Turtle wrinkled his snout at her. “I have a slightly less insane idea,” he said. “If you can swim.”
“I can do anything,” Peril said, tossing her head. “There was a lake by this waterfall near the Sky Palace that I swam in once. I didn’t like it, though.” It was weird, being surrounded by water. In a way, it was like flying, because she couldn’t exactly burn anything while she was underwater. But it was also unsettling. Dragons shouldn’t be underwater. Fire shouldn’t be underwater.
“If we swim into the city, no one will notice you,” Turtle said. “We’ll be able to scout it out without attracting a lot of attention.”
“I don’t care about attention,” Peril said. “If a dragon wants to stare at me and hate me and think horrible thoughts about all the things they can’t do to me, then they can go right ahead.”
She twisted around to glance back at Turtle. A movement far below them caught her eye, and she angled one wing to look down.
There was a black dragon standing on the boulder where Peril had slept the night before.
He lowered his snout for a moment — studying the moss she’d burned? — and then lifted his head to scan the sky.
Although he was miles away now, Peril felt his eyes snag on her scales like wickedly sharp fishhooks.
He didn’t move. He didn’t come flying after them.
He just stared, eerie and still, watching her beat more and more distance between them, getting smaller and smaller.
Whoever he was, Peril had a feeling he wasn’t done with her yet.
Turtle did a flip in the sky to see what she was looking at. He nearly lost the wind under him as he spotted the dragon.
“I was right!” he cried. “See? He’s following us!”
“He’s not,” Peril pointed out. “Mostly he’s just staring at us. It’s creepy, but to be fair, if he tried to do that from any closer up, I’d have to stick something sharp and burning into his eyeballs.”
“All right,” Turtle said. “Thank you for that visual. Do you know any NightWings?”
“Starflight,” Peril answered. “And that other fluff-brained one at the school, but it’s too big to be either of them.”
Turtle flicked his tail nervously and beat his wings faster, keeping up with her easily for the first time since they’d left Jade Mountain. “I did hear a rumor … ” he started.
“A rumor?” Peril asked. “Or dragons having a conversation you weren’t supposed to overhear?”
“Nobody said I couldn’t stand in the tunnel outside and listen!” Turtle said defensively. “Anyway, Sunny was telling Tsunami that some NightWing prisoners had escaped from Thorn’s stronghold. Maybe it’s one of them.”
“Why would a NightWing prisoner be interested in us?” Peril asked.
“True. Maybe it’s someone working with Scarlet,” Turtle said. “Maybe it’s her new ally.”
Peril swiveled violently around in the sky. How did I not think of that? What if it’s a NightWing animus? Coming after me on Scarlet’s orders? Maybe I’m higher on her vengeance list than I thought …
The black dragon was gone.
“Wonderful,” she said. “You couldn’t have mentioned that a bit sooner? Now all I can do is WORRY about it. I HATE worrying about things.”
“It’s almost time for us to swim,” Turtle said cheerfully. “You can worry about that instead.” He canted his wings and swooped down toward the river.
Uneasily, Peril followed him. Don’t think about it. There’s nothing I can do about this NightWing right now anyway. I have to wait until he shows his face a bit closer to me, and then I can burn it off, and then everything will be fine.
She flexed her talons, feeling the warm shift of her firescales, and then splashed down right behind Turtle.
The river was cold and extremely wet and full of flappy slippery things. Peril did not like it ONE BIT. The flappy slippery things (she assumed most of them were fish) kept touching her and then not bursting into flames and that was so weird. Even the feeling of water all around her scales, pressing in on her, was extremely unsettling.
She was also not particularly fond of how much faster than her Turtle could suddenly go. He powered forward in huge wingbeats, steering gracefully with the current, while she flopped around snorting water up her snout and generally feeling like a hippo.
A hippo floated past, eyeing her with serene scorn.
Fine. Not like a hippo. Like an ostrich suddenly plunked in the middle of an ocean, how about that.
Far ahead, Turtle swerved majestically around a bend in the river and clambered onto a submerged boulder to wait for her. Peril floundered toward him, finally finding pebbles below her talons and a moment to gasp for breath.
“Couldn’t we fly a little closer?” she spat.
“Not if we want you to arrive incognito.” Turtle pointed to the increasing number of dragons flying overhead. The wings flashing in the sky were mostly red, orange, or sandy yellow, although Peril spotted shades of brown and blue up there as well. “Don’t worry, soon we’ll be swimming into Possibility. Hopefully no one will notice your scales underwater, and hopefully we’ll be able to spot Moon and Qibli from the river.”
He dove back into the river and Peril had no choice but to follow him. The outskirts of Possibility swept up on either side of the riverbank. These were the smaller dwellings of dragons who’d moved to the city recently. Peril swam past a family of SeaWings who splashed in the shallows, blue scales flickering like broken shards of sky. The two dragonets yelped and wrestled while their father watched, smiling in a way that no one had ever, ever smiled at Peril.
A little farther downstream, on the other side of the river, three MudWings near Peril’s age were planting a garden. The biggest one pointed to a crooked furrow and thwapped one of her siblings bossily. Her brother flung a carrot at her, and the third sibling giggled until she nearly fell over. It wasn’t until the MudWings were behind them that Peril realized the littlest sister had been missing an arm.
She took a closer look at the next set of dragons they passed and spotted another war wound, a scar that ran nearly the length of the SkyWing’s tail. But this dragon, too, was smiling, leaning over to show a smaller dragon how to fix a broken doorframe. He must have felt her staring at him, because he turned his head toward the river, but Peril submerged her head and swam faster, and when she surfaced again there was an island between them.
More islands began to dot the river as it widened out and the current slowed, sometimes trailing into wandering streams or muddling about in clumps of tall reeds. Peril and Turtle swam under a bridge packed end-to-end with merchant stalls and dragons calling out to customers. (“The finest rugs in Possibility!” “The actual finest rugs in Possibility!” “Roasted crocodile on sale!” “Don’t eat that! His crocodile was rotting in the streets yesterday! We have seagulls caught in the air this morning!”)
The next bridge glowed with bright colors and shook with thumping talons as dragons danced along its length. Peril could feel the music vibrating in the water around her. Beaten silver circles hung from the railings and under the bridge like giant coins.
“A full-moon festival,” Turtle said, popping his head out of the water right next to her. “It used to be a SandWing tradition, but they didn’t have much time for them during the war. I heard they were coming back.”
Peril floated under the bridge, watching the whirling dragons overhead as they clapped their wings and twined their tails together. She would never dance in a crowd like that, wearing bangles of silver moons and singing until her voice cracked. She would never paint huge canvases side by side with other SkyWings and SandWings, dipping their tails into the same buckets of moonlit white and midnight blue paint and laughing as it spattered across their claws and snouts.
She’d been in this town only four months ago, searching for Scarlet, but something was different now. It felt lighter and more open than before. As if the war was starting to melt away … as if their world was s
tarting to feel safer under Thorn and Ruby than it ever had been with Burn and Scarlet.
But it’s not safe. Not as long as Queen Scarlet is still out there, smoldering with hate.
“Moon should be easy to spot here,” Turtle said, his snout half buried in the water so his voice rose through bubbles. “Not a lot of NightWings around.”
No NightWings at all that Peril could see. She wondered if they knew about this place, and whether any of them would eventually choose to come here. It wouldn’t suit their tribal air of mystery, mingling with so many other dragons like this … but on the other talon, it might give them more self-respect than living under a RainWing queen’s claws.
She’d never been to the rainforest herself. Clay had strongly discouraged the idea, saying something about how many trees there were and forest fires and blah blah blah. But that was fine; Peril was sure she wouldn’t like feeling so hemmed in anyway. It sounded claustrophobic. Plus full of dragons who could sneak up on you with, like, invisibility scales — that sounded absolutely creepy. Not to mention that Queen Glory was far from Peril’s biggest fan.
The drums and zithers of the full-moon festival were starting to fade behind them, and Peril could see glimmers of the open bay ahead in the distance. This part of Possibility seemed to have older, bigger, sturdier buildings set around open cobblestoned plazas. The palm trees looked more deliberately spaced, casting strategic patches of shade. Bright yellow trumpet-shaped flowers swarmed along dark green vines that seemed to be tangled everywhere.
“Wait,” Turtle said, turning so suddenly that he splashed water up Peril’s nose. She backpedaled against the current, scowling at him.
“What?” she said. “Can we give up now? We could just fly over the town — it’ll be easier to spot a black dragon from up there anyhow. It’s not like anyone is going to come up and try to fight me.”
“I thought I saw Qibli,” Turtle said. He spread his wings to float in a circle and craned his neck, peering at the dragons along the waterfront. “Those SandWings over there, arguing with the red SkyWing — doesn’t one of them look like Qibli?”
Peril realized that she didn’t have the faintest idea what Qibli looked like. Had she ever met him before? All SandWings looked pretty much the same to her, apart from Sunny, of course, who had oddly colored scales and a perpetually cheerful expression that was just asking to be clawed off. “Uh — sure?”
“Let’s go see.” Turtle charged out of the river before Peril could argue. His emerald green tail left a slick wet path on the cobblestones behind him.
She scanned the nearby dragons, but they were all focused on their own business; no one was watching the river. And now she could see the dragons Turtle was aiming for. The red SkyWing stood with his wings folded back and his head cocked arrogantly at the two burly SandWings in front of him, one of whom was lashing her menacing tail. Both SandWings were wearing medallions around their necks stamped with the image of a large bird. Arranged on the stones around their talons were several odd-looking brownish-greenish-pink spheres studded with little spikes.
Peril slithered out of the water and hurried after Turtle, keeping her head low and her wings tucked in close.
“You said thirty!” she heard the bigger SandWing yell. “That was the agreement!”
“You are welcome to come to the mountains and try harvesting these yourself,” spat the SkyWing. “It is much more difficult than your paltry pouch of gold would cover.”
“Let’s just take them,” the male SandWing growled.
“He won’t be pleased and you know it,” his partner snapped.
Turtle paused several feet away from them and turned back to Peril, shaking his head. Not Qibli. She stopped, too, in the most empty patch of stone she could find. From here, the plaza became cluttered with wares spread on carpets, flowers growing out of window boxes, and dragons blithely trampling around everywhere without worrying at all about whose scales they might blunder into. Danger tingled just beyond Peril’s reach; she could sense all the terrible things that might happen if she stepped any farther into the town.
She needed to get back to the river, where she wouldn’t be such a threat.
She glanced around and began to cautiously turn, keeping her tail curled safely in.
And then one of the SandWings muttered something furious and kicked one of the spheres.
Oh, it’s a cactus, Peril realized, spotting the roots as it bounced across the stones toward her. I’ve seen those in the mountains, I think.
She glanced up, and the last thing Peril saw was Turtle’s green eyes widening as the sphere rolled up to her talons — brushed against her scales — and exploded in an enormous fireball.
Peril came to because her body decided not to drown. She surged up out of the water where the explosion had thrown her, coughing and sputtering, into a cloud of thick black smoke that was not particularly fun to breathe either.
Her eyes were stinging and everything was blurry and muffled, but she could see there were dragons yelling and screaming all along the bank and more flapping in from the rooftops. At least three dragons were rolling in the river with scorch marks on their scales. Small fires flickered in the smoke all across the courtyard.
She wasn’t burned — her scales couldn’t burn — but there were incredibly sharp blossoms of pain spiking all up and down her body. WHAT WAS THIS. WHY DID IT HURT SO MUCH. WHO COULD SHE SET ON FIRE TO MAKE IT STOP.
She roared her agony as loud as she could, but it made barely a scratch in the jangling chaos all around.
A dragon suddenly came galloping into the river beside her and she jumped back, hissing at him, before she recognized Turtle.
“You,” he said, shaking his head, “are without question the least stealthy dragon in all of Pyrrhia.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” she snarled, writhing in pain. Nothing had ever managed to hurt her like this. There were tiny teeth eating under her scales! “EVERYTHING HURTS AND I HATE THE WORLD.”
“Let’s find a safer place to be before someone sees you and connects the dots,” Turtle said. She realized that trickles of blood were running down his shoulders and along his tail. He waded into the water until it covered everything but his head and began swimming upstream, back toward the full-moon festival bridge.
It was agony to move, but she did, flailing after him and hoping the smoke would hide her shining copper scales.
Turtle finally coasted to a stop in clearer air, on the muddy bank of one of the small islands, not far from where the festival music was still going on. He pulled himself half onto the shore, wincing, and Peril crawled up into the mud as far away from him as she could. The reeds and shrubs below her curled into a dark scorched mess, but she was in too much pain to worry about it. She wondered if this was what being on fire felt like to other dragons.
“Why,” she growled. “What is HAPPENING.”
“It was a dragonflame cactus,” Turtle said. He twisted and started to pry at something stuck under his left wing in a small pool of blood. “Like the one that exploded in the history cave at school. I have no idea why anyone would want to buy one now that the war is over.”
They didn’t want to buy just one, Peril remembered. They wanted to buy thirty. Whatever their reason was, she thought perhaps burning out their eyeballs would make her feel better.
Turtle extracted the object from his scales and held it out for her to see. “It’s like a little ball of thorns,” he said. “The dragonflame cactus seedpod. You have about a hundred of them stuck all over you, since it exploded right at your feet. But I don’t know what to do — I can’t pull them out of your scales without getting burned — but we can’t leave them — oh … ” He trailed off, staring at her.
“What?” Peril demanded. She was starting to feel a little better, maybe, now that she was out of the water.
“They’re burning up,” Turtle explained. “Your scales are burning the seedpods away.”
Peril held out one front leg and saw a
ball of thorns embedded between her claws, right before it caught fire and shriveled into black ash.
“That’s right,” she said. “DIE, you little monster plants. May your roots always be thirsty and your seeds all meet a fiery death until you’re extinct forever! I HATE you!”
“Yowch,” Turtle said. “You don’t ever have mild feelings, do you?”
Peril wasn’t sure what a “mild” feeling would feel like. She turned to blink downriver at the pillar of black smoke rising from the distant courtyard.
“Was, um … did you see if the explosion … uh … ” Peril trailed off.
“I don’t think anyone was killed,” Turtle said. “It looked like your body blocked the worst of the fire and caught most of the seedpods. I saw other dragons injured, but nobody like —”
“Nobody like Carnelian,” Peril finished. She tried to hide the relief in her voice. Although Clay would forgive her for an accident, surely? Even if someone had died? It wouldn’t really be her fault, except in the sense that everything was her fault because she was a walking menace to the entire universe.
“Anyway,” Peril said indignantly, “what kind of idiot spreads a bunch of flammable cacti all over the street? Anyone could have set one of those off by accident!”
“Not a SeaWing,” Turtle said thoughtfully. “Or an IceWing. Oh, hey, now we know one more thing that can’t kill you.”
“They shouldn’t be allowed to sell things like that to just anyone,” Peril went on, ignoring him. She twitched her tail around to check for any more thorns, but they all seemed to be gone. “Would they sell a sword to any dragon who came along?”
“Um,” Turtle said. “Yes?” His smile fell off his face as he winced again. Another ball of thorns was dripping blood down his tail, but he couldn’t twist far enough to reach it.
“I could set it on fire,” Peril offered, spreading her claws. “But it might burn you a little bit. I don’t know if that would be worse.”
Turtle thought for a moment, then shuffled a step toward her. “Yes. Do it. If I jump straight into the river after, I’ll be fine.”