When Cricket opened her eyes again, a long time later — almost midday, she sensed — there was an entirely new dragon standing outside the door of her cell, looking in with thoughtful curiosity. Seated next to her, with an enormously grumpy expression, was Lady Scarab.
The new dragon was tall and angular and her scales were a bright golden color that almost looked green in the low flamesilk light. Thin lines of black scales outlined her iridescent green eyes and dotted her cheekbones; more black lines traced the veins in her wings. Gold earrings shaped like beetles hung from her ears, a necklace of onyx stingers rested on her collarbone, and her claws were each painted with perfect lines of black and gold.
Cricket had only seen her once before, across a crowded ballroom, but it was not hard to guess that this was Lady Jewel, ruler of Jewel Hive, daughter of Lady Scarab, and cousin to Queen Wasp. The way she held herself was all regal elegance, as if she were being painted. The only crack in her façade was that she winced a little every time her mother moved, and she seemed to be keeping half an eye on Lady Scarab at all times.
“Hmmm,” said Lady Jewel. “So this is the dragon who’s thrown my Hive into such a tizzy.” She tapped her chin with one long, glittering claw. “You’re quite small to cause so much trouble.”
“Small and brainless!” Scarab snapped.
“Mother,” Jewel said in a warning tone. “You promised you’d be quiet.”
Scarab growled.
Cricket tried to sit up and discovered that the paralysis had worn off her wings and neck, although they still ached and she had to move slowly.
“Lady Jewel,” she said in a creaky voice.
“No need to bow,” Jewel said, waving her talons.
Cricket settled back gratefully. Standing would have been a challenge, to say the least.
“What are you going to do to me?” she whispered.
“That’s a fine question to ask NOW!” Scarab bellowed.
“Mother,” Jewel said, giving her a quelling look. Scarab glared at both of them and subsided, muttering. Jewel smiled back at Cricket.
“You mean, the torture, the experiments, the vanishing prisoners?” Jewel sat down, coiling her long shining tail around her legs. “Not for you. The queen wants to handle you herself.” She shrugged with a faintly disappointed look.
“But if they were real, I would say you deserve them!” Scarab interjected.
“MOTHER,” Jewel barked as a prisoner a few doors down called, “Eh? Not real? What’s that?”
Jewel did something carefully to her face, like smoothing away the cross expression and replacing it with everlasting patience.
“My mother,” she said to Cricket, “is not normally allowed in my palace, for reasons that become clearer each time she does visit. She has no idea what I actually do with dragons in my prison.”
“Right,” snorted Lady Scarab. “I’m sure my daughter who once hid all my knives because they scared her has grown up to become a master torturer.”
“What? Really?” called the nosy prisoner.
“Faints at the sight of blood, this one,” Scarab added, jerking her head at her daughter.
“I was five —” Lady Jewel closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath. “Let’s talk about you,” she said, opening them again and looking at Cricket. “Do you know how hard it is to get paint out of treestuff? I’m going to have pink smudges all over my Hive forever now.”
“And you lost my best paintbrush, didn’t you?” Scarab said, lashing her tail.
“Not that my mother had anything to do with this,” Jewel added quickly.
“Should have given you an old one,” Scarab growled. “But you weren’t supposed to get caught, you idiot.”
“Oh my gosh, Mom, seriously!” Jewel flapped her wings, the royal stance entirely collapsing. “I am TRYING to be MENACING AND MYSTERIOUS. Could you be quiet for ONE SECOND while I handle this?”
“With what, a new necklace and a party?” Scarab grumbled.
“You may not have noticed, but somehow I manage to be a VERY GOOD HIVE RULER even — I would say especially — when you and your advice are on the other side of the continent!”
“Hmm,” Scarab said disapprovingly. “The Glitterbazaar would be better if you’d listened to me.”
“The Glitterbazaar is FINE!”
“And your schools have absolutely rubbish history programs.”
“That’s not up to me! Queen Wasp sets the curriculums! Why do you think I have a giant library full of history books for my subjects?”
“And that table in the front hall is still in the wrong place,” Scarab went on. “It would be much more useful as a sideboard in the dining room.”
Jewel pressed her claws to her forehead. “Mother,” she said, “maybe you should go visit with your grandchildren.”
“Not on your life,” Scarab said promptly. “Those brats are very loud and I will not be tricked into dragonet-sitting. Stop distracting me and get on with interrogating this nitwit.”
“That’s what I am TRYING TO —” Jewel stopped and took another deep breath. She turned toward Cricket with a resolutely serene expression. “You. Cricket, right?”
“Yes, that’s me,” Cricket said. “Did you read my messages? I’m telling the truth. Queen Wasp is lying about the Book of Clearsight.”
“I’ve always suspected that,” Jewel said. “Some of our great-great-great-great-grandmothers were not as quick and clever with their lies as Wasp has been. There were hints in the history books, if anyone looked carefully.”
“The books?”
“I do read.” Jewel smiled, more or less, a tiny quirk of her mouth. “Despite the rumors to the contrary. I’d be quite interested to read the Book of Clearsight.”
“I don’t have it,” Cricket confessed.
“Left it with someone smart enough not to get caught, I hope,” Scarab chimed in again. “She says there’s no line of HiveWing succession in there, sparkles. You know what that means?”
“That you could have been queen,” Jewel said with a sigh.
“That you could still be queen,” Scarab said fiercely. “With my help, of course, or else you’d probably do it all wrong. Paint all the Hives rainbow colors or something.”
“Oh, for the — Mother! You can’t say things like that!” Jewel leaned back to check up and down the corridor.
“The guards are all the way back at the entrance,” Scarab said, flipping her tail from side to side. “They can’t hear us.”
“I can!” called the prisoner.
“You’re a SilkWing,” Scarab called back.
“True,” he answered. “True.”
“Lady Jewel,” Cricket said hesitantly. “May I ask — is my sister all right?” She caught herself, remembering. It still felt too strange to call Katydid her mother. “Katydid? She was brought in last night, before me.”
“She’ll be fine,” Jewel said with surprising gentleness. “The queen is less interested in her, now that we have you. I will find out what she knows, which I assume is nothing, and release her before Wasp arrives.”
“And that will be when?” Scarab demanded.
“Very soon,” Jewel answered. “Which, thank you so much for that; I was supposed to have another three days to prepare before her usual Nest visit.”
“She … she said she’s coming to ‘fix’ me,” Cricket said. “To make me like everyone else. Can she do that?”
Jewel glanced at her mother, pausing for a moment. “Yes. She’s done it before.”
“What?” Lady Scarab spat. “You never told me that.”
“It doesn’t always work,” Jewel said. “And I don’t know how she does it. But we had a pair of dragons in here a few years ago who’d been preparing a case for flamesilk rights. They were pretty old — nearly as old as you, Mother.”
“So perhaps not total idiots, then,” Scarab snapped.
“Sure,” Jewel said. “They said they remembered a time when flamesilks were treated like normal members of the community, selling their flamesilk and living like anyone else. Anyway, Wasp didn’t like that very much, so she made my guards drag them in, and she came by and took them into a closed room for a while, and when they came back out, their eyes were white. And they never argued against the queen again.”
“I take it back,” Scarab huffed. “Total idiots after all. So every time she threatens to add you to her Hive mind …”
“She might actually be able to,” Jewel said.
“But you don’t know how?” Cricket said. “Or what she does to them?”
Jewel shook her head. “I know it doesn’t work if they have SilkWing ancestors in the last three generations, though. She keeps all those old dragons penned up together in Tsetse Hive.”
“You didn’t tell me that, either!” Scarab barked.
“Of course I didn’t!” Jewel said, flicking her wings at her mother. “I was afraid you’d go over there and storm around with a protest sign and get yourself thrown in with them!”
“Too right,” said Scarab. “Someone needs to give my niece a good thumping.”
“Well, I would like you to stay in control of your own brain, as annoying as that brain is, Mother. So I would appreciate it if you could not go thumping the queen of our tribe anytime soon.”
“If someone doesn’t thump her soon, we won’t have any dragons left who can!” Scarab growled softly to herself and paced off down the corridor.
Cricket tried to stretch the pain out of her wings and neck as she thought. The queen could do something to dragons behind closed doors to make them part of her Hive mind. But surely she hadn’t gone to every dragon in every Hive to do it, one at a time, thousands of dragons over fifty years. For one thing, dragons would remember that happening, so everyone would know how she did it — Katydid would have remembered, surely. And dragons would slip through the cracks, and Queen Wasp just couldn’t possibly have time to get to every HiveWing that way.
Wait …
“Lady Jewel,” Cricket said. “Did you say something about the queen coming for a … Nest visit?”
“Yes.” Jewel tipped her head, studying Cricket. “She visits the Hive Nests twice a year — once in the dry season, once in the rainy season. To ensure that they’re clean and safe and full of eggs, according to her rules.”
“Do you go into the Nest with her?” Cricket asked.
“No. She always goes alone.” Jewel tapped her claws on the floor. “Hmmm.”
Scarab reappeared at the bars. “I’m sensing the development of another completely stupid plan.”
Cricket got herself to stand and stepped toward the leader of the Hive. “Lady Jewel,” she said. “Please let me out of here, and I promise I’ll find out what she does in the Nests. If I’m right, and it has something to do with the mind control, maybe we can figure out a way to stop her.”
“I can’t let you out, little dragonet,” Jewel said. “As much as I might be tempted to. Queen Wasp would punish my guards most severely, and they are loyal to me when their minds are their own. They don’t deserve that.”
“So put those two you don’t like on duty,” Scarab suggested. “The oily ones who are probably spying on you for the queen.”
Jewel narrowed her eyes at her mother for a long moment. “Hmm,” she said at length. “That might actually work.”
“SEE?” Scarab said triumphantly. “I am full of good advice if you actually listen!”
“By the Book, Mother, I listen to you all the time!”
“Not about those dragonets of yours, you don’t. Oof, they are a disaster.”
“THEY ARE N — this is not productive.” Jewel closed her eyes and rubbed her temples for a moment. “You can only control yourself, you can only control yourself,” she murmured. “All right. Let’s say I do put those sneaks on guard duty. How would we get her past them?”
Cricket glanced around her cell. “Could I go out another way, instead of through the prison gate? Up or down, maybe?” She scratched the treestuff below her.
“Down would drop you into Rootworm’s ballroom, and she would not be pleased about that.” Lady Jewel looked up at the ceiling, her eyes darting around as though she was measuring the space in her head. “Up … I think you’d end up in my kitchens, or close to them. I don’t really want a hole in my kitchen floor that looks down into a prison cell, but I suppose there are dragons up there who could help you get out of the palace.” She tapped her claws again.
“How can I make a hole in treestuff?” Cricket said thoughtfully. “A hammer or something heavy would do it, but it would take a while and the noise would bring the guards.” She studied the walls, the bars, the corridor outside … “Flamesilk. Flamesilk might work.”
“Or it might burn down my palace,” Jewel pointed out.
“I’d be careful,” Cricket promised.
“And,” Scarab observed with unusual cheerfulness, “then Wasp would think her flamesilk friend broke in to get her out. Can’t hardly blame you for that, after she lost them twice in her own Hive.”
“I suspect Wasp can find a way to blame me no matter what,” Jewel said.
“Isn’t this why you act like such a vapid banana slug around her?” Scarab asked, flapping her wings. “So she’ll think you’re a harmless idiot and leave you in peace?”
“I do not!” Jewel protested.
“Ah,” said Scarab. “So you actually are a harmless idiot?”
Jewel shot her mother a cross look. “The point is, yes, Wasp would not be at all surprised if I lost a dragon from my prisons because she thinks I have nothing but pollen between my ears. That doesn’t mean she won’t be furious and perfectly nasty to me.”
“Perfectly nasty is Wasp’s natural resting state,” Scarab observed. “You’ll survive it. I say it’s worth it to keep one more HiveWing free.” She nodded at Cricket. “Sneaking into the Nest and spying on the queen, on the other talon, sounds like the height of stupid.”
“That’s the deal,” Jewel said firmly. “I want to follow this theory — and I can’t do it myself; she’ll have eyes on me.”
“I want to know the truth, too,” Cricket said, wrapping her talons around the bars. “It’s all right, Lady Scarab. I want to do this. I think we’ll find answers in there, I really do.”
Scarab looked from her daughter to Cricket and back, then flung her wings up with a snort. “Fine. Let’s get this daft dragonet some flamesilk.”