The Poison Jungle Read online

  Sundew kind of wanted to ask for the vine back, but she had a pretty strong feeling the queen would say no, and then what would she do — try to wrestle it out of the massive dragon’s talons?

  I’ll get the truth out of her when we come back, though, she thought as they all took a step back toward the edge of the balcony. She definitely knows that plant.

  “Can I take Sundew to meet the new dragons?” Willow asked.

  “Yes, yes,” the queen answered, waving them off.

  “They’re asleep, you nut,” Hazel pointed out with a grin at Willow that made Sundew absolutely wild with jealousy.

  “Then we’ll just peek at them,” Willow said. “Come on, Sundew!”

  The new dragons, it turned out, were only a few levels down the same tree, in two side-by-side interior rooms that Sundew noticed were not prison cells, exactly, but were not exactly wide open to the rest of the village either. She also couldn’t help but notice the vines of thorns and toxic sap that wound around the doorways, or the four LeafWings stationed nearby, casually playing pickup twigs in the hall in the middle of the night. They gave Willow and Sundew suspicious looks but went back to their game with a shrug when they saw Hazel with them.

  “The SilkWing is in there,” Willow whispered, pointing to the first doorway.

  Sundew peered inside, her heart thumping. This whole time, she’d felt confident that Luna was all right. Her sense of Luna, from the short time they’d been together, was that Luna could absolutely take care of herself. But Blue and Swordtail had worried so much and so incessantly that it must have rubbed off on her a little, because now she felt a tremor of weird excitement as she peered into the dark room. Luna, at last! Safe and sound! So everyone could shut up about her and focus on the mission!

  Except … it wasn’t Luna.

  She couldn’t see the sleeping SilkWing very clearly, but she could see that the wings were a dark color, maybe blue or purple, not the pale pearly green that Luna’s were. And there was no flamesilk glow from this SilkWing’s wrists.

  “What’s wrong?” Willow said softly.

  “Not the dragon we’re looking for.” Sundew shook her head with a sigh. Blue was going to be disappointed. Swordtail was going to be worse; he was going to be SUPER ANNOYING about it. But Luna had to be all right. She must have just landed … somewhere else. “Where did you find her?”

  “Trapped in a Roridula not far from the border,” Willow said. “She’s lucky we got there before it ate her.”

  “I wonder what a SilkWing was doing inside the Poison Jungle,” Sundew said thoughtfully.

  “Escaping from HiveWings, I think,” Willow said. “Now, come see the others.” She tugged on Sundew’s elbow and led her to the second doorway. Sundew found herself holding her breath as she looked inside.

  For a moment, she didn’t know what she was seeing. There were two dragons, asleep back-to-back with the bigger one’s wing tented over the smaller one. The smaller one seemed to be greenish, like a LeafWing, but the wing she could see was an odd shape, not leaflike at all. And the other dragon was … not green … maybe blue? Like a SilkWing … but with only two wings?

  Strangest of all, they were both kind of glowing.

  She squinted at them.

  Yup. Little patterns in their scales had a faint glow to them, all along their wings and across their snouts and down their tails. As though they had rolled in phosphorescent moss, except it seemed to be really part of them.

  “What are they?” she breathed, awestruck.

  “They call themselves SeaWings,” Willow whispered. “And they come from the Distant Kingdoms.”

  Willow and Sundew spent the rest of the night in a pile of leaves in Hazel’s room. Willow offered to take Sundew back to her own home, but she was clearly nervous about waking her dad and explaining Sundew to him in the middle of the night. So they decided it would be easier to sleep in the queen’s tree house and deal with grown-ups in the morning instead, with daylight to help, and after the queen spoke to them.

  Sundew fell asleep almost as soon as she lay down next to Willow, the long days of flying and stress catching up to her all at once. She had a moment to breathe, a moment of feeling Willow’s tranquil heartbeat through their scales, a moment to think, Stay on guard, I don’t know this village, there are strangers all around me, except Willow, I have Willow, right beside me … and then she was out, in a darkness beyond dreams.

  She slept well past dawn, as she realized when she finally awoke to find the sun shining cheerfully, already ambling up the curve of the sky.

  She sat up quickly and blinked at Hazel, who was perched in her hammock, reading a book.

  Hazel’s room was bright and airy, studded with open windows and balconies so the breeze flew through it, but sheltered from the rain by an overhanging roof of large round leaves. Three desks took up half the room, even when they were shoved into the corner to make space for the leaf pile Sundew had slept in. Each desk was covered in a mess of bookbinding supplies made from jungle ingredients: some kind of sap glue dripping over the sides of its pot, tree fiber threads draped everywhere, and bark for the covers scattered about, dyed in colors from deep berry red to summery daisy yellow to a swirl of purple and pearl white.

  Bright red trumpet creeper flowers poked through the roof, and Hazel had hung small paper dragons and clouds from every leaf stem, so there was a little blizzard of them flying overhead.

  Sundew blinked again and looked over her shoulder to see Willow still asleep beside her. Willow had one wing flung out to the side, the way a baby dragonet might sleep, and her cheek was pillowed on her front talons in a cute smushy way.

  Focus, Sundew!

  Or pause for a moment to be happy. That’s what Willow would say to do. After all the craziness with SilkWings and sneaking through Hives and dealing with strangers, I’m back with her at last, where I can just be myself.

  She sighed. All right, moment over.

  “Hazel,” she said, and the princess finally looked up from her book. “Aren’t we late to meet your great-grandmother? Weren’t we supposed to be there at dawn?”

  Hazel’s wings lifted and fell in a shrug. “She sent a messenger that she wasn’t ready yet. She’ll call us when she wants us, don’t worry.”

  Sundew frowned at her. “And what am I supposed to do until then? Just sit around this village like an orchid waiting to be stomped? Dragons will be looking for me! Also I have things to do!” She thought of Blue and Cricket and Bumblebee and Swordtail. Would they worry about her? Or would they think she’d abandoned them, as would be typical of her according to them apparently?

  I hope someone feeds Bumblebee, she caught herself thinking, and then she wanted to smack herself. That dragonet would 1,000 percent make sure someone fed her; she didn’t need Sundew for that. None of them needed her.

  “You’re doing the most important thing,” Willow said sleepily. “You’re investigating the mind-control plant and warning us that the HiveWings know we’re here. That’s pretty important, if you ask me.”

  “The HiveWings don’t know we’re here,” Sundew pointed out. “They know we’re still alive, but they don’t know where.”

  Willow propped her chin on one talon and gave Sundew a skeptical look. “You don’t think they’ll guess pretty quickly? Hmmm. Where could those dragons who like trees possibly be? Oh, perhaps in the only bit of forest left on the whole continent, which also happens to be the only place we haven’t been able to go for the last fifty years, what a coincidence.”

  Sundew felt unease ripple under her scales. Was Willow right? Would it be that easy for Wasp to find them? She’d assumed Wasp would come after them eventually … but also that she’d waste some resources searching the whole continent first.

  “It doesn’t matter if they guess right,” she huffed. “The Poison Jungle will fight them off! Even if they arrived at the Snarling River today, they couldn’t get through to either of our villages. The jungle will eat them alive.”


  “I hope you’re right,” Willow said. “Hey, while we wait, let’s go talk to those SeaWings! Don’t you want to meet them?”

  Sundew’s scales prickled with excitement and nerves. She’d nearly forgotten about them while she slept. Dragons from the Distant Kingdoms! She couldn’t believe it, but Cricket was right — it was a real place, where dragons really lived.

  “Yes,” she said. “Let’s do that right now.”

  “We can take them some breakfast,” Willow said, sitting up and stretching. “Hazel, want to come, too?”

  The princess shook her head. “I’m at a really good part,” she said apologetically, holding up her book. “You know Great-Grandma usually never leaves me alone for this long, so I want to take advantage of it while I can.”

  “I get that,” Willow said. “See you later!”

  “Bye,” Sundew mumbled, following Willow out of the room. They flew down to the kitchen level, where two busy dragons waved at Willow and made puzzled faces at Sundew but didn’t stop their whirl of chopping and peeling and preparing. Willow scooped up two halves of a coconut, gave one to Sundew, and filled them both with strips of dried mango and raw fish.

  “It seems like most of the dragons in the palace know you,” Sundew observed.

  “I guess,” Willow said, glancing around at the chefs. “I mean, everyone kind of knows everyone. There aren’t that many of us in the tribe, after all.”

  Because the HiveWings tried to wipe us out. And then half of us left to form our own tribe, Sundew thought, with an odd twist of guilt under her usual anger.

  “Do you come here a lot, though?” Sundew asked, watching Willow dig out and open a barrel of macadamia nuts. “To the palace, I mean? … Maybe to see Hazel?”

  Willow crinkled her snout at Sundew. “Hazel is a friend of mine,” she said, “like all the dragonets our age in the village. But if what you’re really asking is ‘Hey, Willow, have you by any chance fallen in love with some other dragon while I abandoned you to go start a war and frolic with SilkWings?’ the answer is no, I haven’t, you’re still the only dragon for me, even when you ask silly veiled questions.” She tossed a nut at Sundew, which bounced off her nose before she caught it.

  “Oh,” Sundew said. “Well then. Good. Fine. I mean, that wasn’t what I was asking, but since you brought it up, that’s great and good and fine with me.”

  “And?” Willow prompted.

  “And … thank you for the macadamia nut?” Sundew guessed.

  “And you’re still the only dragon for me, too, Willow, light of my life, I promise I will never fall for a beautiful SilkWing and leave you.” Willow put one talon dramatically to her forehead.

  “By all the trees!” Sundew said. “Of course! That’s obvious! That’s so obvious. I don’t need to say that, do I? You know all that. I mean, obviously. As if! Leave you for a SilkWing! BLEH.”

  Willow giggled. “I know,” she said, “but you should say it all the time anyway.”

  “I can’t imagine you would take me seriously if I said things like ‘light of my life’ all the time,” Sundew said, balancing the coconut and its contents carefully as she spread her wings and flew off the balcony with Willow.

  “I will always take you exactly as seriously as you deserve,” Willow said, grinning.

  “That is not a comforting answer, light of my life,” Sundew said. Willow started laughing so hard, she nearly dropped her coconut.

  A different set of not-quite-exactly-guards were gathered outside the strange dragons’ rooms. These four were bent over a map of the jungle around the village, pointing out spots where unwanted plants were trying to get in and comparing stories of their valiant battles with dragon-traps.

  They glanced up at Willow and Sundew but didn’t move to stop them or even ask what they were doing there as they landed.

  “Can anyone in the village just stop by to see the weird dragons?” Sundew asked.

  “I suppose so,” Willow said. “But I probably visit them the most, because I’m the one who found them.”

  “You ARE?” Sundew blinked at her in surprise.

  “Didn’t I mention that?” Willow said. She flicked her wings back and batted her eyelashes. “I rescued them! From a GIANT anaconda! If it weren’t for me, they’d be super dead! And then we’d have nothing but the remains of two interesting corpses to study.” She sighed.

  The bluer dragon poked her head out of her room. In the daylight, it was a little harder to see the dots of phosphorescent scales around her eyes and along her snout bones, but her deep blue color, unusual wing shape, and — Sundew noticed for the first time — webbed talons were much more obvious. “Willow!” she said brightly. “I always know it’s you when I hear someone talking loudly about heroic anaconda rescues. I will forgive you for the corpse comment because you come with food.”

  “Hi, Tsunami,” Willow said, passing her one of the coconuts. “This is Sundew, my girlfriend.”

  Unexpected tiny starbursts of joy exploded all through Sundew’s body, from her toes to her wingtips. They had never told anyone that before! Hearing Willow say it out loud, casually, to a totally random dragon, was probably the second-greatest moment of Sundew’s life, right after meeting Willow. She wondered what the blue dragon must think of meeting a LeafWing wearing whatever incredibly giddy expression she probably had on her face.

  “Hello, Sundew. What kind of tree is that?” Tsunami asked, backing into the room so they could enter. The other dragon lay on his side by the wall. He looked slightly ill, but he lifted his head curiously to see them.

  “It’s not a tree: it’s a plant that eats dragons and other animals,” Willow explained. “She’s one of the PoisonWings I told you about.”

  “That’s not what we call ourselves,” Sundew said quickly. “We’re LeafWings, real LeafWings.”

  “She might be able to answer some of your questions,” Willow said to the dark blue dragon, “because she’s just been to the Hives.”

  “Oh!” Tsunami said, looking at Sundew more intently.

  “Hi,” croaked the other SeaWing. “I’m Turtle. Sorry I’m not getting up. I don’t feel very well.”

  “He swallowed a lot more of the Gullet River than I would recommend,” Willow explained. “I’m sure he’ll be all right in another day or two. The ginger tea has been helping, hasn’t it, Turtle?”

  “Hrm,” he more or less agreed, flopping his head down again.

  “Poor dragon,” Willow said. “You know, I told them to turn around and go straight back to their continent, but it’s a good thing they didn’t. I don’t think Turtle would have made it.”

  “Grmbph,” he groaned.

  “You really came all the way from the Distant Kingdoms? How did you get here?” Sundew asked Tsunami. She could practically hear Cricket banging off the walls of her brain, yelping questions. These dragons from the Distant Kingdoms would absolutely make her lose her mind. She’d probably be even worse about them than she was about her beloved mysterious reading monkeys.

  “We swam,” Tsunami said. She held up one of her webbed talons, then pointed to what looked like gills along her neck. “SeaWings can breathe underwater. So we’d swim until we got tired, take a nap at the bottom of the sea, eat some fish, and then keep going. It felt like heading off the edge of the world. For most of the trip, we couldn’t see any land in any direction — maybe an island in the distance, unless we were hallucinating those. But we were trying to stay on a course due west, following the stars if my brother has any idea what he’s talking about.

  “It took us about four days of almost nonstop swimming, but I bet I could have done it in three by myself. I’m not sure if Turtle is really sick or just still recovering from all that exercise.”

  “Oi,” Turtle protested weakly. “Right here! And really sick!”

  “That’s a long time to swim without knowing anything was out here,” Sundew said. They must be out of their minds. What kind of lunatics would swim off the edge of the world fo
r no reason?

  “But we did know this continent was out here,” Tsunami said, surprised. “Didn’t you tell her, Willow?”

  “I thought you should,” Willow said.

  “A Pantalan dragon washed ashore on our coast several days ago,” Tsunami said. “She got caught in a storm and blown over the sea to us.”

  “In a storm?” Sundew echoed, her ears perking up. “Does she have pale green wings and glowing wrists?”

  “Whoa … you know Luna?” Turtle said from the corner.

  “I thought LeafWings and SilkWings didn’t talk to each other,” Tsunami said to Willow. “For example, Luna didn’t say anything about this jungle.”

  “Or about dragon-eating plants. Or dragon-eating giant snakes. Or dragon-poisoning rivers,” Turtle mumbled.

  “I only met Luna briefly,” Sundew said, “when we rescued her from the flamesilk cavern.”

  Turtle and Tsunami exchanged significant glances. “So that part of her story was true,” Tsunami murmured. “Willow had never heard of a flamesilk cavern.”

  “I’m sure it was all true!” Sundew said. “Luna’s feisty for a SilkWing, but she’s still a SilkWing, and they’re a pretty simple tribe. Whatever she told you, you should believe it.”

  “Really?” Tsunami said. “She was very worked up about the plight of the SilkWings. She wanted us to gather an army and charge across the ocean and destroy the HiveWings to save her tribe.”

  Sundew leaped to her feet, her eyes shining.

  “Uh-oh,” said Tsunami.

  “YES!” Sundew cried. “Do that! DO THAT!”

  “Hang on,” said Turtle.

  “How big is your army? What kinds of weapons do you have? How soon can they be here? Are they on their way? Are you the advance scouts?”

  “Sundew, don’t get too excited,” Willow said, reaching out to touch one of Sundew’s shaking wings with hers. “They’re not sure they should get involved.”

  “Why WOULDN’T you?” Sundew yelped. “Don’t you care about fighting injustice and — and — and evil? EVIL? YOU COULD STOP EVIL, DID YOU THINK OF THAT?”