“

By the time the other dragonets arrived, Glory had wiped out any trace of green fear from her scales. She waited by the boulder, her wings speckled gray like the stone, as they swooped down to join her. Sunny jumped up to hug Clay’s neck as soon as she saw him.

“How’s Webs?” Clay asked.

Tsunami snorted. “I don’t think these ‘healers’ have seen anything worse than a sprained wing or a stubbed claw before,” she said. “They’re doing a lot of peering at the scratch and muttering.”

“But I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Sunny said. “The RainWings are trying their best.” She turned and caught Tsunami rolling her eyes behind her back. Sunny frowned. “They are.”

“Sunny, you think everyone’s always trying their best,” Tsunami pointed out.

The little SandWing huffed a small snort of flame. “So? Everyone is! Why wouldn’t they be?”

“Yes, dear,” Tsunami said, not unkindly.

“Hallooooooo!” a voice interrupted. A pink comet streaked through the trees and thudded down beside the dragonets. Glory jumped back and flared her ruff at Jambu as he bowed to all of them, grinning.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I heard what you were up to, and it sounded like fun,” he said brightly. “So I took the day off to see if I could help. Brother and sister, working as a team! Awesome, right?” He craned his neck to see the hole in the boulder behind her. “Oh, freaky thing! No wonder it feels so weird in this part of the forest! Most of the RainWings avoid coming anywhere near this pond. But no one’s ever reported a mystery hole before, I don’t think. So what’s the plan?”

“The plan is I go in,” Glory said. “And everyone else waits here.”

Well, nobody liked that plan. Tsunami wanted to go first; Clay wanted to go together; Starflight was still in favor of not going in at all. Even Jambu started whining about not wanting to be left behind.

Glory folded her tail over her talons and waited for them to shut up.

Sunny sidled up to her. “Maybe we could compromise,” Sunny suggested quietly. “Maybe you could take someone with you. Someone with fire, maybe, who could help you with the darkness in there.”

Unfortunately, that was a good point. Glory didn’t love the idea of blundering into total darkness alone, and if she was right, and it was a tunnel, there was no way to know how long it was or how lost she could get.

“Like, maybe —” Sunny started to say.

“All right!” Glory shouted, silencing the others. “All right, fine, different plan. Clay and I go in first and see what’s in there.”

Sunny looked disappointed. Glory wasn’t sure why; she was doing exactly what the SandWing had suggested.

“What about me?” Tsunami said, bristling.

“You hold the other end of the vines,” Clay said. “If we yank on them three times, it means we’re in trouble, so either pull us out or, if you can’t, come in and get us.”

Glory didn’t love the idea of having a vine tied around her shoulders, but she was outvoted. As Starflight tightened the knots, she untangled her sloth and passed it to Sunny.

“Here,” she said. “Watch Silver for me while I’m gone?”

“Aww,” Sunny said, brightening. “Pretty name.”

Glory hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She didn’t want the others to notice that she was starting to like the weird little mammal. “Well, you can call it whatever you want,” she said.

“Hrrrrgle,” the sloth disagreed, but it flopped across Sunny’s back with a blissful expression. It must like the SandWing warmth of her scales, Glory realized. What if it doesn’t want to come back to me? She shook out her wings. Then it’ll be Sunny’s problem, I guess.

“Let’s go catch a monster,” she said to Clay.

“Remember, three tugs,” Clay said to Tsunami. He squared his shoulders and marched up to the boulder alongside Glory. She knew he must be remembering the awful noises and dark creature from the night before, too. She was glad he’d followed her lead of not telling the others about it. Starflight didn’t need another reason to try to stop her from going into the hole.

“Let me go in first,” Clay whispered. “So I can light the way.”

Glory nodded reluctantly, and he stepped forward into the darkness. She followed right away, nearly stepping on his tail.

He breathed out a plume of flame, and they saw a stone tunnel stretching ahead of them, then turning abruptly to the right.

“That’s impossible,” Clay whispered. “This tunnel is much longer than the boulder. And it’s not going down into the ground . . .”

“Some kind of magic?” Glory guessed. “Maybe animus magic?” Glory couldn’t think of anything else that could have made a tunnel like this. Unless there were mystery creatures with powers similar to animus dragons.

When she was four years old, she’d gone through a phase of reading all the animus dragon stories and hoping she was one, so that she could enchant Dune’s dinner to eat him. Of course, no powers had ever manifested, and it was probably lucky they hadn’t, given what they’d learned about that kind of magic from Tsunami’s sister Anemone in the Kingdom of the Sea.

On the one talon, the ability to manipulate and enchant any physical object, Glory thought. On the other, say good-bye to your soul.

She squeezed past Clay and set off down the tunnel. He stayed close enough to brush her wings with his snout.

“I thought the scrolls said there hasn’t been an animus dragon in generations,” Clay said, scratching his head. “But between Queen Coral’s daughters and this being here, I guess I remembered wrong.”

“No, that is what the scrolls said — but remember, that was in the histories written by NightWings,” Glory said. “NightWings can’t stand animus dragons because animus power is much cooler than what they can do, and NightWings would rather be the only magically powerful dragons out there. So maybe they lied.”

“Or they didn’t know that it runs in the SeaWing royal family,” Clay said. “Or perhaps any dragons who do have animus power make sure to keep it hidden so they won’t be forced to use it, like, for the war or something.” He breathed out another spurt of fire, and they saw the turn a few steps ahead of them.

“This tunnel might not be an animus thing either,” Glory said. “Maybe there’s some other kind of creature who can do this type of magic.”

Clay didn’t answer, but she felt the shiver that ran through his wings.

At the turn, Glory leaned forward to glance around the corner. Even before Clay could use his fire, she saw light — enough light to realize the tunnel turned again to the left, and that was where the light was coming from.

They crept to the next corner and peered around it.

Another long tunnel stretched ahead of them, and at the end of it waited an outline of bright sunlight — much too bright for the floor of the rainforest.

Clay and Glory exchanged glances.

“Did we miss something?” she whispered. “I thought this tunnel would be much longer. Also that it would have, you know, a monster in it.”

“It must have come from out there,” Clay said, nodding at the circle of sunshine.

They slid along the tunnel, keeping an eye out for hidden entrances, but as far as Glory could tell, there were none. There were only the long, smooth stone walls leading to that brightness, which got more and more blinding the closer they came.

She paused at the doorway, blinking, and realized that sand was piled up outside as high as her shoulders, nearly blocking the exit. She dug into it, shoving sand aside until there was a hole big enough to crawl through, then poked her head out.

The sun beat down on her scales, but not in the same way that it did in the rainforest treetops or in the Claws of the Clouds Mountains. Here the heat was dry as ancient bones, sucking all the moisture out of her scales, and there was no breeze that she could feel.

Grains of sand trickled between her talons. As her eyes adjusted, she realized that the sand stretched, endless and pale, to the horizon ahead of her. There were no trees. The sky was aggressively blue and cloudless. A sickly stench of death hung faintly in the air. There was nothing but desert as far as the eye could see.

Clay squished himself up beside her and stuck his nose out into the blazing heat.

“Yowch,” he said.

Glory’s ears twitched. Out in the sky, a pair of tiny dark shapes appeared, approaching fast.

“Hide,” Glory ordered, shoving Clay back into the tunnel. Throwing off the vine rope, she wriggled out of the hole. She stretched her talons across the sand and focused on her scales, watching them blur quickly into the pale brown-gold-white colors. Camouflaged, she stared up at the approaching dragons.

They were two SandWings, swooping lower as they got closer. For an uneasy moment, Glory thought they must have seen her. But they whooshed past without even glancing down, and she realized they were aiming at something beyond and behind her.

Moving cautiously, Glory crept out another few steps and turned around.

On this side, the hole was hidden in a dune surrounded by a semicircle of dull green cacti. Each cactus was half as tall as a full-grown dragon, with tiny thorns as sharp as fangs. A few dusty white flowers bloomed between the prickles.

Beyond the cactus sentries, the dunes slanted down to an enormous structure in the distance. The two SandWings spiraled into it, vanishing behind the thick sandstone walls. There were no windows that Glory could see. There was only the solid block shape, like a monstrous brick dropped on the sand.

Wait, she thought. There was something dotting the top of the walls — small dark shapes at regular intervals, fluttering now and then in the very slight breaths of wind.

She squinted, trying to process what she could see. It looked like . . . but it couldn’t be . . .

She closed her eyes abruptly and clutched her stomach. It was. She remembered the scroll now where she’d read a description of this place.

The dark shapes were dragon heads. The heads of dragons who had been executed and mounted where everyone could see them, to remind others of the dangers of disobedience. According to the scroll, you could smell them for miles in all directions.

Glory knew where she was now.

She was standing in the Kingdom of Sand, within sight of Burn’s stronghold.