Ivy heard her mother coming and slid her papers under the book she was pretending to read. She didn’t think she would get in trouble, exactly, for drawing dragons all the time, but she knew her parents didn’t love it. “Why can’t you spend your time on something more useful?” and “What a waste of paper” were two of the comments she’d gotten so far when she’d tried to share her drawings with them.

Mother poked her head around the door. “Those girls are here again,” she said disapprovingly. “But I can tell them you’re studying.”

“No, no! I’m all done with my homework,” Ivy said truthfully. “Please let them stay.”

Her mother sighed and went back out to their front room, where Ivy could now hear Violet and Daffodil arguing with each other. The Truth Seekers club had lasted, against all the odds, over a year now. Despite all their fighting, Violet and Daffodil were fiercely loyal — to each other, to the idea of their secret club, and, it turned out, to Ivy as well.

Daffodil tumbled into the room first, flinging herself into Ivy’s hammock so it swung back and forth. Her yellow ribbons were crooked, and she looked like she’d just been running from one end of Valor to the other, although she kind of always looked like that.

“Oh my stars, hi,” Daffodil burst out. “I have been so busy today, you can’t even imagine. The Wingwatchers are having a big meeting tonight and I was trying to figure out how to sneak in but it’s almost impossible except I think maybe I found a secret tunnel into the cavern that I might be able to fit through if I cover myself in butter and hold my breath and don’t eat anything for the rest of the day.”

“Do you have any snacks?” Violet asked innocently, coming through the doorway.

“I have carrot slices and nectarines,” Ivy said. She slid the bowl over as Violet folded herself neatly onto the floor beside her.

“Aaaargh, you’re both so mean!” Daffodil said, lunging out of the hammock to grab a piece of nectarine.

“You can’t sneak into that meeting anyway,” Violet pointed out. “That tunnel is way too small, and even if you fit through it, they’ll definitely notice you huffing and puffing and smelling like butter. Plus the meeting is after bedtime, and your parents are way strict about bedtime.”

“And Daisy would probably tell on me if I snuck out,” Daffodil grumbled, narrowing her eyes.

“Besides,” Ivy added, “if you spy on a Wingwatchers meeting, they might not let you become a Wingwatcher one day, and that would be super sad.”

Violet raised her eyebrows. “Wait. Do you want to be a Wingwatcher?”

Ivy glanced down at the curling tail on the drawing poking out from under her book. “Maybe,” she said. “I mean … they know so much about dragons.”

Violet leaned over and slid the drawing out so she could look at it. “Whoa, cool,” she said. She held it up for Daffodil to see.

“You’re getting so good at those!” Daffodil cried. “Which kind is that?”

“The sea dragon,” Ivy said. “I think the face looks a bit too horsey. The wings are always fun to draw, but the legs are SO hard.”

Violet picked up the book to squint at the real drawing, then back at Ivy’s. “Well,” she said loyally, “maybe yours is what they really look like. It’s not like anyone around here has ever studied one up close, so how would we know? I like yours better.”

“Me too!” Daffodil said quickly.

“You didn’t even look at the book drawing,” Violet pointed out. “You’re just saying that because I said that.”

“No!” Daffodil objected. “I’m saying that because I like Ivy and I know everything she does is the most awesome, so there!”

Violet rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m saying it because I mean it.”

“Hopefully I’ll see one someday,” Ivy interjected hurriedly. “And then I’ll know what they really look like and be able to draw them even better.”

“You are literally the only person I know who wants to see a dragon,” Violet said.

“That’s not true!” Daffodil said. “I want to see a dragon!”

“But, like, you only want to see one so that you can tell everyone you saw it. You’re looking for another crazy Daffodil adventure story. Ivy wants to see one because she’s actually really interested in them.”

“It doesn’t matter, though,” Ivy said. “We can’t start Wingwatcher training until we’re twelve at the earliest.” Four more years until she’d be allowed to train, then another year after that before her first possible mission outside. She had to wait five years to see a dragon, even though she lived in a world full of them.

“Well,” Violet said, glancing at Daffodil. “How about a Truth Seeker mission instead?”

Daffodil flailed her way out of the hammock and peeked out the door. “Coast is clear,” she whispered, staying where she was to keep watch for eavesdroppers — or, more specifically, Ivy’s mom.

Violet tugged a scroll out of her satchel and unrolled a drawing that turned out to be a scribbly map. Ivy lay down on her stomach next to her and studied it. She’d seen maps kind of like this in the Wingwatcher’s Guide, but this one had a few details she didn’t remember seeing before.

“Did you take this from school?” Ivy asked, tracing one of the rivers with her finger. Their year didn’t study geography yet, but the older kids did.

“I snuck in and copied it from the teacher’s scroll,” Violet said. “That’s why it’s a little wobbly. So how long do you think it would take to get from here to here?” She jabbed her finger at one section of the mountains and then another section farther north.

“Um,” Ivy said, scrunching up her forehead. “All morning?”

“Ivy!” Violet said, giggling. “Way longer than that! Days and days and days!”

“Oh,” Ivy said with a shrug. “What’s that little drawing up there near the top of the mountains?”

“That’s the mountain dragons’ palace,” Violet said. “I mean, that’s what this mapmaker thinks it looks like anyway.”

Ivy’s heart went thump and skip and started fluttering weirdly in her chest. “They have a palace?” she said. “In the mountains?”

“Of course they do,” Violet said. “Like the one the sand dragons have in the desert that your dad snuck into.”

Ivy couldn’t quite explain the feeling she was having, of wanting to see something so badly and knowing she’d never ever be allowed to. What did a dragon palace look like? Was it beautiful? Did it have rooms for different things — an eating hall, a throne room, a library? How could dragons be vicious wild animals, the way her dad described them, but also have castles where they lived together and queens who ruled over them? How did a wild animal obey a queen or build a castle?

She wished she could ask her father about the palace in the desert, but his dragonslaying story was always the same: lots of gory killing, very vague on the details around it. He never talked about sneaking inside or how he carried out the treasure or what any of the dragon stuff looked like.

Maybe Uncle Stone would tell me … if I could get him to talk about that night at all.

Ivy’s uncle had never married, and although he was supposedly as rich as the Dragonslayer, he was never seen spending his treasure. He lived alone in the smallest cave in the underground city. Sometimes he came over for dinner and spent the entire evening staring glumly into his soup. Ivy found him a little unsettling and way too quiet, except every once in a while when he yelled at her dad and was way too loud.

“So … you know how your dad was away for a few days?” Violet asked, studying Ivy’s face.

Ivy nodded. Her mother had fluttered around the caves in a state of nervous disarray the entire time he was gone. It had been rather exhausting. “He took my favorite horse,” she said. “I was worried he wouldn’t bring her back.”

“Do you know where he went?” Daffodil asked from the door.

Ivy thought for a moment, but she couldn’t remember being told. “I thought it was a regular gathering expedition,” she said. Although, come to think of it, there had been a lot of noise around him coming back this time. A few more men shouting “Heath the Hero!” or “Hurrah for the Dragonslayer!” —their voices echoing through the tunnels and filling up the great hall.

“He says he went to this palace,” Violet said, tapping the little drawing of a castle way up north in the mountains. “He was gone for three days, and when he came back, he told everyone he rode up to the gates of the mountain dragons’ palace and shouted at them to come out and fight, but none of them would because they’re scared of him.”

“Why would he do that?” Ivy said incredulously. “Last time he only fought one dragon — what if a whole bunch had come out to fight him? He would have been eaten up SO FAST.”

“I want to know how the dragons knew who he was,” Daffodil demanded. “I mean, did all those dragons actually think, ‘Oh no! It’s the Dragonslayer! Everybody hide!’? Seriously? Because how? Did the sand dragons describe him to the mountain dragons? Or draw them a picture? Aren’t we totally miniature to them? Can they even tell us apart?”

“Those are great questions,” Ivy said. Her dad had always acted as if, of course, everyone in the universe knew who he was, so she’d kind of assumed that included all the dragons. But really, did the dragons have any idea what he looked like?

Did they ever think about “the Dragonslayer” at all?

“Thank you,” Daffodil said, looking delighted.

“No, they’re not,” Violet said. “Those questions are missing the whole point.”

“Oh yeah, well, YOU’RE MISSING A WHOLE BRAIN,” Daffodil shouted.

“Why, Violet? What’s the real question?” Ivy asked quickly.

“Just look at this map!” Violet said. “He was gone three days. How could he possibly have gone all the way to this palace and back in just three days?”

Ivy stared at the map. She only sort of understood it — she knew the little triangles were mountains and the wiggly lines were rivers. She didn’t quite know how far it really was to the top of the map; she only sort of knew where Valor was on it: somewhere in the wooded foothills at the southern part of the mountain range.

But she heard the urgency in Violet’s voice and she felt a weird shivering in the universe. Was this another Dragonslayer lie? If it was such a big, obvious one, wouldn’t lots of people have noticed it? Or if they had noticed it, why didn’t they care?

“Is there any way?” she asked, putting her little finger on the palace and stretching her thumb toward Valor. “Maybe there was something magic in the treasure that makes him go really fast?”

Daffodil laughed. “Your dad never goes fast.”

That was true. The Dragonslayer tended to dawdle, to stop and chat to anyone he saw, to sit down and eat whatever extra food was lying around.

“But maybe he did it somehow,” Ivy said. “Or else where did he go for all that time?”

“THAT is an ACTUAL great question,” Violet pounced. “We should find that out!”

“We totally should!” Daffodil agreed.

“Wait —” Ivy started.

“But how can we figure it out?” Daffodil asked, looking at Violet. “What do we do?”

“We follow him!” Violet said, her voice dropping to a thrilling whisper.

“Yessssss!” Daffodil agreed in a matching whisper.

“Oh, dear, oh no,” Ivy said. “Following my dad? Outside? We definitely aren’t allowed to do that.”

“We aren’t allowed to read my dads’ law scrolls or steal books from the library either,” Violet said, glancing pointedly at the Wingwatcher’s Guide on Ivy’s floor. “But we’ve done those things anyway. For truth! For justice!”

“So we can know more stuff than other people!” Daffodil cried, raising one of her fists in the air.

“No,” Violet said, frowning. “This is not about beating other people at knowing stuff, Daffodil.”

“Um, it totally is,” Daffodil said. “You love being the person who knows the most things. I saw your face when you won the spelling contest!”

“I didn’t steal that book,” Ivy interjected, “by the way. I’ll give it back. I’m just not … finished with it yet.”

“Anyway, I have a plan, so everyone shush,” Violet said.

And that was how, ten days later, Ivy found herself sneaking behind her father as he left the caves again.

She was technically supposed to tell Violet and Daffodil; her instructions were to run and get them so they could all follow him together. But there wasn’t time for that. He left the cave so suddenly, and Ivy was pretty sure the important part was following him. More important than getting the others. She thought. She hoped they wouldn’t be mad about this. She’d have to remember every detail to tell them, to make up for going without them.

Heath sauntered through the tunnels, whistling. He didn’t head toward their small stable of horses, so he couldn’t be planning a long trip — and he hadn’t made a glorious announcement to a gathered throng of worshippers before leaving either, so this wasn’t one of his Dragonslayer Quests. He’d told Mother he was “going outside,” and she’d simply told him to be careful — but he’d also taken a shoulder bag hidden under his shirt, and he avoided walking past Uncle Stone’s door, so he was definitely Up To Something.

Ivy was good at not being noticed, and her father was exceptionally good at not noticing things, especially things he thought were unimportant, like little girls. She stayed several paces behind him, pressing herself against the wall whenever he stopped to chat with one of his followers.

She ran into a problem at the tunnel exit, though. Her father chose one of the exits with a ladder up to the sky, where a Wingwatcher stood guard at the bottom.

Ivy crouched behind a bench carved out of the rock. Her heart was pounding. She’d never been this close to this exit before — certainly never without permission. It smelled different here. She didn’t think she was imagining that.

“Hello, Holly!” Heath boomed cheerfully as he approached the bottom of the ladder.

“It’s Foxglove, sir,” the Wingwatcher said. Ivy didn’t know her very well, although Foxglove had left school only a couple of years ago to train with the Wingwatchers. Her hair was shaved into a close dark fuzz over her head and her forest-green uniform was neat and unwrinkled.

Most interestingly, Foxglove’s expression was hard to read. It wasn’t the usual adoring gaze Ivy’s father got all over Valor. She looked calm, focused … unimpressed. Ivy smushed her face around, trying to imitate her. Violet and Daffodil would be so startled if Ivy could make a cool “I don’t care” expression like that.

“Any dragon sightings today?” Heath asked, ignoring the name correction.

“No, sir.”

“Too bad, too bad.” He cracked his knuckles. “Can’t wait to meet another dragon with the pointy end of this guy.” He patted the sword at his waist with a grin.

Foxglove raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

“Well, I’ll be back soon,” Heath said. He put one hand on the ladder.

“Sir,” Foxglove said. “I am required to ask what your purpose on the outside is. By your own decree, sir.”

Heath frowned at her. “You are required to ask other people. I am THE DRAGONSLAYER and the lord of all of Valor.”

“It was my understanding that the laws apply to everyone, sir,” Foxglove said evenly.

Ivy held her breath. She knew that expression on her father’s face; this moment on the edge right before he exploded with anger.

But instead he shifted from a glare to a smug grin as oily as Ivy’s hands after the olive harvest came in.

“Very good, Holly,” he said, wagging one finger at her. “I like to see my people following my laws. Where would we be without them, am I right?”

“It’s Foxglove, sir,” she said again.

“I am going outside to assess the status of the orchards,” he said grandly. “Check up on the fruit harvesters. Lord business. Don’t you worry about it.”

Foxglove gave another slight nod, stepping back so he could climb up the ladder. He went without saying a word of farewell.

Ivy rubbed her temples, thinking. How could she get past Foxglove? No self-respecting Wingwatcher would ever let an eight-year-old climb outside on her own. Unless maybe she asked really nicely? Ivy was a big fan of asking nicely; she found that this nearly always worked, at least with grown-ups.

Foxglove was a teenager, though. That was a mysterious in-between kind of person who might do absolutely anything. They were inexplicable, Violet would often say wisely.

But she had to try, or her father would be too far out of sight in a minute.

Ivy jumped up from behind the bench and ran over to Foxglove. A wonderful moment of surprise flashed across the Wingwatcher’s face before she went back to her very cool “nothing here is interesting” expression.

“I have to catch up with my dad!” Ivy said breathlessly. “Please let me go after him? I promised I’d give him something before he left and then I forgot and he’ll be so mad if I don’t give it to him! I promise I’ll come right back.” She smiled her “I love you the best of all my teachers” smile, which also usually worked.

“No way, kid,” Foxglove said, not unkindly. “I can’t let you out there alone.”

“I won’t be alone! I’ll catch up to my dad. I’m really quick, I promise.”

“What do you have to give him?” Foxglove asked.

“Um.” Ivy panicked. She reached into her pockets, fumbling to see whether she had anything at all. “Just a … this … super important … um … potato.” She held it out, utterly betrayed by pockets that were usually full of interesting rocks and scraps of nonsense. But two days ago, Mother had taken her pants to wash them and must have emptied out everything, so all she had was the potato she’d dug up in gardening class that morning.

Foxglove slowly raised one incredibly elegant eyebrow at her.

“It’s really important,” Ivy said. “This potato could change everything. I can’t tell you anything else. It’s top secret potato business.”

“I see,” said Foxglove. “Let me guess. We’re going to take down the dragons with potatoes.”

“Oh,” Ivy said, startled. She had never thought of “taking down” dragons before, even though her dad was the Dragonslayer. She kind of thought of that as Dad’s thing, but not something she’d ever want to do. “M-maybe we can use the potatoes to make friends with them instead.”

Now there was a definite shift in Foxglove’s face. Maybe something even a little bit like a smile.

“Have you ever been outside?” Foxglove asked. Ivy shook her head, and Foxglove crouched beside her. “Are you good at keeping secrets?”

Ivy thought about that for a moment. “Yes from Mother and Father,” she said finally. “No from Violet.”

“Hmmm,” said Foxglove. “Is Violet good at keeping secrets?”

“The BEST,” said Ivy. “It’s VERY ANNOYING.”

Foxglove laughed. She glanced around at the empty tunnels, then up at the sky-scented hole above them. “What if we just go … see what he’s doing? Together? And if he looks busy, we won’t even bother him.”

“Yes,” Ivy breathed, her eyes wide. “That would be perfect.”

“All right. Let’s go,” Foxglove said, pointing up. She lifted Ivy onto the ladder, then climbed up right behind her, her strong arms ready to catch Ivy if she slipped, although of course she didn’t because she was good at climbing.

Ivy crawled out of the hillside into an indescribably vast forest of trees, all of them something like eighty times her size (she guessed). The air smelled like apples and grass and it kept flying into her face and up her nose instead of staying still like the air in the underground city. It was also noisy; the whole outside was whooshy and sh-sh-shhhhmmy and crickle-crackly and a little buzzy, too, and SUPER BRIGHT, like, WHY WAS THERE SO MUCH LIGHT EVERYWHERE. Ivy sat down in the dirt and closed her eyes for a moment, listening to the whooshing and feeling the light try to burn off her face while the air tried to blow it out. It was a lot; there was a LOT HAPPENING.

“Foxglove, what are you doing?” said a young male voice nearby.

“Just taking Ivy to find her dad,” Foxglove said, in one of those grown-up voices that was secretly saying something else. Ivy cracked an eye open and squinted up at her. The other Wingwatcher had his arms crossed, looking down at Ivy, but he didn’t look mad. He had a “planning something” face that looked a lot like Violet’s.

Hey, Ivy realized. Foxglove knows my name! A very cool teenager knows my name!

“But we might not find him,” Foxglove said significantly. “So if he comes back without seeing us, no need to mention this.”

“Right,” said the other Wingwatcher. “I was looking for dragons in that direction anyway.” He pointed at a spot of blue sky beyond the trees.

Blue sky! Ivy thought. She’d seen it through holes in the ceilings of a few caves, but it was so much bigger and bluer out here. Try to remember it better than that. Daffodil isn’t going to settle for “bigger and bluer.”

“Ready to walk?” Foxglove asked Ivy. Ivy scrambled to her feet and took Foxglove’s hand. They edged down the sloping hill, between towering craggy trees on a carpet of pine needles.

At the bottom of the hill, Ivy started seeing more and more fruit trees — apple and pear and peach, with berry bushes tangled between them. She slowed to match Foxglove’s cautious, quiet pace, and then stopped completely when Foxglove froze and squeezed her hand.

Up ahead, Heath was sauntering through the trees, holding a half-eaten apple nearly the size of his head in his hand. He glanced right and left as he went, on higher alert than he had been in the caves.

Foxglove tugged Ivy behind a tree. “Where is he going?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” Ivy answered. He’d had a bag, but he wasn’t using it to carry apples. What else could he be going to get? “He just said ‘outside.’”

The Wingwatcher peeked around the tree at him. “The old village is in that direction,” she whispered.

“But — the law,” Ivy said. “I mean, didn’t Pine … he can’t …” She trailed off, surprised by the suddenly grim expression on Foxglove’s face. Foxglove was staring after Heath, looking very much like maybe he was her least favorite person.

“That’s right, Ivy,” she said. “He can’t go there. At least, if the law is fair and applies to everyone.” Foxglove’s fingers twitched on the hilt of her dagger.

“So he probably isn’t,” Ivy said. “Maybe he’s going to get pears for Mother. He’ll be back soon, right?”

Foxglove looked down at her, and the frown slowly cleared from her forehead. She opened her mouth, maybe to say something reassuring, but she was interrupted by an unearthly sound from the sky.

It was like an avalanche, or a thousand giant tigers roaring at once, or thunder in a hurricane the size of the continent, or like something else enormous and terrifying that Ivy had never heard before. It gave her instant goose bumps and made her want to curl up like a hedgehog somewhere safe, preferably with Violet and Daffodil and a bunch of pointy swords.

Foxglove hissed an unfamiliar word (“that was CURSING,” Violet informed her with a scandalized expression when Ivy asked about it later) and grabbed Ivy. Before the sound had finished echoing off the mountains, Foxglove had thrown Ivy halfway up the trunk of the nearest evergreen and was scrambling up behind her.

Move, legs, Ivy thought frantically. She forced herself to reach up and grab another branch, sticky with sap, and haul herself higher. A few moments later, she was about halfway up the tree when she felt Foxglove’s hand on her ankle.

“Stop there,” Foxglove whispered. “Stay completely still.”

Ivy didn’t have to be told twice. She clung to the trunk, tucking her legs in and imagining herself as a knot in the bark. Small, brown, indistinguishable. Definitely inedible. She was glad she was wearing her old gray tunic and pants instead of the new dark purple ones her mother had made for her.

The dragon roared again, and now she heard a new sound — this one coming from below her. She squinted down without moving a muscle and saw her father racing through the trees. His eyes were wild and he’d dropped his apple. Ivy had never seen him move so fast. He ran as though the dragon were right behind him, breathing fire on his heels. She could hear his heavy, panicked breaths as he tore past.

But the dragon wasn’t down there. It was up in the sky. Ivy could hear the wingbeats.

She couldn’t resist. Carefully, slowly, she inched her head up and back until she could see the blue expanse beyond the thicket of branches.

A flash of black scales soared overhead — wings tilting, flickering tail, breath of flame on the air.

A dragon, a dragon, a dragon.

It swooped around again. This time she caught a glimpse of its face — not horsey at all, but perfect, long and elegant, with the most intelligent eyes. And the scales were more than black; they caught the sunlight in shimmers of dark purple and blue and green, and small diamond-white scales flashed under its wings.

The dragon roared once more, and then it lashed its tail and swept away west, toward the desert.

Another long moment passed before Ivy realized she’d been holding her breath, and she slowly let it out.

“Wow,” she whispered.

She wanted to stay in the tree longer, remembering the dragon — maybe waiting to see if it came back — but before long she felt Foxglove tug gently on her ankle.

They descended quietly, and Foxglove reached up to help Ivy down from the last branch, which was way higher than Ivy would have been able to reach on her own.

“I guess that was your first Wingwatcher lesson, kid,” Foxglove said. “If you hear a dragon, hide. Do not run. Dragons are much faster than you, but they won’t usually bother with prey if it’s in a sharp, sticky tree like this one, and if the branches are thick enough and you’re motionless enough, it hopefully won’t even see you.” She glanced in the direction Heath had been running. “Only a coward or an idiot would run from a dragon.”

Ivy was nearly startled out of her dragon daze. Was Foxglove talking about her father? The Dragonslayer wasn’t a coward. That wasn’t even possible.

He had been running awfully fast, though.

“You’re so lucky,” Foxglove said. “The black ones are the rarest. I can’t believe you got to see one on your first time out! What did you think? Were you beyond scared?”

Ivy smiled at her. “It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “I loved it.”

“Loved it!” Foxglove echoed. “The dragon? Or the exciting-terrifying running-and-hiding part?”

“The dragon,” Ivy said promptly. “I loved the dragon.”

Foxglove raised her eyebrows again. “Well, I haven’t heard that before,” she said. “I thought I was the only one who secretly thinks dragons are kind of great.”

“You do?” Ivy breathed. “Do you get to see dragons every day?”

“Not every day, but that’s basically our job,” Foxglove said with a grin. “Watching the skies so everyone is safe. Studying the dragons so we can understand them as much as possible. We lost a lot of books and a few of the older watchers when the village burned, but we’re trying to bring back everything we knew.”

“I want to be a Wingwatcher so much,” Ivy said passionately.

“I’ll put in a good word for you,” Foxglove said. “That is, if I’m not banished before then. Come on, let’s get you home. We didn’t learn much today, did we?”

Ivy disagreed, although she didn’t say so out loud. She’d learned to hide, not run, from dragons. She’d learned that dragons were even more amazing than she’d thought. She’d learned that her dad acted like a cat with its tail on fire when he heard one. And she’d met Foxglove, a Wingwatcher who understood her.

They started back toward Valor, but Ivy kept tripping over tree roots because she couldn’t keep her eyes off the sky. She wished the dragon would come back. Or that another one would fly overhead.

Foxglove stopped her near the entrance and went ahead to make sure Heath wasn’t around to catch them going back in. Ivy took a deep breath, trying to fill her lungs with all the outside air they could hold.

“I don’t want to go back underground,” she said when Foxglove returned. “I want to see more dragons. I want to stay out here. Why can’t I be a Wingwatcher now?”

“I don’t think the old folks are quite ready for eight-year-old guardians yet,” Foxglove said, crouching to meet Ivy’s eyes. “But tell you what, come back whenever Squirrel and I are on duty, and I’ll give you a little early training, if you don’t tell anyone but Violet.”

“Really?” Ivy breathed.

“Really, Ivy Who Loves Dragons,” Foxglove said. “Just promise me you’ll never ever ever go outside without a Wingwatcher.”

“I promise,” Ivy said.

She went home, covered five small scrolls (which were supposed to be for math homework) with sketches of the dragon in flight, and fell asleep to dreams of wings and scales.