Read Chapter 5: Into the Flames

Tom’s boots slapped against cobbles slick with ash and scattered cinders. The heat came at him in waves, pressing against his back like a great beast breathing down his neck. South. He kept moving south, though every instinct screamed at him to turn, to find a crack in the wall of flame, to claw his way out of this furnace of a city.

But east was smoke and screaming. West was the hunting party’s net, and he knew, with the cold certainty that had kept him alive this long, that the river was already watched. So south it was—into the gullet of the fire itself.

The box bumped against his hip with every stride. Iron, but not so heavy as it had felt an hour ago. Or perhaps his arms had simply gone numb with fear.

He came to a junction where three streets met, all of them burning. Wooden houses leaned into one another like drunkards, their roofs belching fire into the low sky. A caravan of merchants’ wagons lay abandoned, one wheel smashed, its contents spilled—bolts of silk and velvet blackening in the heat. A woman knelt beside a bundle of rags that might have been a child, her sobs swallowed by the roar.

Tom’s lungs burned. He pressed his sleeve to his mouth, the fabric damp with sweat, and forced himself forward through the narrowest lane. It was barely wide enough for two men abreast, and the walls on either side were already glowing orange at the windows.

Then he saw the horseman.

Tom pulled himself into a doorway’s shallow recess, pressing his spine against the wood. The man rode at a walking pace through the heart of the fire, utterly unhurried. His cloak was the color of dried blood—deep red wool that fell over the horse’s hindquarters. The beast itself was a dark dappled grey, its head held high, ears twitching at the sparks that rained down around them.

Sir Robert Markham. Tom knew him from the old days, when his father still worked the fire crews and Markham had come down from Whitehall to inspect the pumps. A king’s agent, they called him. Tom had seen him once, years ago, in the courtyard of a burnt church, watching the smoking ruin with the same patient expression he now wore.

Markham wasn’t fleeing the fire. He was riding *with* it.

Tom pressed deeper into the shadow of the doorway as the horse stepped closer. Markham’s face was pale, sharp-boned, lit from below by the flames so that his eyes seemed to vanish into dark hollows. He wasn’t looking at the buildings, or the panicked citizens, or the direction of the wind. He was looking *up*—at the rooftops, at the way the fire moved, as if he were reading something written in the smoke.

A soldier on foot trotted up beside the horse, holding his helmet to his head against the heat. “Sir, the street ahead is clear. The flames have taken the east warehouses but the wind holds west.”

“The wind holds west,” Markham repeated. Not a question. A confirmation. “Then we block the crossing at Bell Lane. No one passes south of the bridge.”

“Sir, the fire—there are still families in those houses. If we block the lane, they’ll be cut off from the water.”

“They’ll be cut off from more than water if they carry word of this night.” Markham’s voice was flat, careless, like a man ordering the disposal of spoiled meat. “Two men at the lane’s mouth. No one through. No one. Shoot them if they try.”

The soldier hesitated, then saluted and ran off into the inferno.

Tom’s blood went cold in his veins. Markham was cutting off the south route. Not the river—the *street* that led to it. And he was doing it in a way that would look, to anyone who didn’t know better, like a man trying to save lives, to redirect the fire’s flow away from the water’s edge.

But the fire didn’t follow orders.

Markham’s horse stepped past Tom’s doorway, close enough that Tom could smell the oil on the man’s riding boots, the sweat of the animal. The box seemed to grow heavier against his ribs. He closed his eyes, tried to breathe shallow, tried to become stone.

Markham stopped.

“You there,” he said.

Tom’s heart seized. His hand went to his belt where his knife used to hang—empty leather.

“The boy in the doorway. Show yourself.”

Tom didn’t move. A heartbeat. Another. He could run—back the way he came, into the smoke, into the unknown arms of the hunting party behind him, the merchant’s men, Tavel’s brute—

But Markham was already dismounting. The horse nickered, stepping sideways as a cry from the rooftops split the air. A timber cracked like a cannon shot, sending a shower of sparks cascading down over them.

Markham turned, just for an instant, to see the falling beam.

Tom ran.

Not south—that was blocked now. Not west, not east. He drove straight through the building beside him, burst through a door that was already half-consumed, and found himself in a tradesman’s workshop. The walls were lined with barrels of pitch and tar. The fire was already here, a low orange carpet crawling across the floor toward the nearest cask.

Tom didn’t stop. He vaulted over a workbench, through a back room, out through a shattered window into an alley he knew only from stolen walks as a child. The old tannery. The river smell—mud, fish, rot—cut through the smoke for one blessed instant.

He ran.

Behind him, he heard Markham’s voice, calm even over the roar: “Find him. He carries the phoenix.”

Tom’s hand found the box, clutched it tight, and plunged onward into the burning dark.

The fire was ahead of him now, the whole sky turned orange and black, the world a tunnel of flame. And somewhere beyond it, the Thames waited—cold, dark, and utterly unguarded.

If he could reach it.