The Dragonet Prophecy (13 page)

Behind Scarlet, Tsunami raised the scavenger’s sharp claw. Her eyes met Clay’s. He felt the same chilling fear she must be feeling. If they attacked the SkyWing queen, they’d instantly have a new, powerful enemy who hated them.

But they couldn’t tell her the truth about themselves. She’d take them captive or sell them to her ally Burn or kill them just to mess with the prophecy. And they couldn’t go with her either — they had to get back to their friends.

He nodded slightly.
Do it. We have no choice.

Tsunami stabbed the claw through Queen Scarlet’s tail at the vulnerable spot, driving it straight into the ground beneath.

The queen roared with fury and pain. She whipped her head around and blasted fire in all directions.

“Fly!” Tsunami yelled. She rolled under the flames and shoved Clay’s tail. He spread his wings and bolted into the sky with Queen Scarlet’s fire scorching his claws. Tsunami flapped beside him, her wingbeats wobbly but determined.

“It won’t take her long to get free,” Tsunami called. “Quick, we have to lose her in the peaks.” She soared up the cliff, and Clay followed.

They flew past the top of the waterfall, where the river flowed out of a hole in the cliff. They flew up and up until they reached the top and whooshed out onto a rocky plateau studded with dark green trees and bushes. Even up here, the mountains loomed over them, impossibly high and unbearably big. The peaks zigzagged to the north and south like crooked dragon teeth, a jagged row that went on and on and on.

The bigness of everything kept overwhelming Clay. How would they ever find their friends again in all of this? And even if they did, what could five dragonets do to save a world this big?

Tsunami led the way, staying low and swooping around trees, diving into chasms where they found them. Her wingbeats were getting stronger as she flew. Sunlight spread across the mountains, dazzling Clay’s eyes. He wasn’t used to so much brightness — and this was only dawn. The ferocity of the midday sun was still ahead.

“Here!” Tsunami called, jerking her head toward a dent in the side of the mountain. They spiraled down to land on the ledge outside a small cave. From here they could look over the rocky plateau, with valleys and mountain peaks spread out around them. Clay peered down nervously. The roar of the waterfall was a faint rumble in the distance. There was no sign of Queen Scarlet.

“I can’t believe you did that,” he said to Tsunami.

“I had to, didn’t I?” she asked, but without her usual conviction. She scratched at her gills, looking worried, then slipped into the shadows of the cave to check that it was empty.

Clay wanted to reassure her, but he was worried, too. He closed his eyes and turned his face toward the rising sun. The heat soaked down through his scales until even his bones felt warm at last.

“You should see yourself,” Tsunami said from the cave. “You’re practically glowing. I didn’t know MudWings had so many colors in them.”

Clay opened his eyes and glanced down. He’d always thought of himself as just brown — plain brown scales, ordinary brown claws, the color of flat mud from horns to tail. But now, in the full sunlight for the first time, he could see gold and amber glints between and beneath his scales. Even the browns seemed richer and deeper, like the mahogany trunk where Webs kept the most delicate scrolls.

“Huh,” he said.

“You’re so pretty,” Tsunami joked, emerging into the light. Clay had to bite back a gasp. While the sun brought out his colors, it made her look bejeweled, like a dragon made of sapphires and emeralds or summer leaves and oceans.

He thought of Glory and how beautiful she already was in the gloomy caves. None of them would be able to look at her in full sunlight, or else they’d be too dazzled to ever speak to her again.

Glory
. Clay squinted out at the mountainside. There were crags and holes and rocky outcroppings that might lead to tunnels everywhere. He had no idea what the outside of their home looked like. They could see a lot of the mountain from here, but no smoke signal yet.

The sun had nearly cleared the horizon now, climbing slowly up the sky and chasing away the three moons. Clay saw several red shapes flitting around the distant mountain peaks. At first he thought they were birds, until he spotted fire flickering around them like lightning, and realized they were dragons.

This was definitely SkyWing territory. Starflight was right about where their secret cave was. But Clay had no idea how they’d escape the mountains now that the SkyWing queen was probably hunting them in a towering rage.

Tsunami seized his shoulder. “Over there!” she cried, pointing.

A thin column of smoke was starting to rise from a hole partway down the slope. Clay flung himself into the air and swooped over the hole. It was enclosed and partly hidden by a thicket of branches, so he couldn’t land next to it. But it was open to the sky and looked like the shape of the sky hole to him.

It had to be his friends.

Tsunami swept up beside him. They both hovered around the smoke, trying to peer down into the hole.

“Starflight and Sunny must be right there,” Clay said. “Right below us!” The smoke smelled of old paper. He felt a twinge of pity for Starflight, burning some of his beloved scrolls.

“So we’re close, but we have to find the entrance,” Tsunami said. “The tunnel must come out somewhere nearby.” She spiraled down to the rocky ground outside the bushes. She started pacing as if she were trying to count off the distance from the study room to the entrance tunnel.

Clay stayed up in the air, circling. He had the same funny feeling he’d had looking at Tsunami’s crooked wing — that if he relaxed and just looked, he could see how things should fit together. He’d walked the caves under the mountain a million times. He knew them better than his own claws.

He could still hear the faint roar of the waterfall, so he could guess which way the underground river flowed. He pictured the tunnel from the study cave to the central hall and mapped it out on the craggy rocks below.

“Here,” he called to Tsunami, swooping down to land. “The boulder blocking the exit should be right below here. So the tunnel to the outside would go that way —” He turned to look.

“The ravine,” Tsunami said. A crevasse cut through the rocks a short distance away. When they peered down into it, they could see a stream running over pebbly gravel and sandy mud. “The entrance must be down there somewhere.”

Clay hopped down to the bottom of the ravine, keeping his wings spread to slow his fall. Mud squelched between his talons as he landed. He felt a wave of anger wash over him. Here was mud and sunlight and warm fresh air, this close to their cave. Why hadn’t the guardians ever brought the dragonets outside? Even small trips to this ravine would have made life so different.

He knew they’d say it was for safety. They’d say it was to protect the dragonets, in case the distant SkyWings spotted them.

But Clay guessed it was really because the guardians didn’t trust him and his friends. They didn’t trust them not to fly away. They didn’t trust them to act smart and avoid drawing attention to themselves.

He dug sharp gashes in the mud with his claws. The dragonets never even had a
chance
to be trustworthy. Maybe Clay didn’t deserve it, after attacking the others at hatching. Maybe the guardians thought that something inside him might snap at any moment. But there was no reason to have kept Sunny and Glory and Starflight and Tsunami in the dark all these years.

Tsunami thumped down beside him and nodded at a mossy pile of boulders up ahead.

“Let’s check there first.” They squished and splashed down the stream.

Clay spotted something in the mud in front of them. He flared his wings up to stop Tsunami from going any farther.

“Look!” he said. “Dragon tracks!”

Fresh dragon prints were stamped into the riverbank, with the deep line of a tail dragged between them. They disappeared suddenly as if the dragon had lifted off into the sky.

Clay gingerly fit one of his own feet into a print. It was dwarfed by the size of the other dragon’s talons.

“If it came from our cave,” Tsunami said, “and I’m sure it did — then it must be Kestrel.”

“How do you know?” Clay asked.

Tsunami put her own foot down next to one of the prints. “No webs between the claws,” she said, “so it’s not a SeaWing. They’re too recent to be Morrowseer’s from yesterday. And you can see all four feet here, so it’s not Dune.”

“Oh,” Clay said, feeling foolish. “Of course.”

“There are prints leaving, but not coming back,” Tsunami said, her voice rising with excitement. “Maybe she went out looking for us this morning. If she’s still away, this is our best chance to get the others out.” She started running down the riverbank, following the line of prints to where it began. “Come on, Clay, hurry!”

Clay raced after her. The tracks led right to the tumble of boulders. When they climbed up onto the large rocks, they could see down into a dark tunnel in the side of the ravine. It was almost entirely hidden from view unless you looked from the right angle.

“This is it,” Tsunami whispered.

“Why didn’t she hide her tracks better?” Clay worried. “What if it’s a trap?”

“It’s not,” Tsunami said confidently. “Kestrel doesn’t know we’re coming back for the others. She doesn’t think like that. If she were one of us, she’d escape and leave everyone else behind without a second thought.”

That sounded true to Clay. Kestrel never believed that dragons could keep their word or care about other dragons.

“She was in a hurry to find us, that’s all,” Tsunami pointed out. Clay glanced up at the sky anxiously. If Kestrel hadn’t bothered to be cautious, she must be
really
angry with them.

Tsunami lowered herself into the tunnel, and Clay slid down beside her. He was warm enough now to make fire, so he breathed a small burst of flame to give them a glimpse of the tunnel ahead. They edged forward as Tsunami’s scales began to glow.

The tunnel took a sharp right, then a left, then went down at a steep angle for a few steps. But soon it straightened out, took them around another corner, and ended — at an enormous gray boulder.

Clay’s heart thumped hard in his chest. They’d really found it.

He was looking at his prison from the outside.

Tsunami reared up on her back legs and began running her talons along the walls. “Look for something that’ll move the boulder,” she said.

Clay breathed another burst of fire at the wall on his side. It looked like ordinary flat stone with a few fissures running from the ceiling to the floor. He scraped his claws through the cracks. Nothing happened except his claws tingled painfully.

He tried sniffing around the boulder, then shoved it, but it wouldn’t move any more than it had on the other side.

“I hope Starflight’s right,” he said, pushing away the sinking feeling in his stomach. “I hope we really can open it from this side.”

“We can,” Tsunami said fiercely. “It’ll be a lever or something . . .” She backed away a few steps, peering up at the top of the boulder.

“Or magic,” Clay said. “What if it’s a magic word? Or some kind of talisman we don’t have?”

Tsunami stared at the boulder for a moment, frowning, then shook her head. “They’d need an animus dragon to enchant it, and who even knows if those ever existed in the first place.”

The only thing Clay remembered about the lesson on magic and animus dragons was that they had power over objects. He remembered that because Starflight spent the rest of the day sticking his nose in the air and insisting that NightWings were far more magically powerful than any mythical animus dragons.

“If they’re so great, why do the NightWings live somewhere mysterious where no one can find them?” Clay had asked.

“Easy,” Starflight had said loftily. “It’s because we have all these special powers, and we don’t want to make regular dragons feel inferior.”
Even though they are
, his expression implied.

Clay snorted. “Special powers like what?” he’d asked.

“You know,” Starflight had answered, irritated. “Telepathy? Precognition? Invisibility? Hello?”

“You don’t have invisibility,” Clay had argued. “I mean, you’re a black dragon. You’re just hard to see in the shadows. That’s not a power. I’d be invisible, too, if I were lying in a mud puddle.”

“Yeah, well,” Starflight had said, “
we
can appear out of nowhere in the dark of night! Swooping down as if the sky has just fallen on you!” He’d spread his wings majestically.

“Still not a power,” Clay had said. “That’s just you guys being creepy.”

“It is
not
creepy!” Starflight had cried, his voice rising. “It is
magnificent
and
imposing
!” He’d stopped and taken a deep breath. “Besides, we’re the only ones with visions of the future, so there.”

“Well, I say until the NightWings come down off the clouds, all we have is rumors and a mumbo-jumbo prophecy that could mean anything.” Then Clay had draped his nose off the rim of the ledge and peered across at Starflight. “I mean, it’s not like
you’ve
got any special mind powers, other than being way too smart.”