Darkness of Dragons Read online

  She reached out to grab him again, but just then someone cleared their throat from the doorway.

  Cobra whirled around, almost nicking Qibli with her venomous tail. Through his tears, Qibli recognized the dragon who’d been watching the fray outside. She angled her head to study him sideways for a moment.

  “Am I interrupting something?” she asked.

  “Just trying to teach my idiot son a lesson,” Cobra hissed.

  “About … what exactly?” asked the stranger.

  Cobra folded her wings back. “He thinks about other dragons too much. It’s going to get him killed one day.”

  “Interesting,” said the other dragon. Her eyes flicked from Qibli to the coconut to Cobra, as if she were reading the story of what had just happened. “I happen to be looking for dragons who … work well with others, let’s say. I’d like to take him off your talons.”

  “He’s not for sale,” said Cobra. Qibli glanced up at her. That sounded like she cared enough to want to keep him … except that she’d said it in her “opening negotiations” voice, not her “and that’s final” voice. As though she was only bartering to get a better offer.

  “Give him to me,” said the other dragon, “and my Outclaws will stay out of your business.”

  Cobra’s eyebrows arched. “Should I care what your little gang of ruffians does?”

  “Yes. We will have full control of this city by the new year. If we’re willing to leave you alone, that’s an offer you should jump at.” The dragon stepped past Cobra and beckoned to Qibli. “Come along, dragon who cares too much.”

  “I didn’t say you could take him, Thorn,” Cobra snapped.

  “But I am taking him,” Thorn answered calmly.

  “Why would you want him?” Cobra tried. “He’s useless. He’s completely ordinary. He’ll never do anything important.”

  “Ordinary dragons do important things all the time,” said Thorn. “Or perhaps I just want him to steal me some coconuts. You don’t need to worry about it, because you won’t be seeing him again.”

  “Huh,” Cobra snorted. “That would be an upside.”

  Qibli looked from one to the other in disbelief. His mother was about to back down — and he’d never seen her give in to anyone except his terrifying grandfather. Who was this strange dragon who wanted to steal him? Was Cobra … afraid of her?

  “What about our business?” Cobra demanded, flicking one wing out to block Qibli’s path.

  “Have you found any of them?” Thorn asked, nodding at the sketch on Cobra’s desk.

  “No,” Cobra answered. “Not a trace anywhere.”

  Thorn frowned. “Then keep looking. Same rate until you find them.” She dropped a small, jingling sack into Cobra’s claws and turned to Qibli again. “Time to go.”

  “But —” Qibli tried to protest. “My mother —”

  “Doesn’t want you here,” finished Cobra. She was greedily digging about inside the sack.

  Qibli blinked hard, trying to hold back his tears. His mother definitely wouldn’t want to keep him if he cried.

  The strange dragon crouched in front of him, and he realized for the first time how kind her eyes were.

  “You will be safe with me,” she said softly. “And wanted. And cared for.”

  “B-but,” Qibli choked out, “I w-want my m-mother t-to —”

  “To want you and care for you?” Thorn said, even more softly. “I know. I’m sorry she doesn’t. But your life doesn’t have to be like this. Come with me and you’ll see.”

  She brushed his wing with hers and turned toward the door. Qibli took two steps after her, then looked back at his mother. Cobra was piling coins in careful stacks on her desk, but she felt his eyes on her and glanced up.

  “Hoping for some last words of wisdom?” Cobra said scornfully. “Take care of yourself, lizard. You’ll never amount to much, so don’t go trying to be a hero, or you’ll just get killed. And don’t come crawling back here. How’s that?”

  Thorn put her wing around Qibli and steered him toward the door. Her jaw was tense, as if she was holding back a lot of things she wanted to say.

  Qibli’s home passed by him in a blur, and by the time he looked up, they were in unfamiliar streets, heading toward the other side of the city. There were palm trees here, staggered along the walls of the alleys or poking out of courtyards like curious snouts.

  “Can I ask you something?” Thorn said.

  He nodded.

  “What did you do with the spiny mouse?”

  He reached into the small pouch slung around his chest and drew out the small, trembling creature. Thorn stopped and watched him release it into a hole in one of the outer city walls.

  “I figured you’d rescued it,” she said.

  “They’re not really worth eating,” he said, worried now. Should he have offered it to her? What did she want him to do? If he was going to belong to her now, he should start figuring out how to make her like him. Maybe he’d already failed.

  “I agree,” she said, thumping his shoulder in a friendly way. “I’d have let it go, too. It was clever, what you did. I was impressed with how you tricked everyone. Just the kind of smarts I’m looking for in my organization.”

  Qibli’s heart was threatening to swell and burst right out of his chest. No one had ever praised him for anything. No one had ever noticed anything he’d ever done right.

  She didn’t do it intentionally, but in that moment, Thorn won Qibli’s undying loyalty forever.

  He’d thought she was the only dragon he’d ever care about that much — that he would spend his life fighting and dying for her and be happy doing so.

  Until she sent him off to school and he met a dragon named Moonwatcher, and now everything felt different. He’d had a life plan: prove his loyalty, serve Thorn, be the best Outclaw possible. That life plan did not include thinking about a fascinating NightWing all the time.

  Moon took up so much of his headspace. He caught himself watching her the way he used to watch Cobra, hoping for a glance that would hint she might love him back. He wanted to bring her new scrolls that would make her face light up. He wanted to make her soup when her visions gave her headaches and sing her silly songs to help her stop worrying. He wanted to fly beside her while she saved the world.

  He most definitely did not want to watch her fly away, with no idea when she would ever come back.

  Qibli saw a glimmer of silver farther down the mountain. It was Winter, gazing after the departing dragons with a soulfully tragic face.

  Did I look like that, too, watching her leave?

  Probably not. Winter has a much better snout for soulful tragedy than I do. Whenever Qibli tried to make heroic, dashing faces like Winter’s in the mirror, it mostly looked like he was trying to suck bits of scorpion out of his teeth.

  “Hey,” he said, landing beside his friend. (He’d decided to fly with the label friend, although parts of him could acknowledge that it was a little optimistic.)

  Winter jumped and gave him a sideways scowl. “Hrrmph,” he said, clearing his throat. “Just uh … admiring the sunrise.”

  “Oh, yeah, me too,” said Qibli. “Absolutely nothing else interesting happening out here. Nope. Excellent sunrise, that’s it.”

  Winter transferred his scowl to the wings that were getting smaller and smaller in the distance. “Well,” he said, “at least Darkstalker will take care of … uh, of them.”

  “Moon can take care of herself,” Qibli pointed out.

  “He’ll get settled in the rainforest, make some friends, and then she’ll come right back,” Winter said, ignoring Qibli. “And we can all go back to normal. Except now we have a giant magic friend who can tell us the future. That’ll be useful.”

  Qibli couldn’t keep the worry off his face as he regarded Winter. He just didn’t sound like the haughty, sharp-minded IceWing prince that Qibli had come to know.

  Everyone else under Darkstalker’s spell — if I’m right, and there is a sp
ell — still sounds like themselves. They’re less suspicious of him than they probably should be, but still normalish. Winter is acting like someone’s wrapped his brain in walrus blubber.

  “How can everything go back to normal?” Qibli asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead? What happens when your queen finds out you’ve popped up back at school? Or your parents? Won’t that be a little awkward for your brother, who supposedly killed you?”

  Winter hesitated. “I … I’m not sure,” he said. “My name must be gone from the rankings wall by now. I think if I choose to stay in exile, it shouldn’t make any difference to my queen or my family. I’m as good as dead to them anyway.” He paused again, then added in a lower voice, “I do worry about Hailstorm. I wasn’t going to come back to school, but … ” He trailed off.

  But Moon was here, Qibli finished in his head, feeling imaginary claws sink into his heart. And he’d risk anything to be with her.

  Qibli thought he would do the same, but he’d never been tested like Winter, sent through the cold darkness of betrayal and certain death. How could he ever think he’d be worthy of Moon, when she could choose someone like Winter?

  Or at least, the real Winter — the one underneath the weird spell.

  I have to get him back. For his sake and for hers. Once he’s thinking for himself again, we can figure out what to do about Moon and Darkstalker.

  I have to break Darkstalker’s spell on him.

  But how?

  Winter found Qibli in the prey center shortly after midday and poked him with his tail.

  “Enough moping,” he said. “We have class.”

  “I’m not MOPING,” said Qibli, sitting up and throwing away the banana he’d been staring at for twenty minutes. “YOU’RE moping.”

  “I most certainly am not,” said Winter. “IceWing princes never mope.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Qibli said. “I got the word wrong. You’re BROODING.”

  “Well, that would be preferable.” Winter drew back his wings and snorted a tiny cloud of ice particles. “But I’m not doing either. I’m going to history class, and so should you.”

  “History!” Qibli protested. “How can we possibly sit in a dark cave listening to Webs drone on about the ancient past? This is history, happening right now. We’re in the middle of it, or we should be.”

  “Oh, really? What sort of history were you planning to make today?” Winter scoffed. “All the excitement has gone off to the rainforest. We’re just the footnotes.” He poked Qibli with his tail again. “Come on, or Tsunami will yell at us.”

  Qibli trailed through the tunnels after him, trying not to look as glum as he felt about the idea of being a footnote in someone else’s heroic saga.

  They found their way to the new history cave, several winding corridors away from the one that had been firebombed. This one had a skylight, but it was still too dark, damp, and chilly for Qibli. He missed the wide-open sunshine of the desert. He also wasn’t a big fan of the fact that the cave only had one exit, or the way scrolls were piled in corners like inevitable kindling. Even though Sora was gone now, he couldn’t help thinking of the last attack and what might have happened without Moon’s prophetic warnings.

  Tamarin, the injured RainWing, was already there when they arrived. She was circling the cave cautiously, tapping the walls with her talons and sniffing the air.

  “Anything we should worry about?” Qibli asked her.

  She shook her head. “Unless … do you smell smoke?” she asked.

  “I don’t,” he said, inhaling deeply. “And SandWings have a pretty good sense of smell.”

  “So do I, normally,” she said. “But I haven’t been able to get the smell of smoke out of my nose since the explosion.” Her wings twitched back and she reached out to touch the cave wall as if reassuring herself it was still there.

  Qibli mentally flipped through what he knew about RainWing scales — when they weren’t deliberately changed for camouflage or adornment, they reflected the dragon’s emotions. Tamarin’s today were a muted blue-gray with ripples of white, in between the bandages and scorch marks.

  A little sad, Qibli guessed. And Kinkajou turned white when she was attacked and knocked unconscious — so maybe that indicates pain? “Are you all right?” he asked. “Do the burns hurt a lot?”

  “Today they do,” she said, wincing. “Mostly I’m worried about Kinkajou, though.”

  “Me too,” Qibli admitted. He’d last seen their RainWing friend lying in a bed in the town of Possibility, far across the continent, unable to wake up. That’s one thing I could have done with Darkstalker’s scroll. I would have healed her. I would have healed Tamarin, too, and all the soldiers who were hurt by the war.

  Oh, why hadn’t his friends just let him have it? Then Darkstalker would still be under the mountain, Qibli would be fixing everyone’s problems, Kinkajou would be awake, Tamarin would be able to see, and Moon would still be here where he could talk to her every day.

  A SeaWing burst into the room, flapping his wings and staring around frantically. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Has anyone seen Princess Anemone?”

  Pike. Qibli plucked the name from his memory of the winglet lists. Clawmates with Bigtail — now dead — and Flame — now accused of trying to murder Stonemover. Pike is the SeaWing who’s always defending Anemone and may be working for her mother, Queen Coral.

  “Um, yes,” Winter answered him. He peered down his snout at Pike. “Anemone left for the rainforest with all the NightWings and their glorious leader early this morning.”

  “Did you literally just say ‘glorious leader’?” Qibli asked.

  “Do you literally not recognize sarcasm when you hear it?” Winter retorted.

  Nearly everything Winter ever said sounded sarcastic, but Qibli thought he was developing a fairly good sense of when the IceWing was actually being sincere. And the intonation just then had been … troubling, to say the least.

  “She left?” Pike cried. “Left the school?” He clutched his head.

  “You couldn’t have stopped her,” Qibli said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “I have to go after her,” Pike said, turning in a circle. “But I don’t know anything about the rainforest! Oh, Queen Coral is going to feed me to the sharks. The princess on her own! With no one to guard her!”

  “Prince Turtle was with her,” Winter pointed out.

  “I don’t find that reassuring,” Pike snapped.

  “I’m inclined to agree with you,” Winter said, poking his nose back into his scroll.

  “Turtle is great,” Qibli argued. “He’ll watch out for her.” He didn’t dare tell them that Turtle was invisible to Darkstalker. But surely that meant Turtle would be useful protection for his sister … didn’t it?

  “Besides,” Tamarin added, “Anemone’s an animus. She can guard herself better than anyone else could.”

  Perhaps, Qibli thought, but it depends on what spells Darkstalker has cast on her.

  “I have to go after her,” Pike said again. He spun toward the entrance and ran straight into their history teacher.

  “Sit down, young dragon,” Webs said, pleasantly but firmly. “It is time for our lesson.”

  “I have to go rescue the princess!” Pike cried.

  “Fiddlesquids,” Webs said, ushering him back into the cave. “You are a student. What you have to do is fill your mind with knowledge and wisdom.”

  Qibli sympathized completely with the frustrated look on Pike’s face. He wanted to rip off the roof of the cavern with his claws and go flying after the other dragons, too.

  “Since your two winglets are rather low on numbers at the moment, Silver Winglet will be joining us today,” Webs went on. He flicked a beckoning wing at the hallway and four dragonets filed in.

  “Rather low on numbers” is a generous way to describe us, Qibli thought ruefully. He and Winter were the only ones from Jade Winglet still at school, and Tamarin’s Gold Winglet had been equally decimated by the
explosion and Sora’s attempted assassination of Icicle.

  But wait — Qibli perked up. This meant he’d get to see Ostrich, the SandWing in Silver Winglet. She was the daughter of Queen Thorn’s most trusted general, Six-Claws, and Qibli had promised to look out for her while they were at school.

  He hadn’t seen her yet since his return to Jade Mountain, although he’d gone looking the night before. Princess Anemone had been the only one in the cave they shared. When he poked his snout in she was scattering jewelry around, clearly in such a bad temper that he hadn’t dared stay to wait for Ostrich.

  But the curious little SandWing wasn’t among the dragonets settling into the classroom. Qibli checked his mental list — there was a big-shouldered MudWing named Sepia, a placid-looking RainWing named Boto who settled himself next to Tamarin, a haughty IceWing called Changbai who did not sit next to Winter, and a small-boned dusky orange SkyWing named Thrush, who took one of the front-row seats and gazed intently at the teacher.

  Where is Ostrich? Qibli wondered. She’s usually so excited for her classes, no matter how boring they are. How did she escape this torture?

  “Now where were we?” Webs said in his maddeningly slow voice. “Ah yes, the five hundred years of transformation and resettling that followed the Scorching … ”

  Thrush raised one of his talons and spoke without waiting to be called on. “Can you teach us about Darkstalker today, please?”

  “Yes!” Changbai agreed. “He doesn’t seem anything like the dragon from our old stories. In that he did not immediately start murdering all of us.”

  “Three moons,” said Boto, his claws turning lime green. “Is, uh … is he likely to do that?”

  “Darkstalker,” Webs grumbled. “Wrecking my lesson plans. That’s over three thousand years after the Scorching! We’re not scheduled to get to that era for months.”

  “But we need to know about him now,” Tamarin insisted.

  “Because of the maybe murdering?” Boto said. “I think I agree yes, I would like to hear about that? Or more specifically about how not happening that is?”