She was quiet, but the tick tick tick of her brain was almost too loud for him to avoid hearing.
“I’m not reading your mind,” he said, “but I can tell that you’re thinking I’ll only stay this way if I don’t use my animus magic.”
“I don’t want to scare you,” she said. “If you haven’t seen those futures — the ones where you use it too much, where you start killing other dragons, where you steal the throne to become king … well, that’s probably better. If you haven’t seen them, then they mustn’t be very likely, right?”
It was his turn to be quiet.
He had maybe, sort of, kind of maybe glimpsed a future where he was king of the NightWings.
But it was an awesome future. He was a great king. He would make the NightWings the most powerful tribe in Pyrrhia, and all his decisions would make them stronger and safer. Even if the path to get there was a little dark … once they were there even Clearsight would have to admit it was totally worth it. Better for everyone. The best possible future.
It wasn’t the most likely future, not yet. But he sometimes thought it should be.
She wouldn’t love hearing that, though. She had to be steered carefully into that timeline, until she could see how perfect it was.
“I’ve had visions here and there of the distant future,” he said with a shrug. “But you of all dragons must know that it’s nearly impossible to predict events that are too far in the future. Little changes now can cause such big changes later that it’s almost not even worth it to look that far ahead, right?”
From the tension in her wings, he guessed this wasn’t the answer she was looking for.
“Hey,” he said, ducking his head to meet her eyes. “Don’t be mad at me for things I might do one day, all right? I’m not evil now. I haven’t done any of that. And I probably won’t. Will you focus on that, please? Stay in the present with me?”
“Yes,” she said, dropping her wings. She stepped away from him and shook them out, as if her visions were clumps of mud stuck between her scales. “I know. I’ll try.” She gave him a wry smile. “Sorry. We’re going to have this argument a lot.”
Well, that sounds fun. If you know that already, he thought, then can’t we not?
“So what was it?” she asked. “The one spell you’ve cast?”
With an effort, he made himself grin at her again. “If I tell you, you’re going to make fun of me.”
“Ooo, even better,” she said, perking up. “Tell me!” She poked his chest with her tail. “Tell me!”
“It was just — this toy of Whiteout’s,” he said. “It’s a little carved scavenger. She loves it in kind of an obsessive way. Once it got lost and she cried for a whole day, until we finally found it again. So after that, I enchanted it to always return to her. No matter where I hide it, or where she loses it, it always turns up on her pillow by that night.” He shrugged. “It’s just a little thing.”
“Awwwwwwwwww,” she said. “You are working the sympathy vote so hard right now.”
“I am what I am,” he said, spreading his wings again. “I can’t help my noble heart and generous nature.”
“We might be able to do something about the size of that head, though,” she said, laughing.
“What, this perfect specimen?” he asked with mock incredulity.
Her ears flicked up suddenly. “Shh,” she whispered. “Did you hear that?”
They both fell silent, and against the backdrop of water dripping and the distant roar of the storm, Darkstalker heard a strange, muffled sound. He swiveled his head around. Toward the back of the cave, toward the long shadows.
Clearsight twined her tail around his again and he felt the tension prickling through both of them.
Is someone in here? Or … something?
The sound came again — a low moan just weak enough to perhaps be the wind, but with something unmistakably dragon about it.
Darkstalker hopped off the ledge and stepped cautiously into the dark. Clearsight was close behind him, which was reassuring, because presumably if they were going to be mauled by something in this cave, she would have seen that coming.
With their night vision, they could see that something large and lumpy was lying in the last tide pool, where the rivulet ended. Darkstalker glanced at Clearsight, then let out a small burst of flame to give them more light.
It was a dragon, but in that moment of brightness they could see it was not a NightWing. Its scales were blue.
The dragon made another mournful noise and slowly, painfully, flopped its head around to look at them.
“NightWings,” it hissed softly.
“Are you hurt?” Clearsight asked. She circled the blue dragon cautiously. “Oh, there’s a gash on this side … but it doesn’t look too awful.”
“It’s something else,” Darkstalker said, scanning the SeaWing’s mind. “He’s exhausted. He’s been swimming for days. I see blood and screaming and — tentacles?”
The SeaWing shuddered and tried to sit up.
“Don’t make it worse,” Clearsight said, nudging him back into the water. “Just rest. Can you tell us what happened?”
“Albatross,” the dragon whispered.
Darkstalker froze. He’d heard that name before. In his father’s mind, in a secret compartment where Arctic sometimes turned over the names of the other known animus dragons in Pyrrhia. Queen Diamond, Arctic’s mother. Jerboa, a SandWing who had vanished from the SandWing court years ago and was now either a fugitive or dead. And Albatross, brother to the queen of the SeaWings.
If there were any others, they were just rumors. Those three were the ones Arctic worried about.
“You were attacked by an albatross?” Clearsight said skeptically. “With … tentacles?”
“Albatross is Queen Lagoon’s brother,” Darkstalker told her.
“Oh,” Clearsight said. Her eyes clouded over, and he saw her knitting together all the things she knew and would know about the SeaWings. “Oh no …”
“He went mad,” the SeaWing whispered hoarsely. “He attacked us. He killed … everyone. My brother, my father. I barely escaped with my life. I swam and kept swimming …”
“Everyone?” Clearsight echoed. Her thoughts were so loud and tangled with grief that Darkstalker couldn’t avoid hearing them (or so he told himself). The whole tribe? Or the whole royal family? What about Fathom? Is he dead, is everything wrong now? She shook her head, brushing away tears. No, I see the timelines still; he can’t be dead. He can’t be.
Darkstalker felt a rush of jealousy. He had seen the SeaWing in their future, too: a timid, jittery green dragon, sad and lonely. A friend one day, perhaps, but certainly no one to be so devastated about if he didn’t make it. A peripheral character in their great love story. So why was Clearsight so upset? Was this someone he had to worry about?
“I don’t know if anyone is left alive.” The SeaWing stared at Clearsight with haunted blue eyes. “Albatross killed the queen. I saw it. He killed two SkyWings and the princess and the king and my —” He choked on the words, letting out a sob. “He was still killing when I fled into the ocean. But I don’t know why. He was our prince. We loved him. He was loyal to the queen. He made such beautiful magic for her. Why would he do this?”
Clearsight lifted her eyes to meet Darkstalker’s.
“He was an animus,” Darkstalker whispered. She nodded, knowing that already.
“I think I know why he did it,” she said softly to the SeaWing. “He did a lot of magic for the queen, didn’t he? He wasn’t careful with his soul at all.”
She shot Darkstalker a “what did I tell you?” look. He didn’t love it.
“Weren’t you listening to me?” Darkstalker said, lashing his tail. “Look at me, Clearsight, the way I am now. I’m not whoever you’re seeing in your visions. I am careful.”
The SeaWing lunged out of the water and seized Clearsight’s talons. “Maybe it was another tribe. Maybe they put a spell on Albatross — that could happ
en, couldn’t it? The IceWings have magic, too; maybe they were trying to wipe us out. Or maybe the RainWings drugged him. They have all kinds of plants that do weird things in the jungle, that’s what I’ve heard. That makes sense, doesn’t it? It must have been someone else using him. It wasn’t Albatross at all.”
Clearsight guided him back into the pool. “We’re going to get you help,” she said. “Queen Vigilance will want to hear about this. She’ll make sure you’re taken care of in exchange for your story. Just … wait here.”
The SeaWing slumped forward, letting the water cover his snout. He took a deep breath, gills fluttering, and closed his eyes again.
“How are we going to get a message to the queen?” Clearsight whispered to Darkstalker, edging around the tide pool and back toward the cave entrance.
He growled under his breath. “We’ll have to tell my father. He has her ear — he can tell her about this dragon and what’s happened in the Kingdom of the Sea.”
She hesitated in front of a wall of glowing moss, her wings spread so she looked silhouetted. “Is this a good idea?” she said. “Queen Vigilance wouldn’t attack the SeaWings while they’re in trouble, would she?” She wrinkled her forehead, not waiting for his answer; she was already a hundred days away, a thousand, studying all the possible outcomes.
“She’ll start with a messenger or a spy,” Darkstalker said. He could at least pretend that Clearsight really wanted to know what he thought. “To find out for sure what happened. It wouldn’t make sense for her to attack, though. The Kingdom of the Sea isn’t geographically useful for us to invade.”
He couldn’t imagine the trip the surviving SeaWing had made — all the way around the bottom of the continent, past the rainforest? Or through the middle of the continent, along the rivers?
“Besides,” he added, “she’s busy enough with the IceWing war. She’ll know we don’t need another front or another enemy to deal with.”
Clearsight looked at him as if she were slowly returning to earth. “I don’t see any NightWing-SeaWing battles ahead,” she said. “I think it’s safe to tell her.”
“That’s what I said,” he pointed out.
“And we should find out what really happened,” she said. “The more we know about animus magic … the safer we’ll all be, right?”
“I know a lot about it,” he said. “IceWings have had it longer than any other tribe. Trust me, I hear about it every day.”
“So why aren’t you scared?” she asked. “Wasn’t it his animus power that drove Albatross insane? Isn’t that why he killed all those dragons? Aren’t you afraid that — that —”
“That that could be me one day?” he said. “No, Clearsight, I’m not worried that that will happen to me. If there’s any animus you should be worried about, it’s my father.”
Could Arctic lose his mind the way Albatross had? Those rotten patches inside him — those came from using his magic, didn’t they? Darkstalker didn’t know the whole story, but he did know that Arctic had done something with his animus power to escape the Ice Kingdom safely with Foeslayer. How many times had he used it? How big were his spells?
How much of his soul did he have left to lose?
Darkstalker was not the dangerous dragon in this tribe. It was Arctic; he had no doubt.
But how was he going to convince Clearsight? He needed a way to make her believe in him — to stop being so afraid of what he might be one day. He needed her to see that he was different from all the other animus dragons … that he was nothing like his father.
Something chimed in his mind, like the bell that rang quietly to signal the end of library time at school.
He was different. He was smarter. And he could prove it.
He knew what he had to do.
The Kingdom of the Sea was in shock.
Queen Lagoon and her husband, Humpback, were dead, as was their daughter, Splash. Current was missing — one of the dozens who had escaped into the sea — but his brother, Scallop, and his father, Fathom’s uncle Eel, were not so lucky. One of the musicians had tried to fight Albatross when everyone fled; she was dead, too. Fathom would have to find out her name later.
Fathom’s parents were both dead. Manta had followed her father into the gardens, pleading for Fathom’s life, and he had killed her and Reef together. Not even Fathom’s magic could bring them back from death.
But as he’d stood with Indigo in the wreckage of the party, heartbroken, a dragon had crawled out from under one of the tipped-over couches.
It was Pearl, bleeding from a thousand cuts, but alive.
“I sliced myself up with the glass from the aquarium,” she told Fathom, her voice shaking, her injured wings hanging awkwardly. “I covered myself in blood and pretended to be dead. He walked right past me.”
She was the only dragon left to rule the kingdom, other than their mad aunt, Sapphire. Five years old and the new queen.
Of the two SkyWings, Princess Sunset had died, but Eagle, miraculously, had survived. He survived to berate them all about the dangers of animus dragons. He survived to threaten revenge and war and the extermination of the SeaWing tribe. And he survived to take a message back to the SkyWing queen that the disputed shore villages would be abandoned immediately.
Queen Pearl promised that SeaWings would never encroach into Sky territory again, in exchange for amnesty for Sunset’s death. She also promised them tributes of gems and seafood for the next five years, in exchange for keeping the massacre a secret. The last thing the SeaWings needed right now was for anyone to find out how vulnerable they were.
On her first day as queen, Pearl issued one edict. It outlawed animus magic anywhere in the Kingdom of the Sea.
Fathom stood beside her in the throne room as she signed the proclamation, and he thought perhaps he was the only one who noticed how wobbly her handwriting still was.
After the messenger left to announce the edict, Pearl sent away everyone but Fathom.
“How did you kill him?” she asked when they were alone.
“It was Indigo,” he said. “She got him with a spear. She saved me. Us.” He looked away. “Some of us.”
He’d have to get Indigo to match his story later. He knew she would do that for him, even if she didn’t understand why.
He didn’t want anyone to know he’d killed his grandfather. He didn’t want to be seen as a hero — especially not for that. He wasn’t a hero at all, not even close.
“I know the edict is about me,” he said. “You don’t have to worry. I’m not like him.”
“You think that now,” Pearl said sadly. “But maybe the SkyWings are right about what to do with animus dragons.”
Fathom felt a shiver through his bones. Had he survived his grandfather’s massacre only to have his own sister put him to death?
“I mean, how am I supposed to trust you, Fathom?” Pearl asked. “Whenever I look at you, I see everything he did. Won’t you always be tempted to use your magic? What would stop you? What could ever stop you?”
“I will,” he promised, bowing his head. “The soul that I still have, and wish to keep. Queen Pearl of the SeaWings, I pledge you this oath, on my life and sealed with my blood: I will never use my animus magic again, not for the rest of my days.”
He took a sword from the wall and drew an X in blood across his palm. It hurt so much, a bright sharp pain that was easier to bear than the hollow one inside him. He looked at the cuts all over Pearl and was tempted to do the same to himself.
“All right,” Pearl said. “I accept your oath. But there’s one other thing.”
“Anything,” said Fathom.
“You can never have dragonets,” she said. “If this power runs in your veins, you could pass it down. But if you have no dragonets, it may die with you, and all of Pyrrhia will be safer for it.”
Fathom was quiet for a moment. Was she picturing animus nieces challenging her for the throne? He wanted to tell her that if he could pass it down, he thought perhaps so could she.
But it wasn’t an option for her to avoid having dragonets; the kingdom needed heirs, especially now, with most of the royal family dead.
“I agree,” he said. He never wanted dragonets anyway. What kind of father could he ever be?
“Fathom,” Pearl warned. “That means you have to stay away from Indigo.”
“What?” he cried, his heart twisting painfully. “But why?”
“Because you’re in love with her,” Pearl said bluntly, “and you’ll do anything, break any rule for her. Maybe even your oath to me.”
“I … no, I …” Fathom trailed off. Pearl was worried about the wrong oath, but she was right about one thing: if Indigo were ever hurt like that again, he knew he would still use his magic to save her, no matter what he had promised.
“Besides, it’s not fair to her,” Pearl said, uncoiling from the throne. “She’s my friend, too, and I want her to have a happy life. Don’t you? Think about it. What could she ever have with you? No dragonets, no future, nothing but constant danger. Do you want that for her?”
Fathom shrank into his wings. Was it selfish of him to want to keep Indigo’s friendship? And how could he make a decision like this without talking to her? It was her life. She’d be furious if she found out he was choosing her future without telling her.
But maybe furious was good. Maybe furious would keep her away from him.
“Shouldn’t I ask her what she wants?” he tried. “Or at least explain —”
“I’ll do it,” Pearl said, cutting him off. “She’ll tell you anything you want to hear, but she’ll tell me the truth. Don’t worry, Fathom, I’ll take care of her. I’ll make her part of my honor guard, promote her up the ranks quickly. In a few years, I’ll find her a minor noble she can have a family with. She’ll have a safe, normal life.”
Far away from me, Fathom thought miserably. With someone else.
But Pearl was right: that was how it had to be.
He knew the truth about himself now. He was not special. He was someone who ran and hid while his whole family was massacred, when he was the only one who could have stopped it.
He should have stopped it sooner. He might have been able to save his parents if he’d been faster, braver, more sure of his power. More sure that his grandfather needed to die.
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