The storm raged for hours, which was a long time to be packed into a room with over a hundred other dragons, even a room as big as the Great Hall. Blaze used one of the large curtains to make herself a hammock, hung from the tall ceiling, and proceeded to sleep through most of the storm. After a while, Thorn organized an expedition to the kitchens that brought back dried fruit, water, and bread for everyone, though all of it tasted a little gritty with sand.
Qibli spent most of the time worrying about the fact that Vulture, Smolder, and Onyx weren’t in the Hall with everyone else. Where had they gone instead? Were they still alive?
He kept himself busy making more earrings in a sheltered corner where not too many dragons could see him and ask awkward questions. Ostrich and her father, Six-Claws, found him there halfway through the storm and volunteered to distribute earrings to all the dragons in the hall.
Qibli felt a little resentful about the fact that some of those dragons were Talons of Power, driven into hiding with the palace SandWings after attacking them. But even they needed magical protection — brainwashed Talons of Power would not be any improvement over the current version.
He also checked Turtle’s slate every few minutes, and then again, and then again, more and more frequently.
Where was Turtle? Why had he disappeared for so long?
Had something terrible happened to him?
He didn’t know how long it had been when he looked up to find Thorn standing over him, frowning slightly.
“Oh, hey,” he said. Winter jabbed him with a pointy elbow and Qibli jumped. “I mean, hello, Your Majesty.”
“I have the strangest feeling,” said Thorn, “that you know something about this.” She waved one of her wings at the rafters that were shaking in the wind.
“Um …” Qibli set his jaw and squared his shoulders. “Yes. That was me. I called the storm to save your life. I … didn’t quite have a handle on how big it would turn out to be.”
“More animus magic?” Thorn said, still frowning.
He held out his wrists to display the bracelets. “They’re supposed to control the weather.”
She tapped one claw against the copper. “I’m not sure control is the right word here.”
“I’m sorry,” said Qibli. “About the palace, I mean, and I hope everyone’s all right. But I’m not sorry that you’re safe. I was trying to protect you from the Eye.”
Thorn’s wings flicked up and down and she stared at him with raised eyebrows. “Protect me from the Eye? Didn’t you trust it to choose me? Like it did before?”
“But Onyx is royalty,” Qibli said. “And Darkstalker is on her side and I was afraid he’d done something to it … and plus she’s royalty. I thought that’s what the Eye would want.”
She shook her head and lifted the Eye of Onyx necklace over her head to hold it in her talons. Qibli took an instinctive step back. It so clearly radiated power — and danger. Even if he hadn’t seen it kill Blister, he’d be terrified of it. But since he had, it was hard not to remember the sinister dragon’s silent, agonized thrashing, or the charred smell that was left after she exploded into black dust.
“I know it’s scary,” said Queen Thorn. “But I’ve been wearing it around my neck for months now, and I’ve come to trust it.” She traced the wings gently with one claw. “It feels — right to me. Like it was crafted by an animus with wisdom and goodness in her heart. And all my research into it has confirmed that. The Eye doesn’t choose the most royal or most dangerous dragon to be queen. It chooses the best queen available for the job.”
She smiled down at it. “In fact, Smolder and I discovered a secret. The Eye has chosen commoners over royalty before. The current royal bloodline goes back to a dragon who grew up in a town a lot like the Scorpion Den — a dragon who got the throne basically by accident, because the Eye chose her to save the kingdom from a cruel and vicious princess.” Thorn met Qibli’s eyes. “The truth is, Oasis and her descendants — including Onyx — aren’t any more royal than you or me. Except insofar as having power for hundreds of years makes you royal. But that’s not what the Eye cares about.”
“Really?” Qibli’s mind was spinning. This was exactly what he thought animus magic should be used for — not personal power, but improving the world in ways that made entire tribes safer. Imagine if every tribe had an Eye of Onyx — something that ensured only wise and good queens were chosen. Wouldn’t that mean Pyrrhia would always be at peace? So all dragons would be happier and well cared for?
“My theory is that Jerboa was playing a trick on her queen,” said Thorn. “If she was ordered to make the Eye, perhaps the queen wanted something to keep herself in power. But instead Jerboa made this clever spell to pick good queens.”
“I’m sorry,” Qibli said. “I didn’t realize. Of course it’ll choose you, if that’s the real spell.”
“I think I am a good queen,” Thorn said thoughtfully. “And I guess if I’m ever not, it should be comforting that there’s a way for me to find out.” She laughed. “It would be nice if I could bargain with it, though. Like, hey, Eye of Onyx, instead of blowing me up, could you just send me a note that’s like, Time to stop being queen, crazyclaws, and then I could happily retire? If I had an animus of my own, I’d probably get them working on that.”
Maybe I can get Turtle to do that for her, Qibli thought. After we deal with Darkstalker. When we’ve averted the prophecy and everything is calm again.
Thorn looked up toward the ceiling. “I think it’s finally stopped,” she said, and Qibli realized she was right — the wind had fallen silent at last.
“Let’s go see what a mess you’ve made,” Thorn said to Qibli. “I don’t suppose you brought an animus object that cleans up after you.”
“Sorry,” Qibli said ruefully.
The main doors of the hall were impossible to push open. They had to fly to one of the upper windows and open the shutters to discover that the palace was buried in a layer of sand three dragons deep, entirely blocking the doors and covering all the gardens. The sun sparkled cheerfully in the bright blue sky overhead.
“Qibli,” Thorn grumbled. She scanned the palace — the towers and rooftops poking out of the ridiculous new dunes. Qibli realized that she must be worried about Smolder, although she was hiding it under her exasperation with him.
“I’ll start looking for anyone who needs to be dug out,” he offered and darted back inside to assemble a team.
They found dragons safely squirreled away all over the palace. It had been built to have a lot of places to safely hole up during a sandstorm, with reinforced shutters and strong doors. Some of them required digging to get to, but by the early hours of the morning, all the dragons in the palace seemed to be accounted for except for Smolder and Onyx … and there was no sign anywhere of Vulture.
Qibli took Winter, Ostrich, Six-Claws, and Tawny back to the giant sand pile that used to be the arena, the last place he’d seen Smolder.
Please let him be all right, Qibli prayed as they dug. Smolder might not be good enough for Queen Thorn, in his opinion, but if she liked him, that was all that mattered.
Please let him be all right. Please let us find him soon.
His shoulders ached. He wished Moon were there, digging beside him, with her never-giving-up face on.
“Any luck?” Thorn asked, landing on one of the perches that stuck out of the sand.
“Not yet, Your Majesty,” Six-Claws answered.
Thorn wriggled her wings as though they itched. Qibli had noticed that she often did this when her closest friends called her “Your Majesty.”
“You should try the Obsidian Mirror,” he suggested.
“I know I should,” she said, rubbing her snout. “It’s buried in a very safe chest in a very safe hidden compartment in my bedroom, under a couple of tons of sand.” She glanced back at a contingent of wings flurrying around the central palace building. “We’re working on it.”
Qibli sat up and studied the arena, shaking sand off his wings. What would he have done, if the storm had hit before he could get to the Great Hall? If he’d been standing right here, like Smolder and Onyx?
Smolder knows this palace better than anyone. He’s lived here his whole life, all throughout the war while his sisters were away fighting one another. He survived Oasis and Burn. He must know every possible hiding hole, every safe place.
His eyes scanned the walls as his brain spun rapidly through possibilities.
I’d want to get underground, if I could. Somewhere fortified and secure …
Qibli looked down at his talons, then up at his queen. “Thorn!” he called. “Aren’t the dungeons right below us?”
“Part of them,” Thorn answered, wrinkling her nose. “This palace has a LOT of dungeons.” She tipped her head. “What are you thinking?”
“Maybe the dungeon is connected to the arena somehow,” Qibli said, pacing in a large circle. “So prisoners could be brought here to fight for the queen. Like in Scarlet’s palace. It’s possible, isn’t it, that this arena was used that way a long time ago?”
“Horribly possible,” Thorn agreed. “Good idea. You four, look for a way in from here. Qibli, come with me.”
He followed her back to the upper windows of the Great Hall, then swooped down to the lower levels and out through the covered passageways that led to the kitchens, the throne room, and other parts of the palace. Drifts of sand lay across the floor in places where the windows hadn’t been completely shuttered.
“Where’s your guard?” Qibli asked, watching Thorn’s tail whisk through one of these drifts, leaving a spray of sunlit sand motes in the air behind her.
“Digging out the palace, like everyone else,” said Thorn. “I put all of Vulture’s dragons who were still here to work as well, in exchange for amnesty and resettlement packages. Outclaws are watching them, but I think they’ll turn out to be fine after we chat with them a little bit and get their heads on straight.” She glanced back at Qibli. “It’s hard to readjust after someone you trust has been lying to you for years. But hey, you turned out mostly normal, so I think there’s hope for them.”
“Mostly normal?” Qibli protested. “Three moons, I’m not sure which is worse, mostly or normal.”
Thorn laughed. “Maybe normal is the wrong word. Generally acceptable? Reasonably fit for society? Solidly on the side of the not-so-murderous?”
“Stop, stop, this much flattery can’t be good for me,” Qibli said wryly.
She turned down a poorly lit, narrow passage that twisted and angled downward. Qibli stayed close, hopping down the occasional steps and keeping his wings away from the rough-scraped walls. Lanterns flickered from niches all the way down, casting jumpy little shadows around his claws. The air had an odd smell, like a trove of decayed lizards buried under a floorboard and forgotten about for years.
Thorn unlocked a series of gates on the way down, relocking them behind her. They passed a few guards, posted in pairs, who saluted to the queen and stayed in position, holding their weapons.
Finally a flight of stone stairs deposited them in an antechamber with four tunnels branching out from it. Thorn took a lantern from a low shelf by the stairs and breathed a small burst of flame to light it.
“I don’t like coming down here,” she admitted to Qibli. “Poor Smolder refuses to come with me — it’s the one thing I can’t get him to do. I suspect his mother used to punish him by locking him down here overnight whenever he displeased her.” She lifted her lantern to look down one of the tunnels. “If he had to take refuge down here because of the storm … I can’t imagine how sick he must be feeling.”
“We’ll find him,” Qibli promised. He pictured the palace in his head, mapping it over the turns they’d taken on the way down. “This one leads under the arena, I think — right?” He pointed to the darkest tunnel just as a strange gibbering wail erupted from it.
The sound sliced under Qibli’s scales like freezing needles, terrifying him down to his bones. He leaped back from the passage and resisted the urge to run screaming up the steps back to the sunlight.
“What —” he said, picturing ghosts and furious spirits. “What —”
“That’s the mad prisoner,” Thorn said grimly. “She’s been down here since the time of Queen Oasis.” She brushed past him and set off down the passage.
Qibli scrambled to keep up so he could stay close to the light — and to Thorn’s reassuring no-nonsense voice. “Mad?” he echoed.
“I wanted to release her, or at least talk to her,” said Thorn, “but she attacks anyone who enters her cell or goes near her chains. She managed to stab two of my guards with her tail before we gave up. I think there were times during the war when she was forgotten for days and nearly starved. Burn was not the most careful dragon with her prisoners. I’m sure she didn’t even care what this one did to end up in here — there’s no record of her crime anyway.”
She waved one wing at the deserted cells they were passing. “The whole dungeon is almost empty now — I freed most of the dragons Burn had imprisoned, since their crimes all involved disloyalty to her. There’s a jail in the courtyard barracks that’s a lot more humane, for prisoners who we can try quickly.”
Thorn sighed. “I was keeping those two NightWings here for Queen Glory, but somehow they escaped. Which is another argument for shutting this whole dungeon down and never using it again, if you ask me.”
They turned a corner and Qibli saw the glow of firelight up ahead. In unspoken agreement, they both began to run, until they were close enough to see two dragons huddled by the wall at the end of the tunnel, outside the cells.
“Smolder!” Thorn called joyfully.
He lifted his head and grinned weakly at the sight of her. “About time, your royal sluggishness,” he said.
“You didn’t have to sit here and wait for me, you broiled snail,” she pointed out, sliding her lantern into a niche across from the one that was lit. “You do have feet. You could have just come on upstairs instead of making us all worry about you. I mean, not that I was worried.”
“Well, I was,” Smolder said. He opened his wings and Thorn hugged him, pulling back quickly as though she didn’t want to get too emotional in front of witnesses. On top of Smolder’s head something like a little tuft of fur sat up and shook itself. It leaned into the light and Qibli realized it was Flower, yawning and stretching.
“But we couldn’t leave,” Smolder continued. “Onyx is hurt.” He moved aside to reveal his daughter, curled into a sullen ball and breathing shallowly. One of her back feet looked as though it had been crushed by something heavy; it was an awful bloody mess, and she clearly couldn’t walk — in fact, Qibli wasn’t sure she’d ever walk on it again.
Thorn inhaled sharply. “We need to get you to a doctor,” she said to Onyx.
“I know,” Onyx spat. “I told him to go get one —”
“But I didn’t want to leave her alone,” Smolder interjected.
“Right.” Onyx snorted. “More like he’s a coward who’s afraid of ghosts.” She tried to shift her weight to sit up and froze, shuddering in pain.
Smolder lifted his wings. “Well, I haven’t stayed alive this long by running toward the shrieking things in the dark.” He made an “I am who I am” face.
The “thing in the dark” screamed again from somewhere very nearby, sending Qibli’s heart pounding.
“That’s just the mad prisoner,” Thorn said to Smolder. “I told you about her. You couldn’t remember what she was arrested for either.”
“For LIES!” the dragon shrieked. “For my FACE NOT MY FACE I’M GOING TO KILL HER!”
Thorn sighed and took the lantern again, stepping back to one of the cells they’d run past. Inside, a tortured-looking SandWing paced, clawing at the scales around her neck. Rusty chains stretched from her ankles to loops bolted into the floor. As the light illuminated her prison, she whirled around and threw herself at the bars, screaming.
“LET ME OUT SO I CAN KILL HER!”
“See, that just doesn’t sound like a good idea,” Thorn said. “Smolder, look, she’s only a dragon. She probably wasn’t mad when she got here, but more than twenty years in the dark will eat away at anyone’s sanity.”
“For LIES!” the dragon shrieked again. “I’M NOT HER! THE QUEEN NEVER CAME! NO ONE EVER CAME! NO ONE SEES ME! SHE STOLE MY FACE! SHE THREW MY FACE INTO THE FIRE! I’M NOT HER!”
“Wait,” Onyx rasped. She dragged herself forward using her front talons, shoving Smolder off when he tried to help her. Her dark eyes squinted at the frantic prisoner.
“You can’t possibly know her,” Thorn said curiously. “She’s been in here longer than you’ve been alive.”
“She looks like my mother,” Onyx said. “Who wasn’t too emotionally stable herself, by the way. Lots of nightmares. Super paranoid. Would have kept me buried under a rock forever if she could have.”
Smolder edged forward to take a closer look at the prisoner, too. She had her claws wrapped around the bars and her snout pressed between two of them, her eyes closed, as though she were trying to will herself free with the force of pure hatred.
“Does she look like Palm?” Thorn asked him.
“NOOOOOOOOOOO!” howled the prisoner.
Smolder sat back, lifting his talons to cover his snout with an expression of horror and dismay. “No,” he said. “I mean — yes, but no, because this — I think this is Prickle.”
“Who?” said Thorn.
“Aunt Prickle?” Onyx said, grimacing as another wave of pain seemed to grip her.
“Palm’s sister,” said Smolder. “Prickle, is that you? What are you doing here?”
“You,” she snarled at him, clawing at her chains. A thin layer of clarity seemed to settle over her as she recognized him. “This is all your fault. Your earrings. Your fine words. Your stupid dragonet.”
“That’s me,” said Onyx. “The stupid dragonet. Mother let the soldiers take Prickle, thinking she was Palm, so Mother could escape with me. She told me the whole story after her, like, nine thousandth nightmare about it. But she said they would have released Prickle within a day or two, once the queen realized the mistake.”
“Except the queen died,” said Smolder. “She must have died before seeing her. And then no one ever …” He trailed off.
“Wow,” Qibli said faintly.
“I want to release you,” Thorn said to Prickle through the bars. “But I’m a little worried about what you might do.” She glanced sideways at Smolder.
Prickle hissed and turned her back, hunching her wings around herself.
“We’ll come back and try again,” Thorn said. “Now that we know who you are and what happened — we’ll bring someone you can talk to. We’ll get you back to the sunlight. I promise.”
The only answer was a low growl.
“Hello?” called a bored voice. “If prisoners are being released, can I be next?”
“No, Cobra,” Thorn called back. “And by the way, your father attacked without your help, failed to overthrow me, and left again.”
Cobra chuckled somewhere in the dark. “You really think he would give up that easily?” she said. “You think he’ll go back to his gilded compound and lie around eating scavengers peacefully for the rest of his life? Ha. Ha. Ha. Vulture will burn the kingdom to the ground before he gives up.”
Thorn looked at Qibli and he nodded. He wished Cobra was wrong, but he knew it was true.
A grinding, scraping sound came from the wall at the end of the tunnel — the sound of the old door to the arena being dragged open from the outside. Sunlight tumbled in, chasing away the ominous gloom of the dungeon. Smolder turned toward it, relief scrawled all over his face.
Ostrich popped her head around the door. “I found it!” she chirped. “It was me!”
“You’re very clever,” Six-Claws rumbled affectionately behind her.
“Well done. Go get a doctor,” Thorn ordered Ostrich, striding over and shoving the door open another few inches. “Six-Claws, help me get Onyx out onto the sand.”
Onyx hissed furiously as Six-Claws bent to lift her, but she kept her tail coiled safely away from him and Thorn as they carried her outside.
She won’t be challenging Thorn again anytime soon, Qibli thought. Maybe ever, if they can talk her out of it while she’s recuperating. He glanced at Smolder, who was hurrying after them. That’s … suspiciously lucky.
In the chaos of the storm, anything could have happened.
Would Smolder deliberately injure his own daughter to stop her from fighting Thorn? To save Thorn’s life, and her own?
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Intentional harm or lucky accident — whichever it was, Thorn was safe and Onyx didn’t have to die. The Eye could go back around Thorn’s neck and she could continue to rule the kingdom in peace.
Unless Darkstalker comes for it. Until the next step of his plan, whatever it is.
“Bye, Qibli,” Cobra’s voice whispered from the dark. “I’m sure your grandfather will be seeing you soon.”
Qibli shuddered and climbed out onto the arena sands. Winter reached down and caught his talons, hauling him up the last incline. The chill of his talons against Qibli’s felt like a reminder of the cold, worried feeling inside of him.
Darkstalker and Vulture, working together. That could mean the end of Pyrrhia.
He reached for the slate in his pouch again, although he’d almost lost hope that Turtle would ever send another message. Maybe he’d forgotten he had the slate, or that Qibli was out here waiting for news.
But this time there was a new message.
The message Qibli had been dreading ever since he watched Moon and Turtle fly away with Darkstalker.
It read:
DARKSTALKER KNOWS ABOUT ME. TRAPPED IN THE NIGHTWING PALACE. HELP!