The Brightest Night

  “You don’t even know what it is?” Sunny asked. “What if it’s an empty box?”

  “Then I’ll get yelled at,” Smolder said, “but he’ll get hunted down and killed, so I doubt he’d risk it. Dragons have tried to trick Burn before — sewing odd animal parts together, dyeing normal insects strange colors — and it has always proven to be a very bad idea. Besides, he haggled so hard over the price, he nearly refused to give it to me. It must be something pretty unusual. Also, it keeps making this strange high-pitched hissing noise.”

  He gave her a sharp look as he snapped the last chain on. “Don’t get any ideas from Scarlet’s bad behavior. My sister has reasons to keep the SkyWing queen alive. She has a lot more reasons to make you dead … so don’t add to them.”

  Sunny nodded, not trusting herself to speak. This was the nightmare — the situation she and her friends had always feared. She was in Burn’s clutches now, and she couldn’t think of any possible way she might escape.

  “I’ll be back before you know it,” Smolder said. He dipped his wing toward the scavenger. “Up, Flower.”

  The little creature looked up at Sunny with her thoughtful brown eyes, then patted Sunny’s side again and sat down.

  Smolder tipped his head sideways and peered at her. “Flower? Come along.” He rang his bell and held out his claws.

  Flower shook her head firmly and put one paw on one of Sunny’s front talons.

  “She wants to stay with you,” Smolder said. “That’s funny. Flower is usually extremely cautious around any dragon who’s not me.” He narrowed his eyes at Sunny. “If I leave her with you, will you be careful with her? No knocking her off the ramp, no stepping on her, and definitely no eating her.”

  “I wouldn’t eat her!” Sunny protested. “I barely even like meat, except sometimes a lizard here or there. And I think she’s being really sweet.” There was something comforting about the idea of having someone with her in this dark tower, apart from Queen Scarlet — even if it was a scavenger.

  “Well,” Smolder said, fidgeting. “If you promise to be careful. Flower, are you sure?”

  Flower kept her paw on Sunny and stared back at him without moving.

  “All right.” He sighed. “See you soon.”

  He lifted off the edge and flew in a gentle spiral down to the bottom of the tower. Sunny leaned out and saw the shaft of sunlight that spilled into the room as he opened the door — and then saw it disappear again as the door slammed behind him. The weight around her ankles felt suddenly even heavier.

  She rested her head on her front talons with a sigh, curling her tail in close. Flower immediately tucked herself into the curve of Sunny’s side, reached into her bag, and pulled out a scrap of scroll paper and a lumpy stick of charcoal. In the dim light, she started to sketch, and Sunny, peering over her shoulder, saw a dragon’s face appearing in rapid strokes. Her face, in fact.

  “That’s amazing,” Sunny said. How could an animal create art like that?

  Flower glanced up and did something with her mouth that looked exactly like a dragon smile. Sunny found herself smiling back, despite her fear and her worry. At least she wasn’t alone.

  “Little SandWing,” Queen Scarlet’s voice hissed softly from below her. “You think Burn is what you have to worry about right now. She’s not. I am. I’ll be free soon … free … and I’ll be coming for all my enemies…. Think about that while you try to fall asleep … what I’m going to do to your friends when I get my claws on them … how messy and thrilling it’s going to be….”

  Sunny closed her eyes and covered her ears, but the whispers continued inside her head.

  What if Burn comes tomorrow? What if she kills me right away?

  What if I never get to find out the truth about my mother and my egg? Never get to spend more time with her?

  What if the prophecy is fake? What if I really have no destiny — other than to end up here? What if nobody is going to end the war or save the world?

  And worst of all …

  What if I never see my friends again?

  Somehow, eventually, Sunny slept, which she knew because she woke up to find Flower tugging gently on her tail and Smolder unlocking her chains.

  She sat up slowly and stretched her wings, which still ached from all the flying she’d done in the last several days.

  “What’s happening?” she asked Smolder.

  “Oh, I thought we’d go for a walk,” he said wryly.

  Sunny squinted at him. “Are you joking? Or is that just your voice? Can other dragons tell when you’re joking? Because I can’t figure it out.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “I have heard that before,” he admitted. “There was someone who used to tease me about it. She told me she was going to assume that everything I said was a joke, since that would simplify things. You can do that, too, if you like.”

  “All right,” Sunny said. Smolder wasn’t exactly the sinister prison guard she would have expected from Burn’s brother. She much preferred this oddness instead, even when it was unsettling.

  The last chain clattered to the floor and Smolder held out one talon so Flower could climb up onto his back again.

  “Make sure to steer clear of Scarlet,” he reminded Sunny, who didn’t need reminding. “She’s in a foul mood today.”

  “I HEARD THAT,” Scarlet roared.

  Smolder rolled his eyes at Sunny and dove off the edge. She followed, catching a glimpse of the smoking orange queen as they whisked past. Scarlet sent a blast of flames into the air right behind them; Sunny felt the heat crackle along the scales of her tail and saw Flower press herself closer to Smolder’s back.

  Outside, it was early morning — barely sunrise, Sunny realized. Smolder didn’t leave me locked up very long; he didn’t even wait until midday to come get me. Maybe he’s secretly kinder than he wants me to think. The light slanted low across the courtyard and small brown birds hopped along the top of the walls, gossiping cheerily. The air smelled like roasting lizards and the sand was still cool under her claws as she followed Smolder to an archway on the left.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I have been investigating a mystery for the last twenty years or so,” said Smolder. “Occasionally I ask other dragons what they think. Invariably, they disappoint me. But you seem unusual — more unusual than most — so I figured I’d try again. Ever hopeful, that’s me.”

  “Twenty years?” Sunny said. “I hope it’s not a very urgent mystery.”

  Smolder chuckled, then said, “Well, it rather is. But it’s been resolutely impossible to solve nonetheless.” He led the way through a room of pillars, all of them carved with swirls that looked like dragon tails, and into a long hallway lined with sparkling rust-colored tiles in a spiraling pattern. Sunny brushed one of the tiles with her wing, thinking that it was the first beautiful thing she’d seen in this palace.

  The hallway slanted down and down and down until Sunny was sure they were underground, and finally it ended in a room with four locked doors.

  Smolder walked to each door and opened them with large brass keys from around his neck, revealing four rooms of roughly equal size, with thick stone walls and plain gray stone floors. All of them were completely empty.

  “The rumors about the SandWing treasure were never entirely accurate,” he said as he did this, twisting the keys in his claws. “We were very wealthy, yes, but we weren’t quite stupid enough to keep it all in one place. Almost that stupid, but not quite. We kept only our most prized possessions in our treasure rooms — along with a backup stash of rubies, diamonds, and gold in case we ever needed it. So it wasn’t our entire wealth or a palace full of treasure that went missing. Only the contents of these four rooms … but they contained quite a lot.”

  He held up a talon for Flower to climb onto, then set her carefully on the floor in front of the treasure rooms. She looked even smaller next to the massive rooms. Sunny realized that Flower was probably small enough to squeeze
under the doors.

  The scavenger put her tiny paws on her hips, tossed her head fur back, and looked for all the world like she was bored of this dragon game.

  “So here’s what I’d like to know,” Smolder said. “How did three scavengers about this size — two, actually, once they lost this one — manage to carry four rooms’ worth of treasure off into the desert?”

  Sunny studied the little scavenger in front of her. It was actually a very good question. Flower was only about as tall as a full-grown dragon’s head. She had no wings and miniature, practically useless paws.

  Well, maybe not that useless, she thought, remembering the sketch of her face from the night before.

  “Could they have built something to carry it?” she said, crouching to examine Flower’s paws. The scavenger squeaked at her. “I saw the ruins of one of their villages on my way here. Their dens look like real houses, and there was an iron bell in the wreckage, too. So they’re good at making things … maybe they made some kind of wagon to carry it in?”

  “A wagon would have left tracks across the sand,” Smolder pointed out. “The only tracks we found were hoofprints — three horses, galloping flat out. You tell me how they could do that with more than two bags of gold on their backs, let alone all of this.”

  “Oh, you found prints?” Sunny said, stepping into the first room and peering around. “Didn’t you follow them?” She moved to the second room, which was the same as the first, except perhaps with a little more sand on the floor.

  “Follow them!” said Smolder. “If only we’d thought of that.”

  “Aha,” Sunny said. “That was definitely sarcasm.”

  He gave her a crooked smile. “Well, look. There was a lot of confusion when we first found the queen’s body. We all heard her roaring in the middle of the night — it must have woken every dragon for miles. That’s what brought us outside the palace, thinking something terrible had happened. All we found at first was Mother, lying there, dead. Had one of her daughters killed her? Why not in a proper duel? Who else would dare kill the SandWing queen? Who else could — and why wouldn’t they admit to it? The first clue we found was this little creature, trying to hide by burying herself in a dune. She was injured and, of course, had no treasure on her, apart from a cute little claw-sword thing.”

  Smolder reached into the bag around his neck and, somewhat startlingly, produced a banana. He handed it to Flower, who sat down and began peeling it with expert little twitches of her slender paws.

  “That’s when we realized scavengers were involved, so we knew they must have come here to steal treasure. Burn was so furious. We finally found the horse tracks,” Smolder went on. “But they had at least two hours’ head start by then. We caught up shortly before they reached their forest home — and then Burn decided we should let them reach their forest home.” His eyes were dark, watching Flower. “Once they led us right to it … we burned it to the ground.”

  “Yikes,” Sunny said. That’s a lot of scavengers to wipe out just because three of them did something stupid.

  “Burn said we had to stamp out the vermin before they began to think they could do something like that again,” Smolder pointed out, as if he guessed what she was thinking.

  “So after you burned the village …”

  “We searched for the treasure in the ashes. No sign of it anywhere — not a single jewel or gold nugget. We tried hunting down the few scavengers who’d escaped the fire, but some of them must have slipped through our claws — and one of those must have the treasure, even now, twenty years later.”

  Sunny started pacing from room to room. Something wasn’t right about this story. A lot of things weren’t quite right about this story. That much treasure — how could it disappear into thin air? How could scavengers make it disappear into thin air?

  She stopped and looked down at Flower again. The brown eyes looked back at her curiously.

  “Are you sure the scavengers killed Queen Oasis?” Sunny asked. “It wasn’t maybe just really bad luck that they were there at the same time as some other killer?”

  Smolder nodded. “I thought of that. But it was a scavenger-sized spear in Mother’s eye. And — this part is a little weird — they cut off her tail barb and took it with them. We never found that either, but there was a trail of venom drops and dragon blood beside the horse tracks.”

  Sunny wrinkled her snout. “Why would they do that?”

  “Why do scavengers do any of the inexplicable things they do?” Smolder tossed another banana to Flower. Sunny wondered if the scavenger had any idea they were talking about her.

  “Hmm,” she said, studying the rooms. Now that she was here, looking at the space and at a scavenger at the same time, the original story sounded more and more ludicrous. It was crazy enough that scavengers had managed to kill a dragon queen. But then they also stole all her treasure? Without getting caught and eaten?

  Her wings twitched with a sudden idea. Maybe the question wasn’t How did they transport all that treasure. Maybe the real question was What else could have happened to it. “Wait,” she said. “When did you check these rooms? When did you see how much was missing?”

  “Oh.” Smolder breathed a plume of smoke and squinted at her. “When we returned from burning the den. I remember flying back and thinking that the scavengers couldn’t have gotten much if we couldn’t find any trace of it. And then Burn led the way down here to do an inventory … and we found everything gone. I never figured out how Flower unlocked the doors either.”

  Sunny lashed her tail so hard it smacked into one of the doors, sending a shiver of pain through her scales.

  “That’s it, then,” she said excitedly. “Someone else took it while you were out hunting the scavengers. Who didn’t go with you to chase the scavengers and burn the den?”

  “Lots of dragons,” Smolder said. He frowned thoughtfully at the open doors. “Blister and Blaze both stayed here.”

  “Then of course it was one of them!” Sunny said. “The scavengers probably didn’t even get anything before Oasis caught them. They don’t have your treasure. One of your sisters does.”

  Smolder was already shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No, that’s not possible. It must be scavengers, or this war would be over already.”

  Sunny met Flower’s eyes, then looked back at him. “Over? How do you figure?”

  “There’s — I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “You can’t do that!” Sunny said, flaring her wings. “You can’t tell me half of something and then not tell me the rest!”

  He wrinkled his snout, looking faintly amused again. “You are my prisoner, remember?” he said. “It’s a royal SandWing secret, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, aren’t you fancy,” Sunny said. “All right, I’ll figure it out.”

  “Don’t do that,” Smolder said with a hint of alarm in his voice.

  “A royal secret involving your treasure that would end the war if someone had their claws on it already. Oh!” Sunny said. “I bet it’s something animus-touched. Is that it? That must be it. Oooh, is it some kind of enchanted treasure that’s like, oh, if you’re holding this, you’re the SandWing queen? So a scavenger must have it, because if a dragon had it, she’d be queen and the war would be over. Interesting.”

  Smolder stared at her with unfathomable black eyes for a long moment.

  “That’s … not it?” Sunny finally asked, nervously.

  “That was unsettling,” he said.

  “It was just logic,” Sunny said. “My friend Starflight would have figured it out faster.” She stopped and curled her tail around her talons. If only Starflight were here. Or Clay, or any of them.

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose you’re likely to be dead by the end of the week anyway. Just remember that if you tell anybody, we’ll have to kill them, too.”

  “Aren’t you cheerful,” Sunny said crossly. “What is it anyway? The SandWing scepter?”

  He shook his head. “I’m n
ot telling you that.”

  “The Lazulite Dragon?” Sunny racked her brain, trying to remember what famous pieces of treasure were mentioned in the scrolls.

  “Stop guessing!”

  “The Eye of Onyx!” Sunny said, and from his expression she knew that was it. His face wasn’t quite the emotionless mask that Blister’s was.

  “Well, that’s why the scavengers must have the treasure,” Smolder said quickly, as if hoping she hadn’t noticed. “If Blister or Blaze had it, one of them would be queen instead of hiding in another kingdom. If any SandWing had it, they’d be ruling the desert already.”

  Sunny shrugged. “So the scavengers managed to get something — and happened to get the most important thing. Someone else still took the rest of it. I bet you anything.”

  “Hmmm.” Smolder narrowed his eyes. Smoke billowed from his nose, writhing around his horns. “In that case, we’d still have to find the scavengers and what they stole.”

  Sunny didn’t have an answer for that. She had a feeling “find the scavengers” meant “burn down more dens,” and it made her feel sorry for the squishy little creatures, especially if they were all as cute and clever as Flower.

  “Smolder!” a voice called. “Smolder!”

  Talons scrabbled on stone as a snub-nosed SandWing came pelting down the long sloping hall. He started calling out as he ran toward them, his voice traveling across the distance.

  “We’re under attack!” he yelled. “Help! General Sandstorm is already dead! No one knows what to do! It’s chaos! We’re all going to die!” He skidded the last several steps toward them and nearly tumbled into one of the treasure rooms. Sunny jumped out of the way of his flailing tail.

  “Who’s attacking?” Smolder said sharply, grabbing the messenger and steering him back up the hallway with one brisk motion. “IceWings or SeaWings?”

  “I don’t know! It happened so fast! It was like they rose straight out of the sand.”

  “Maybe it’s Queen Scarlet’s friends,” Sunny said anxiously, scooping up Flower and hurrying behind them. Smolder gave her a look as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Remember? She said someone was coming to rescue her — what if this is them?”