The Brightest Night (6 page)

“How —” began the soldier.

But just then Sunny heard a roar from the NightWings’ clearing.

Uh-oh.

She wanted to know what Blister’s plan was — but she needed to know how the three NightWings were reacting, and if she was in danger right now. She cleared the mirror quickly, whispered “Fierceteeth” to it, then breathed smoke across it again.

Immediately, three curls of black smoke popped up on the glass, rushing around one another like small tornadoes.

“How could you lose it?” Fierceteeth’s voice snarled.

“I didn’t
lose
it,” Preyhunter snapped. “Someone
stole
it.”

“Right out from under your snout?” Fierceteeth growled. “How, exactly?”

“I don’t know!” Preyhunter yelled.

“I do,” said a trembling voice that barely sounded like Strongwings. “It was the Darkstalker.”

Sunny tilted her head toward the mirror.
What’s the Darkstalker?

What could be scary enough to terrify a dragon as big as Strongwings?

The other two NightWings didn’t respond for a long moment. Finally, Fierceteeth hissed, “That’s just a ghost story for little dragonets. There’s no Darkstalker, or if there ever was, we killed him centuries ago.”

“No, he’s
real
,” Strongwings said, edging toward hysteria. “Everyone knows he’s still out there somewhere, and now he’s found us. Look at this message! We’re going to die!”

“It could have been someone who wants us to
think
he’s the Darkstalker,” Preyhunter said dubiously.

“But who else would know we had the mirror? Who else would know that we’re flying to our death?”

“Snap out of it, Strongwings,” Fierceteeth barked. “Someone is trying to scare us, that’s all. You know the story. The Darkstalker, if he did exist, died a long time ago.”

“No. He couldn’t die,” Strongwings whispered. “They buried him, but they always knew he’d come back one day.”

Sunny had never heard of this mythical dragon.
It must be a NightWing legend. Lucky for me.
She hadn’t expected to tap into an old superstition.

“Maybe it was that SandWing,” Fierceteeth said, then immediately let out a dismissive snort. “No, that stunted salamander wouldn’t have the teeth for something like this. She must have gone back and told someone we had the mirror. I bet this was Deathbringer. Seems like something he would do, from what I’ve heard of him.”

Sunny was obscurely flattered and offended at the same time. She flicked her tongue at the dark glass.

“But Deathbringer would just kill us,” argued Preyhunter. “Strongwings is right about one thing — this is what the Darkstalker does, according to the stories. He plays with his prey for days, making sure they’re nearly paralyzed with terror before he strikes.”

“Yes, exactly,” Strongwings said. “He’ll come back the next time we sleep and kill just one of us, or —”

“So let’s
not
be paralyzed with terror,” Fierceteeth snarled. “Let’s
go
. The Kingdom of Sand is on the other side of those mountains. We can be there in a few days if we stop moaning and clutching our tails. Come
on
.” Her smoke tendril was nearly interwoven with Strongwings’s, as if she were trying to heave him into the sky with brute force.

“But the message —”

“We can’t go back,” Fierceteeth said. “Glory will kill us more definitely than any old NightWing animus ghost, and if she doesn’t, we’ll be the RainWings’ prisoners. I’ll take my chances in the desert, even without that mirror.”

The argument didn’t go on much longer. Soon the sound of wingbeats thumped across the smooth obsidian.

Sunny tilted the smoke together and breathed fire across it again until there was nothing but silence and darkness on the face of the mirror. The slithering inside of her faded, but she felt more tired and sick than she had in a while.
I hope I don’t have to use this thing too often.

So I’d better try to keep an eye on them.

She ducked through the leaves and flew straight up until she slipped through the whispering green canopy, straight into blinding sunlight.

On the western horizon, already no bigger than claws, she could see the three black shapes winging away toward the mountains. She followed, feeling better and stronger with each moment of sun on her scales.

The Kingdom of Sand. The desert. Just on the other side of those mountains.

I’m going home.

Sunny followed the NightWings for three days as they navigated the foothills and then the snowier heights of the mountain crags. They slept in the shadow of Jade Mountain, listening to the wind howling around the twin peaks. She only had to use the mirror once more, when she lost sight of them, and it helped her catch up to them again.

She would have loved to sneak back into their camp and leave more scary messages, but she knew they’d take turns staying awake to keep watch after losing the mirror. And she resisted the temptation to use the mirror on her friends or on Blister again, although she kept worrying about Blister’s new plan. Still, she wanted to avoid that sick, slithery feeling as much as possible.

From the mountaintops, they flew down through densely forested foothills, and off in the distance ahead of them Sunny began to see something that shimmered white and hazy across the horizon.

The desert,
she thought with a prickle of anticipation. She’d been there once before, when the dragonets found the tunnel from the rainforest into the Kingdom of Sand. They’d had to chase Mangrove all the way to the borderlands of the Ice Kingdom. So she’d spent two days flying over the desert, but hardly any time down on the sand, where her talons really wanted to be.

And no time at all looking for my parents
. Her thoughts kept circling back to that as she flew, with no one to talk to and nothing else to distract her from worrying about the prophecy.

Her friends had all found some kind of family by now — even if some of it was disappointing family, and no one was quite what they’d expected. Clay’s mother was awful, but his brothers and sisters were a lot like him, according to Clay. Tsunami’s mother was the queen of the SeaWings, who had tried to imprison them, but Tsunami had two little sisters, too: Anemone and Auklet.

Glory had no way to figure out who her parents were, thanks to the way RainWings kept their eggs all together, but she’d found a brother, Jambu (even if he was a bit silly), and also Grandeur, who was perhaps a great-grandmother or great-aunt or something like that. Poor Starflight had really had it the worst of all, between Mastermind for a dad and Fierceteeth as his sister.

But at least they knew — at least they’d found
someone
. They all had dragons who wanted them in some way.

Why did my parents leave me?

She had almost nothing to go on if she ever wanted to look for her family. All Kestrel had said was, “Dune found Sunny’s egg in the desert, hidden near the Scorpion Den.”

The Scorpion Den. I don’t even know what that is.
She’d seen it marked on the map, but she didn’t remember reading about it in any scrolls.

Oh!
Her wings missed a beat as she finally remembered where she’d heard about Jade Mountain.
It was something Kestrel said the last time we saw her. “When you realize you need me, you can send me a message through the dragon of Jade Mountain.”

She twisted to look back at the fanged mountain. So a dragon lived there — one who dealt with at least some of the Talons of Peace. That could be useful to keep in mind.
Although … who would live somewhere so sinister?
She wondered which tribe it was from, and why he or she lived alone.

When she turned back around, she saw the distant shapes of the NightWings diving toward the forest below them.
Resting again? When we’re so close? We can’t be more than an hour’s flight from the desert now.
They had only flown for half the night before stopping to sleep, and then risen with the sunrise to fly again a few hours ago.

Now the sun had cleared the eastern horizon, but the day was barely begun. And they already needed a break?
They seriously have no stamina.
She rolled her eyes and folded her wings to drop down into the forest as well.

Wind-flurried green leaves brushed against her scales and a riot of gray squirrels scattered along the branches as she landed, her talons sinking into the soft grass. In the distance, she could hear the NightWings roaring grumpily, and she guessed they were having another unsuccessful hunt. For a trio of menacing killers, they were actually surprisingly bad at catching anything to eat.

Sunny wasn’t the world’s best hunter herself, but she didn’t need much. She’d always eaten less than her friends — a lizard a day would be enough for her. Kestrel used to grumble that that was probably why Sunny was so stunted and scrawny, but then Dune would shake his head and insist that it was normal for SandWings to be light eaters.

Kestrel and Dune. Our dead guardians.

If only she’d had more time to ask Dune about where her egg came from. He’d always been evasive when the subject came up, but if she’d known her friends were planning an escape —
if they’d trusted me enough to tell me about it,
she thought with a frown — she could have pressed him harder.

Sunny swiveled her head around, listening.

There was an odd noise in this forest.

Actually there were several odd noises. Like thumps and murmurs and a chattery kind of birdsong, almost as though squirrels were trying to imitate their winged neighbors.

But — it sounded as though it was coming from
under
the ground.

She crouched and pressed one ear to the warm earth.

There’s definitely something under here.
Groundhogs? Rabbits? She didn’t think any normal rodents made noises quite like this. And from what she could tell, it wasn’t a small warren underneath her — the sounds seemed to be coming from fairly far away as well.

Softly she paced through the forest, stopping occasionally to listen. She kept an eye out for the three NightWings, but they weren’t hard to avoid. First there was the roaring and crashing around, and then after a while, snoring that shook the top branches of the trees.

Sunny worked her way cautiously westward, in the direction of the desert. Small brown and red birds chorused from the trees, occasionally pausing as they saw her approach, and then starting again after a moment, as if they realized she was nothing to worry about. Bumblebees and dragonflies buzzed and hummed and flitted around her talons. In the mild morning breeze, Sunny could smell apples and mint leaves. And something else, too, like old burnt wood.

She couldn’t hear the sounds from under the ground anymore, but the burnt smell drew her on. Up ahead she could see a break in the trees.

She stepped out into the bright sunlight and stopped, her eyes momentarily full of light.

There was a hole blasted in the forest.

Something had been here once — something that stretched for more than a mile within the forest, bigger than the dragonets’ home under the mountain — but it was gone now, all burned to black ashes.

Where Sunny stood, at the edge of it, the forest was trying to rise again. Ashes drifted like dead leaves over her claws, but she could see small green shoots wriggling through here and there.

She spread her wings and took to the air, hoping for a better look. The burnt area stretched in jagged slashes through the trees and ended at the border with the rocky foothills that led to the desert. From above, she could see that the hole in the forest was many wingspans across and black as a NightWing’s scales. It looked like a dark gap in a piece of jewelry where a gemstone had been violently gouged out.

She circled overhead. Everything inside the hole looked twisted and blasted into dark ashes, but as Sunny studied the wreckage, she realized that it wasn’t just trees that had been burned here.

Some of the ghostly shapes that remained looked like … buildings.

But these buildings were too small for dragons.

Sunny landed next to one of the ruins and stared at it in confusion for a moment. Even she was too big to fit through the stone doorways that leaned silently out of the ashes.

But why would any dragon build houses so small?

She walked around it, her wings stirring up small tornadoes of ash flakes, and saw that in the center of the burnt area was a kind of open square. She could feel hard, cracked stones meeting her claws under the layers of ash. In the middle of the square she found a collapsed pile of round rocks, and tipped sideways among those was a blackened metal bell about the size of Sunny’s head.

Somebody definitely built this. Were they keeping some kind of small animal here?

She turned to look at another of the small stone doorways and found a shape sticking out of the wreckage beside it. When she clawed it out, she realized it was a piece of stone, roughly carved into a shape with two legs, no wings, and holding something pointy over its head.

Oh!
Sunny inhaled sharply, getting a noseful of old soot smell.
Scavengers!
The statue, if that’s what it was, looked a bit like a drawing from one of the old scrolls about scavengers who attacked dragons for their treasure, waving sharp little toothpick claw things called swords.

Did scavengers build this place? Can they do things like make bells and carve statues?

Sunny knew scavengers lived in dens, but she hadn’t thought they could build real buildings like this. She always imagined them clustering in caves or digging out holes to live in, or maybe leaning long sticks together to create shelters, at most. Here there was clearly advanced masonry, deliberate foundation work, and a sort of organized street plan, as far as Sunny could tell.

Plus the statue … it was crude, but wasn’t it art? What kind of prey made art?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding all of this. Maybe dragons built this place and kept scavengers here for some reason.

And then burned it all down? Why would they do that?

She lifted into the sky, feeling unsettled.

The dragonets had studied scavengers in their scrolls, but Webs and Kestrel had never brought any back to their mountain caves for eating or practice hunting. Sunny had seen a few small scavengers in Queen Scarlet’s palace, scurrying around under the dragons’ feet at a banquet for the visiting SandWings. But she’d been up in a giant birdcage, on display as a gift for Burn, so she hadn’t gotten a very close look.

Scavengers were the ones who’d started the dragon war by killing Queen Oasis and stealing all her treasure, leaving Burn, Blaze, and Blister to fight over the throne and the empty treasury. Sunny didn’t know much else about scavengers. She knew they liked shiny things. She’d always imagined scavengers as sort of fierce magpies or squirrels — bigger than either of those, but not much smarter. They couldn’t have very much of a brain if they thought attacking dragons was a good idea, right?

She glanced down at the destroyed village once more, then turned back to find a spot where she could hide and wait for the NightWings.

Maybe there’s more to scavengers than we were taught.

But what happened here?

Who burned down this scavenger den … and why?