No dragon was safe in the Sky Palace, but the ones in the most danger by far were the daughters of Queen Scarlet.

Or was it now daughter, singular?

Ruby hadn’t seen her sister, Tourmaline, in three days.

Not since the night they went flying together and, high in the starlit sky, glowing in the light of two of the moons, Tourmaline had whispered that she was almost ready.

“Don’t be an idiot. You’re only ten, and furthermore, you’ll never be ready,” Ruby had whispered back. “She killed her mother plus all three of her sisters and eleven of ours. There’s no way to defeat her.”

“She can’t be queen forever,” Tourmaline said.

“She has been queen forever,” Ruby argued.

“Twenty-four years is a long time but not that long,” said Tourmaline. “Queen Oasis was queen longer than that, and look what happened to her.”

“Are you planning to throw a scavenger at Mother?” Ruby asked. “Because I’m sure she’d appreciate a snack before she kills you.”

“It’s always going to be like this,” Tourmaline hissed. She flicked clouds away with her dark orange wings. “Until one of us challenges her and wins. You and I are the only ones left now — the only hope the SkyWings have of a decent queen. Ruby, if I defeat her and become queen, we can get out of this war.”

Ruby wasn’t so sure about that. She’d met Burn, and she suspected the SandWing wouldn’t let her allies go that easily. But it didn’t matter — there was no way Tourmaline could win a battle with their mother.

“The prophecy will take care of the war,” she argued. “The brightest night is in four days … ”

“Right.” Tourmaline rolled her eyes. “I’ll just wait for a bunch of eggs that haven’t even hatched yet to save us. Ruby, I don’t want to wait for things to happen to me. I want to make them happen.”

“I don’t want to watch you die,” Ruby growled.

Her sister hovered in front of her for a moment. Stars glittered in her eyes, searching Ruby’s.

She’s wondering if I want the throne for myself, Ruby thought. She thinks I’m trying to talk her out of it because I’m planning something. Like I’m that stupid.

“Well, don’t worry, I won’t do it yet,” Tourmaline promised. “Another few months of training, maybe. I’m feeling really strong, though. I beat Vermilion in a fight the other day. Want to hear about it?”

Ruby had listened to the entire long play-by-play of each move Tourmaline had made. They’d spent an hour soaring around the peaks in the moonlight. And not once had Tourmaline said anything about leaving the palace.

But then she was gone. And the most unsettling thing was, no one had even mentioned her absence. Her squadron was still here, training and hunting as though nothing odd had happened. There were no patrols out looking for her, no search parties scouring the woods, no missives flying out to other queens to ask if they’d seen (or abducted) the older SkyWing princess.

Just a quiet vanishing into thin air.

Ruby stood in the room she shared with her sister, studying the piles of blankets, the scrolls carelessly tossed aside, the gold-tasseled yellow curtains flapping at the window.

There were no splatters of blood. No sign of a struggle. No note saying, “Oh, I’ve popped off to one of the outposts for a few days, see you soon.”

Did Tourmaline change her mind and run away? Could she have gone to find the Talons of Peace?

But Ruby knew that wasn’t what had happened. Her big sister wasn’t the kind to ever run away. More significantly, Queen Scarlet would never let the peace movement get their claws on her daughter. She’d find them and destroy them all first.

Heavy talons were slowly squeezing Ruby’s insides, digging their claws in harder every minute that Tourmaline was gone.

If she found out that Tourmaline was planning to challenge her …

What did Mother do?

“Princess Ruby.”

She jumped and whirled around. The guard in the doorway cleared his throat.

“The queen has requested your presence in the throne room,” he said. “Immediately.”

“Requested?” Ruby echoed.

The expression on his face said quite clearly that he didn’t approve of the question.

Never let them see that you’re terrified, that’s what Tourmaline said. Act like a queen so that one day they’ll be cheering for you to slit Mother’s throat.

But now Tourmaline was gone. And perhaps acting like a queen was exactly what had gotten her killed.

“Thank you,” Ruby said, inclining her head at the guard as she went past him. Her heartbeat drummed through her shoulders and out to her wing tips. The tunnel felt too small, as though she were the size of a thousand-year-old dragon instead of just a five-year-old dragonet.

Whatever happened to Tourmaline … am I next?

Dragons huddled by the throne room entrance, whispering; they all straightened their heads and wings as she approached. Curiosity gleamed in their eyes. They must have known Tourmaline was missing, even if no one would talk about it. They must have been wondering, like Ruby was, whether Queen Scarlet had decided to dispose of all her potential, threatening heirs.

But I’m not threatening. I’m not!

Ruby ducked her long neck as she entered the room, blinking in the blaze of sunlight that reflected off all the gold inlaid in the walls. It felt like walking into a funeral pyre; oppressive heat and the smell of dragon fire, radiating off the crowd of courtiers, closed in around her scales.

Queen Scarlet wouldn’t kill her daughter in front of all these dragons, would she?

“Ah, Ruby.” The queen’s voice lilted over all the others, and the room fell silent. “At last. Court, many of you don’t know my daughter Ruby because she’s been away in training, and even when she is here, she mostly sits in her cave like a sleepy bat. If you ever have seen her, she’s probably had her nose in a scroll. But despite the fact that she’s nothing like me, she is still somehow my daughter.”

There was a dutiful smattering of applause.

“Well, now everyone is here! Everyone important, I mean. I have such a thrilling announcement. Ruby, don’t lurk by the wall like a jittery centipede. Come stand by your brothers. I want you especially to see this.”

The crowd parted to let Ruby through, their avid orange and amber eyes peeling off her scales as she slid by. There was just enough space for her to fit between Vermilion and Hawk, both of them towering over her. Her other two brothers were on Hawk’s other side. All of Scarlet’s children were here except Tourmaline.

Vermilion snorted and edged a step away from her, but Hawk gave her a friendlyish nudge of acknowledgment. Ruby always got the feeling that Hawk was cheerfully being nice to her because he knew she’d be dead soon. He’d seen the rest of his sisters die under Scarlet’s claws. Ruby suspected his good humor came from the security of knowing he could never have the throne, so he wasn’t worth killing.

Their mother glowed like a poisonous orange from the top of her throne, peering down at the dragons that packed the room. The sharp sparkle of diamonds above her eyes and along her wings seized the light.

Ruby’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of the hulking dragon at the queen’s side: Burn, their SandWing ally, her face twisted in disgust and boredom. Everyone had been instructed to call her “Queen Burn” to her face, but Ruby found it hard to think of her that way. For one thing, she hadn’t won the war yet … and for another, there was only one queen in Ruby’s world, closing her deadly talons around everything in it.

On the other side of Queen Scarlet was a tall, oddly piled arrangement of black rocks that seemed to be smoking.

“Finally,” Scarlet said, rolling her eyes as though including the rest of the court in her impatience with Ruby. A chuckle eddied around the crowd.

“Get on with it,” Burn snapped.

Queen Scarlet flicked her tail and stretched her wings with deliberate languor. Ruby had time to wonder if the thrilling announcement had anything to do with Tourmaline (“I have thrillingly murdered one daughter! Why stop there? Who needs daughters anyway, right?”).

“You may all have heard of a certain … prophecy,” Queen Scarlet said instead. “Mumbling about special dragonets who will hatch on the brightest night and stop the war. And you may all have noticed that the brightest night is tonight. Isn’t that terribly exciting? Tiny little heroes crawling out of their eggs any minute now! That is … unless something simply dreadful happens, of course.”

She cast a sidelong glance at Burn, smiling maliciously. “What you all don’t know is that someone tried to steal a SkyWing egg last night.”

A gasp ran around the room.

“I know,” said Queen Scarlet. “A nasty IceWing thief got all the way in here and actually escaped with an egg — the largest one in the hatchery, as it happens.”

The air crackled as if it might burst into flames at any moment. Ruby tried to imagine life as a SkyWing raised outside the Sky Kingdom. The thief couldn’t have been planning to take it to the Ice Kingdom. A SkyWing would never survive there.

So was he one of the Talons of Peace? Were they assembling the dragonets of the prophecy?

Was the dragonet in that stolen egg going to save them all?

“Oh, don’t worry,” her mother said. “Queen Burn chased him down, killed him, and destroyed the egg. We don’t particularly like tiny little heroes, after all. Especially ones who might try to tell us what to do. So!” She clapped her front talons together suddenly, snapping the tension in the room like a bowstring. “Just to be perfectly safe, Queen Burn and I had a marvelous idea. We’re going to make sure there are no SkyWings hatching on the brightest night. Not even one. Not even close. Bring them in!” she called.

Ruby watched in confusion as seven guards filed in, each of them carrying an egg. Red and orange shapes moved under the thin surface of the eggshells, and she could see cracks already spreading across three of them.

Queen Scarlet narrowed her eyes. “There should be eight,” she hissed.

“We’ll find it, Your Majesty,” said the tallest guard. “I promise. She won’t get far. And it was a runty one anyhow.”

A skittering noise came from the pile of rocks beside the queen, and one of the stones trembled for a moment, then came tumbling down and bounced across the floor, rolling to a stop at Ruby’s talons.

“Fine,” said Queen Scarlet, putting on her annoyed-but-it’s-a-celebration-so-I’ll-just-kill-someone-later face. “I have someone just wonderful I want to introduce to you all, and this seemed like a perfect way to do it. Oooo, the suspense!”

A puff of impatient smoke snorted out of Burn’s nostrils. “Always a spectacle,” she muttered. “Can’t just kill something efficiently and be done already.”

Queen Scarlet ignored her. She was busy removing rocks from the top of the pile, slowly taking off the roof of the makeshift structure. Another scrabbling noise came from inside the rocks.

There’s something alive in there, Ruby thought, and then suddenly a little head popped over the edge of the rocks, only a heartbeat away from the queen’s talons. Scarlet jerked back, and Ruby was shocked to see something that looked like a flash of fear in her eyes.

She craned her neck to see better. What could possibly scare Mother? She’s not afraid of anything.

It looked like an ordinary dragonet — about a year or maybe a year and a half old, with unusually bright coppery orange scales.

But then the dragonet swiveled her head, and her eyes met Ruby’s.

Her eyes.

They were blue.

The weirdest, creepiest blue Ruby had ever seen, far beyond the color of the sky. Like someone had bundled up the sky and immersed it in fire until it burned from the inside.

That’s it, Ruby thought. This dragonet looked like she was burning from the inside. Smoke was even rising from her scales.

Over Ruby’s head, Hawk and Vermilion exchanged looks.

“Did you know about this?” Hawk growled softly under the hubbub of voices whispering all around them. “I thought it was dead. It should be dead.”

“Don’t question the queen,” Vermilion muttered back, keeping his eyes forward and his mouth tensely still.

“It’s an abomination,” Hawk hissed. “SkyWing law commands us to kill creatures like that at hatching.”

Ruby had a dim memory now of something that had happened over a year ago — an egg hatching with twins inside, the mother trying to escape with both of them. The palace had been in an uproar for weeks. But Ruby got only tiny scraps of gossip, usually through Tourmaline if she was lucky.

She’d thought they were all dead … the twins and the mother.

Could this be the one with too much fire?

The strange dragonet squeaked and tried to scramble up to the top of the rock wall, her tiny wings flapping hopefully.

Scarlet seized a long metal scepter propped beside her throne and jabbed the center of it into the dragonet’s chest.

“Down,” she snarled.

The dragonet fell back with a yelp. As Scarlet withdrew the scepter, Ruby could see that the round tip of it had a blobby melted spot where it had touched the dragonet’s scales. A worrying molten metal smell joined the heat in the room.

“Your Majesty,” said a squat rust-colored dragon near the front of the crowd. He was one of the oldest dragons in the palace and had served as an advisor to Ruby’s grandmother when she was queen. Whenever he saw Ruby, he invariably made an odd clicking sound with his teeth, commented on how peculiarly long her neck was, and told her that the secret of long life was eating a goat kidney every day. And yet she could never remember his name. She and Tourmaline called him Kidney Breath.

“Ahem,” said Kidney Breath importantly, waiting for the murmurs to die down and for everyone to look at him. “Your Majesty, please assure us that this is not what it looks like.”

Queen Scarlet gave him a glittering, all-teeth smile. “Does it look like I have the most fabulously dangerous new toy? Because that’s exactly what this is.” She flourished one of her wings in the dragonet’s direction. “Behold, my new and future champion!”

The dragonet poked her head out again, regarding them all with those sinister blue eyes. She glanced up at Scarlet’s wing overhead and reached for it, but the queen kept it well out of her grasp.

“Your Majesty is the wisest of all dragons,” said Kidney Breath. “Your every thought is genius and all your decisions are perfect in every way. But … are you sure this is safe? Keeping that … that monster alive?”

“She’s not just any monster,” Scarlet said smugly. “She’s my monster. And she’s so very useful. Here, darling, show them what you can do.” The queen plucked one of the eggs from a guard’s talons and passed it casually to the dragonet.

At least … she made it look casual, but Ruby could see how carefully Scarlet avoided touching the dragonet’s claws, and how quickly she snatched her talons back.

The dragonet looked down at the egg, which was almost a quarter of her own size. Her expression was curious and a little delighted, as if no one had ever given her a toy before.

And then small tremors began to run across the eggshell, and the translucent whiteness began to fade to gray, and the orange shape inside gave a shudder and then turned black, black as coals, black as dead, burnt husks of trees, before the whole egg went black and no one could see inside anymore.

A hush fell over the room.

Nobody spoke. Nobody could speak, Ruby thought. She felt as though she couldn’t even breathe. Like perhaps it would be safer to never breathe again.

The egg crumbled into a pile of ash in the dragonet’s talons.

The dragonet stared down at her claws with an unreadable expression. Was she surprised? Pleased with herself? Did she know that with one simple act — by merely holding an egg — she’d managed to terrify every dragon in the room?

She tilted her head slightly to peer up at the queen, and in that moment Ruby caught a glimpse of something familiar in those weird eyes.

The dragonet with too much fire was worried that Scarlet would be angry with her.

It was Burn who finally broke the silence. “Impressive,” she growled. “Now deal with the rest of them, or let me smash them myself.”

Scarlet reached over with the scepter and knocked down the wall of rocks in the dragonet’s way. “Go touch the rest of the eggs, Peril,” she ordered.

Peril, Ruby thought. The monster has a name.

Peril glanced at the eggs, then down at her talons, then back at Queen Scarlet. She looked very small next to the two queens.

“But —” she said, her voice swallowed by the hot air in the hushed room. “But I burnded it.”

“You are my champion,” said Queen Scarlet coldly. “You do as I tell you to.”

Peril hesitated for a moment, looking around at the wall of scales and wings and unfriendly, suspicious eyes around her. She stepped forward, and the guards holding the eggs all quickly placed them on the ground, stumbling out of her way.

One by one, Peril stopped at each egg and laid her claws on it until the dragonet inside was dead.

She could do that to anyone, Ruby realized. She can probably kill a full-grown dragon just by touching him. She’s the deadliest weapon Mother has ever found.

A ripple of horror ricocheted through her scales.

Is that what happened to Tourmaline?

She couldn’t unhook her gaze from the murderous dragonet.

Is my sister now a pile of ashes somewhere?

As Peril reached the last egg, Ruby finally tore her eyes free and lifted them toward the queens.

Scarlet was watching Ruby with a satisfied, sinister look. A look that said: “Who would dare challenge me now? You, my dreaming daughter? Go ahead and try. If you even think about it, now you know whose talons will find your throat in the middle of the night.”

She was right. No one could stop Scarlet now.

Ruby would never be queen.

Peril would always be there, the threat lurking behind the throne, the smoking scales that lay in wait for any dragon who showed even a hint of ambition.

So I won’t, Ruby thought. I won’t dream of the throne. I’ll be obedient, loyal, agreeable, anything she wants me to be. Anything that keeps me alive and as far away from that monster as I can get.

You win, Mother.

The dragonet lifted her claws from the last smoking egg and turned to Queen Scarlet with a hungry look in her eyes. Ruby recognized that look, too — the “do you love me now?” look.

“Excellent,” said Queen Scarlet, flicking her tongue between her teeth. “A thrilling demonstration. Everything I was hoping for. As you say, Queen Burn, so much for that prophecy now, right? Peril, back to your place.”

I hope you know how to control your new champion, Mother. Because she’s not just a threat to me.

The crowd of dragons surged back, struggling to stay out of Peril’s path, as the dragonet walked slowly back to the little cage of rocks.

This dragon could destroy the entire world.