Read Chapter 35: The False Prize

The river stank of smoke and drowned things, but Tom hardly noticed. His hands worked in the gray dawn light, fumbling with the old clasp he’d lifted from a burned-out shop two weeks ago—the one that had saved his fingers from a hundred locks since. He turned it over, felt the weight, and knew it would never pass for the box’s true mechanism. It didn’t need to. Not from a distance. Not in a panic.

Alice crouched beside him, her face smudged and hollow-eyed. She watched him work without asking. She knew better now.

“You’re going to get that boy killed,” she said quietly.

Tom didn’t look up. “I’m going to give him a chance to run. That’s more than the fire gives anyone.”

He found the urchin huddled in a doorway half a street over—a boy of maybe nine, all sharp elbows and hunger. Tom had seen him before, picking pockets near the old market. The kid’s eyes went wide when Tom tossed him a silver shilling.

“What’s this for?”

“You ever seen an iron box, lad? About this big.” Tom held his hands a foot apart. “Black. Heavy. Lock on the front with a crown pressed into it.”

The boy nodded slowly, already suspicious.

“There’s men looking for it,” Tom said. “Men in red cloaks. Priests. Dangerous sorts. If they see you carrying it, they’ll chase you.”

“And you want me to be chased.”

Tom smiled, thin and cold. “I want you to run. And when they catch you—because they will—you tell them you found it in the gutter. You don’t know who dropped it. You don’t know where they went. Understand?”

“What happens when they catch me?”

“They’ll open it, find it’s filled with river stones, and let you go.” Tom hoped that was a lie. He’d seen what these men did to people who slowed them down. But the boy had a chance, and a chance was more than Tom had given himself in years.

He watched the boy scamper off, the decoy box bouncing against his ribs, wrapped in a scrap of sacking to look like a treasure. Then Tom turned north, toward the alley that ran behind Percy’s lodgings.

The fire had crept closer overnight. The sky was a bruised orange, and the wind carried ash like a second snowfall. Tom moved through the maze of back courts, keeping to the shadows where the heat hadn’t yet driven the rats out. Alice followed, silent as she’d been since the crypt.

Percy’s lodgings were a narrow townhouse set back from the street, half-timbered and already smoking at the eaves. The fire hadn’t reached it yet, but it would. Tom found a window at the rear that opened onto a scullery and slipped inside.

Voices came from the floor above, muffled but clear through the floorboards. Tom pressed himself flat to the wall and listened.

“The girl is gone,” someone said—a voice like oil on stone. The priest. “The monk failed. He lies in St. Dunstan’s, and if he wakes, he will sing like a canary.”

“Then see that he doesn’t wake.” That voice was younger, sharper. Percy. Tom tensed.

“The boy is more resourceful than I anticipated,” the priest said. “He has the box. He has opened it. The seal has been broken.”

“And the contents?”

“He has not used them. He does not know what he holds. But he will learn, soon enough. He has his mother’s blood, after all.”

Tom felt the words like a blade slipping between his ribs. His mother’s blood. The letter in his pocket seemed to burn against his thigh.

“Then find him,” Percy snapped. “Find the boy and bring me the phial. The fire will be at the city gates by nightfall. If the King declares martial law, the army will sweep the streets and we lose our window. I need that weapon now, not when the Thames has turned to steam.”

“The boy has the pardon too,” the priest said. “He may seek the King’s court.”

“He’ll never make it. The court has moved to Hampton. The roads are fire. And even if he does—” Percy laughed, a thin, brittle sound. “He’ll find the King has no love for the son of a firefighter who died in disgrace. His father’s name is worth less than ash in Whitehall.”

Tom’s hand drifted to his belt where the phial sat, warm against his hip. His father. The fire. The sulfur smell that had haunted his nightmares since he was ten years old. It all clicked into place like the tumblers of a lock.

The weapon that killed his father was in his hands. And the man who had ordered it made was two floors above, laughing.

Alice touched his arm. Her eyes were wide, asking the question she wouldn’t say aloud: *What do we do now?*

Tom counted the exits. The stairs. The window. The back door he’d come through. Three men, maybe four, between him and the door. Percy had guards. The priest had a knife, probably, and the look of a man who knew how to use it.

He had the phial. One throw. One splash. One blue flame that water couldn’t kill.

But the fire was already here, everywhere, devouring the city block by block. To add more was to end everything—not just Percy, not just the priest, but every soul still trapped in the burning streets. The boy with the decoy box. The baker’s boy. The old women who couldn’t run.

His mother’s letter said he had a choice. The box had given him one.

But choices, Tom had learned, were just another kind of lock. And he wasn’t sure he had the key.

He backed away from the stairs, motioning Alice toward the window. Percy’s voice pursued them down the hall.

“The monk’s fire has done its work. Marschal law will come at sunset. When it does, every soldier in London will be looking for a thief and a girl with a box. They will be caught, Alice will be returned to the Church, and the weapon will be mine.”

Alice’s face went pale as bone. Tom saw it, saw the fear crack her composure like a heat-split stone.

She knew what the Church did to girls who ran. She’d told him once, in the crypt, in a voice so small he’d barely heard it.

“We go,” Tom whispered. “Now.”

They dropped from the window into the ash-choked alley as Percy’s voice rose behind them, sharp with the recognition that his quarry had slipped his net. Tom hit the ground running and didn’t stop.

The decoy would buy them minutes. Maybe less.

But minutes were all he needed to reach the King’s court, to stand before the throne, to raise the true box and the phial and the pardon together and dare anyone to call him thief.

His father’s name was ash.

But Tom wasn’t done burning.