guards think the dragon from last night could still be spying in the city, hiding in human form,” Anders said. “Or planning to start a fire.”
Rayna snorted. “What, and they think if they ask people, they’re just going to admit they knew where a dragon was but decided not to tell anyone?”
He nodded, lowering his voice to do his best impression of an upstanding citizen. “Yes, Guard, in fact I hide scorch dragons on my roof, because I want to be roasted alive and I don’t believe in public safety. I feel a little bit guilty about it, and I’ve been meaning to confess to somebody, but I wasn’t sure who would want to know.”
“At least you’d be warm.” She giggled, kicking at a slushy, melting pile of snow.
He returned to his own voice, her giggle helping chase away his own nerves, as he had hoped it would. “You never know if you don’t ask.” But though he smiled along with her, even the words put a twitch between his shoulder blades. Scorch dragons. They were the one thing every person in Holbard knew to fear, whether they were locals or traders from across the sea. There were new rumors every day that dragons were near the city again. Rumors they’d burned a farmhouse to the ground just last week, the farmer’s family still inside.
“How far south do we have to go to dodge the guards?” Rayna asked, jolting him from that thought. It went without saying that they’d avoid them. Guards asked questions like “Where are your parents?” and other inconvenient things related to adult supervision.
“At least ten streets,” he replied. “A couple of them were in wolf form, and I think they smell it if you’re worried.”
“Ten streets? That doubles the distance to Trellig Square! Anders, if you knew we were going the wrong way, why didn’t you stop me?” She was all indignation, hands on hips.
“Well, I—” But he gave up before he started. Maybe he should have tried harder. It sort of was his fault they’d come so far the wrong way. “I’m sorry,” he settled on. But she was already moving again, heading south.
“We’ll go over the rooftops.”
He was tall and gangly to her short and strong—though the twins shared the same black curls and warm brown skin, in almost every other way they were different. So being taller, Anders boosted Rayna up until she could grab the guttering and haul herself onto the nearest roof. Then he scrambled onto a barrel and climbed after her.
When he straightened up, he could see the rooftop meadows of Holbard spread out before them. Each square of grass was at least twenty houses long and twenty wide, rising and falling with the pitch and slope of the roofs.
The rooftops were covered in bright patches of wild-flowers, red fentills tucked down in the gullies, yellow-and-white flameflowers bobbing in the breeze on the slopes, as well as the occasional herb garden, where someone had a window big enough to climb out and tend to their plants.
Thanks to the street children of Holbard, wherever there was only an alleyway between two stretches of grass, rather than a wide street, a plank of wood was almost always propped in place to serve as a bridge. You could travel half the city up here without ever needing to set foot on the ground.
Anders and Rayna ran across the grass together, climbing over the tops of the sloped roofs. It only took them a few minutes to find Trellig Square, which wasn’t as big as the larger town squares in fancier neighborhoods, or down by the docks, but was always guaranteed to be packed with shoppers.
Below them they could see at least a hundred people doing their shopping at nearly twenty different stalls all squeezed in together, selling everything from flowers to eggs, secondhand clothes to hot sausages in bread.
On a rooftop on the opposite side of the square they saw Jerro, a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy of about their age, with pasty white skin hidden under a layer of dirt. He was a notorious pickpocket, and ran with a couple of his brothers, who looked like smaller versions of himself. Today, he studied Anders and Rayna for a long moment and then turned away, apparently confident the twins weren’t a threat.
Down in the square, there was a puppet show setting up for one last performance before dusk fell, the players assembling the wooden box they’d hide behind to work the puppets, while out front a self-playing harmonica sucked in wind and spat out tunes. It was an artifact—an invention that channeled essence, or magic—and probably worth more than the rest of the puppet show put together.
The twins flopped down on their fronts, propping their chins up on their elbows as the harmonica fell silent and the show began. They couldn’t hear the voices of the performers from up here, but they could still tell which story it was. The troupe was performing the last great battle, the time ten years before—when Anders and Rayna had been toddlers—when the dragons had attacked Holbard, and the Wolf Guard had defended the city.