Moon Rising (15 page)

“I have a question,” Icicle interjected.

“Already?” Webs said, ruffled. “I haven’t even begun yet.”

“About that SkyWing,” Icicle pressed on. “The one who burns everything she touches. Have there been other dragons like that in history? Aren’t they terribly dangerous? I mean, even frostbreath doesn’t work on her. So how have tribes dealt with dragons like that in the past? Is there a way to kill her?”

“That’s … rather a gruesome topic for our first day,” Webs sputtered.

“
I’d
like to know more about Thorn,” Onyx spoke up.

“You mean
Queen
Thorn,” Qibli snapped.

“It’s unprecedented, right?” asked Onyx, ignoring him. “There’s never been a queen in history who wasn’t descended from the royal family. Isn’t that true?”

“Well, not exactly —” Webs tried.

“Queen Thorn is the best queen the SandWings have ever had,” Qibli flared loyally. “If you think you could do better, maybe you should challenge her for the throne.”

“But that’s my point,” Onyx said sharply. “Does this mean now
anyone
could take the throne and become queen? Could that happen in the other tribes, too? I mean, it sounds like asking for chaos and rebellion everywhere. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Er, but it’s rather an unusual — I mean, given the Eye of Onyx — and the situation with the three sisters — this is hardly an appropriate —” Webs flapped his wings around, his mind spinning.

This might be a good chance to get some answers,
Darkstalker whispered in Moon’s head.

“Are we going to learn about the NightWings?” Moon blurted out. “I mean, historically, like, maybe two thousand years ago? Like, where they lived, or, um —”
Where they buried the Darkstalker? How am I supposed to nonchalantly ask THAT question?

“We may learn more about the NightWings, but not today,” Webs said grumpily. “As NONE of this is RELEVANT to TODAY’S TOPIC, which is the Scorching. Ahem.” He gathered up a bunch of scrolls and thrust them at Turtle. “Give these out, one to each dragonet. We’ll begin AT THE BEGINNING. That means over five thousand years ago, before there were tribes or kingdoms, back when scavengers swarmed over the whole continent. Unroll your scrolls to the first map, please.”

Moon took her scroll from Turtle with a sigh.

It was worth a try,
Darkstalker observed.

You said there was something you need,
Moon thought.

Yes. If you can find it, and bring it to me, then I could free myself.

Moon thought of the general reaction to Peril. If they were so terrified of
her
, how would everyone react if Moon brought back the creature from their nightmares? Could Darkstalker be trusted any more than Peril? Even if she believed he could be, would anyone else believe it? And wouldn’t they all hate her even more than they already did, for being the one to bring him into the light again?

She furrowed her brow.
Wait … why can’t you use your animus power to free yourself now?
Moon asked him. There were those animus-touched tunnels from the rainforest to other parts of Pyrrhia — couldn’t Darkstalker just make one of those and pop out wherever he wanted?

For a long, nervous moment, Moon had the anxious feeling that exactly that might happen: that Darkstalker might suddenly just burst through the wall and appear in the cave right in front of her.

I can’t,
Darkstalker said finally.

Why not?

He chuckled sadly.
I was too smart for my own good.

“There are many stories about life before the Scorching,” Webs intoned. “After so many thousands of years, it is hard to know which ones to believe.”

What do you mean?
Moon asked.

I had a truly brilliant idea,
he answered.
After what Albatross did — the massacre — we realized that animus magic took a little of your soul every time you used it. So I gathered all of my power and put it in a … a vessel. Do you see what I mean? If the power wasn’t in me, it couldn’t turn me evil. I could use the vessel to cast my animus spells — as many as I wanted — without ever being affected.

I thought this would prove to Clearsight that she didn’t have to worry about me. I would always be myself, and what happened to Albatross would never happen to me.

Of course, that means I need my object of power in order to use it — and of course I didn’t have it with me when Clearsight betrayed me. Wherever I am now, it’s not here. But if I had it back, I could get myself out. You wouldn’t have to do anything except bring it to me.

Please. I need your help, Moon. I just want to be free. After two thousand years … can’t you imagine? Is that so much to ask?

Moon rolled a corner of the scroll between her claws. Transferring the animus power to an object — that
did
sound like a brilliant idea. Had any other animus ever thought of that?

Maybe Darkstalker was telling the truth. Maybe he wasn’t evil, and never would have been.

Bring it to you,
she thought,
which would mean finding it and then finding you and also figuring out how to get it to you. Not
that
simple.

I’ll help you,
he promised.
Any way you need. Please don’t take away my only hope. Please tell me you’ll at least think about it.

“Most of the pre-Scorching stories would best be described as ‘legends’ or perhaps even ‘fairy tales,’ ” Webs was droning on. “It is unlikely that scavengers were ever capable of being as organized or advanced as some of these imaginative fictions would have us believe. Stories often change and grow over time.”

Like Darkstalker’s story?
Moon thought.
Everything we know about him was passed down by those who defeated and feared him. Maybe there’s more to it.

But how would I know?

She glanced around the cave — at her winglet, at these new friends who had accepted her so far. If they found out about her powers, would they be afraid of her, the same way Clearsight and Fathom ended up fearing Darkstalker? Would they think she was dangerous or cursed? Was her mother right, that they’d reject her and maybe even want to kill her?

Moon curled her talons in and took a deep breath.

All right, Darkstalker,
she promised.
I’ll think about it.

Moon did think about Darkstalker; she thought about him the rest of the day, as she explored the tunnels of the school during Kinkajou’s suntime. She ran into a dead end and thought about what it must be like to be trapped in stone forever. She heard the flurries of anxieties swirling around about how dangerous Peril was, and she thought about having powers you can’t control, and what you can choose to do with them, or whether what you do with them isn’t really up to you in the end.

Eventually, she realized she was going to have to talk to somebody.

Worse, she was going to have to talk to a NightWing. One from the tribe, not Starflight or Fatespeaker.

There were four others at the school. Bigtail wouldn’t be any help, even if he knew anything about Darkstalker. Which left Mindreader, Mightyclaws, and Fearless.

She searched the school carefully with her mind until she found one of them alone. Mightyclaws was in the art cave, with no other dragons around.

Was this a good idea? Mightyclaws was one of the more outwardly friendly dragons, but she’d seen darkness and jealousy in his head before. They were close to the same age, and once she’d heard him think,
If my mother had any spine, she’d have hidden
me
in the rainforest.

She hesitated in the entrance to the art cave. Normally the cave would have been flooded with sunlight, coming through holes in the walls and ceiling, but it was twilight outside now. Art supplies were tucked into every crevice: brushes, all colors of paint, blank scrolls, clay for sculpting, wood and glass and metal and beads, even a loom where someone had already begun a tapestry.

Clever little wooden dragon statues were perched on outcroppings around the walls, with green or blue or orange glass beads for eyes. There were too many to have been made in the last two days, so Moon wondered who had made them — one of the school founders? Over her head, a giant metalwork sculpture made of gleaming copper wire wound across the ceiling, looking like flames. Several clear glass globes were suspended from it, glowing with firelight now that the sun was going down.

A black dragon stood in the middle of the cave, considering an easel with a canvas on it. He was not as thin as he had been when she met him five months ago, but he looked as though he hadn’t filled out quite evenly — he had a round belly now, but his face was still lean, with sharp jawbones and deep hollows under his eyes. Even after six months of clean rainforest air and healthy eating, he still had a hint of a rasp to his voice and sometimes his claws shook a little when he reached for something. And he thought about food almost constantly.

Until he was distracted by something — for instance, her. Mightyclaws looked up and narrowed his eyes when he spotted Moon in the doorway.

“Hey,” he said, neither welcoming nor hostile.
Never know what to say to her,
muttered his mind.

“Hi,” Moon said nervously.

He fiddled with a few small jars of paint on a table beside him, then glanced over at her again.

“You here to paint?” he asked.
Or just stare at me awkwardly?

“Um — yes,” Moon said. This was going to be a disaster. How could she get any answers to her questions if she couldn’t even say two words to him? He gestured with one wing to a stack of canvases, and she took one and propped it on an easel not too far from him, but where neither of them could see the other’s painting. It felt like it would be too intrusive to stand where she could watch what he was working on.

Moon had never tried painting before. She had no idea where to begin. She ran her claws over the different sizes of paintbrushes — smooth wooden handles, neat bristles ranging from fang-sharp thin to fat as a dragon’s ear. After a minute, she chose one somewhere in the middle and brought it back to her canvas along with a few shades of blue and green.

Mightyclaws didn’t say anything for a while. He looked as though he was concentrating on his painting, but his thoughts were swooping in all different directions like a disturbed cluster of dragonflies.
No idea what I’m doing. Why does Starflight think this will help me? Would it be weird to go back to the prey center again tonight? Maybe there’ll be some sheep left. Three meals in one day; will anyone notice? Or yell at me? Why is Moon here? Maybe Starflight sent her, too. Although
she
doesn’t have any trauma to work through. With her perfect life in the rainforest, always as much as she wanted to eat, no adult dragons yelling at her, no classes on lying, no death smoldering right over her head all the time …

“Do you like it here?” Moon finally said, breaking into his thoughts to try and stem the flow of resentment about her.

It worked; he stopped and twitched his tail, staring at his painting. “I guess.”
It’s more like the fortress here than the rainforest, except it smells better and there’s sunshine. And prey, and dragons of all colors.

“It’s weird being around all the other tribes, isn’t it?” Moon tried.

“Definitely,” he said. “We were always told to stay away from them unless we were on a mission. Like, to deliver a prophecy or put the fear of NightWings in them. Otherwise, stay away so they don’t figure us out.”

“That we’re ordinary, you mean?” Moon asked.

He flicked his wings with a frown. “NightWings aren’t
ordinary
.”
Of course she would think so.
“We’re more intelligent than any other tribe. We shape the world; other dragons just live in it.” She could hear that he was parroting lines he’d heard — over and over again — from older NightWings.

“I mean — I just meant, that we don’t have the powers we — say we do — right?” Moon stammered.

“Maybe we don’t right
now
,” Mightyclaws said. He looked away from her and stabbed his paintbrush into a pot of red paint. “But we did and we might again one day. We should have let everyone keep believing in them. We were well trained; no one would have guessed, if we were careful. Especially after the success of the dragonet prophecy.”

“Well trained?” Moon echoed.

“Our classes.” Mightyclaws slashed his brush across his canvas. “How to lie, how to develop a convincing prophecy, how to sound like you’re reading someone’s mind. You missed out on all of that.”
Lounging around with sloths, eating bananas all day.
“But we had to trade all our secrets for safety. Now, thanks to Queen Glory and Deathbringer and Sunny and Stonemover, the whole world knows that NightWings have no powers. No one respects us anymore.”
The looks the other dragons give me here — like I either ate their favorite scroll or I might suddenly burst into flames, and they don’t know which.

“But is it true?” Moon said hesitantly. “That no one has powers anymore? Not anyone?”

He shook his head, glaring at his painting.
Not in hundreds of years,
he thought.
If the old scrolls were true. If we ever had them in the first place.

“Why do you think we lost them?” Moon wondered.

Mightyclaws shrugged. He looked as if he was hoping to get out of the conversation by focusing on his canvas. But in his head she heard,
Maybe the volcano sucked it out of us,
and she felt the heavy smoke and heat that lingered in his memory.

They painted for a while in silence.

“Um,” Moon said finally. “Do you know anything about the Darkstalker?”

Mightyclaws jumped as if she’d flung paint all over him. “Don’t talk about him! Why would you ever talk about him?”

“I just wondered,” Moon said, startled. “I thought he was a ghost story.”

“No, he’s definitely real, and he’s definitely coming back to kill us all one day,” Mightyclaws said with a shudder. “My father used to tell me about him while he taught me to fly. He’d say, ‘Flap harder! Imagine the Darkstalker is chasing you!’ or ‘If you can’t twist into a dive faster than that, the Darkstalker will catch you and rip off your claws and eat your brain!’ He told me about how the tribe buried him a long time ago and then ran away to hide, but he’s slowly clawing his way out, and one day he’ll break free and come to kill us all for revenge.”

Moon blinked at him for a minute before she realized she was dripping cerulean paint all over her talons.

Wow,
Darkstalker whispered in her head.
I seem to have gotten a lot scarier in the last two thousand years.

You must have been pretty scary to begin with,
Moon observed,
if the whole tribe moved to hide from you even after you’d been defeated.

Completely unnecessary. A huge overreaction. I killed ONE dragon, who deserved it.

“What did he do?” Moon asked Mightyclaws. “I mean, what was so bad about him?”

Please keep in mind I’ll be terribly offended if you believe this scrawny dragonet and his monster fantasies over me.

“He killed, like, twenty dragons,” Mightyclaws said. “All at once. With his MIND. He could make anyone do anything he wanted to.”

Is that true?
Moon demanded, appalled.

I did not kill twenty dragons. Maybe two. On two separate occasions, and I had to. Moon, come on, I promise not to eat anyone’s brains.

Mightyclaws was not faking his terror of the Darkstalker, though. A million nightmares from the last few years were replaying in his head. She also saw a game where the young dragonets took turns pretending to be the Darkstalker, hiding for a long time, then bursting out to chase and attack the others. Mightyclaws had never liked that game; it always made his nightmares worse.

“Does anyone know where he’s buried?” she asked.

Mightyclaws wrinkled his snout at her. “Of course not. That was thousands of years ago.”

“What about the old NightWing kingdom?” she asked. “Where was it?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “What’s with all the questions?”

“Oh,” she said. “I just — I wondered — I mean, you’re right, I missed out on all the stuff a NightWing dragonet should know. I thought maybe if I … knew more, I’d … be more of a NightWing.”

Mightyclaws stepped around his easel to look at her canvas. She’d painted (quite badly) an evening sky, twinkling with stars and all three moons, over a quiet rainforest scene of green leaves and crooked trees. He took one look at it and snorted, then grabbed his painting and threw it on the floor at her feet.

It was a painting of the volcano she’d seen so many times in the NightWings’ heads. Red-and-gold lava spilled down the sides of the black mountain, and a dark cloud of smoke hung over everything, so you couldn’t tell if it was day or night. It took her a minute of looking at it to realize that Mightyclaws had painted hidden eyes and teeth all over the volcano, as if it was watching, waiting to devour someone.

“That’s really —” Moon started, wanting to tell him how good it was.

“This,” Mightyclaws said. He pointed to her painting, and then to his. “
This
is why you’ll never be one of us.”
Because everything was awful, and you escaped, and it is not fair.

He stormed out of the cave before she could respond.

Moon sighed.

What’s really not fair,
Darkstalker pointed out,
is everyone blaming you for a choice your mother made.

Moon picked up the volcano painting and propped it carefully back on the easel to dry. She gazed at it for a moment, then suddenly glanced back at her own painting.

The sky …

Her heart flipped over.

My egg was laid under two full moons and hatched under two full moons.
Her mother had told her the story of the moonlight and the way her egg had turned strangely silver.
Is that why I have powers and no one else does? Do the NightWing powers come from the moons? Maybe that’s why they disappeared … because there was no moonlight on the volcanic island, and the eggs were all hatched deep inside the caves.

Darkstalker rumbled inside her head.
Of course our powers come from the moons. One full moon at hatching gives a dragonet either mind reading or prophecy. Two gives them both. Three is so rare…. the theory for a while was that perhaps the animus powers were a third gift, but we eventually determined that those are genetic, not moon-given. We think the third moon makes the first two powers even stronger.

Moon brushed the silver scales by her eyes.
Are these a sign of our powers? Because Fatespeaker has them, too.

They should be, but I’ve seen absolutely everything in that silly dragon’s mind and she’s certainly not a mind reader. Nor a prophet, I believe, although she may have a very weak power. Perhaps she nearly hatched under the moons, or was supposed to.

The Talons of Peace had her egg, so she wasn’t on the volcano, but she probably wasn’t out in the moonlight either,
Moon thought.
And they also had Starflight’s, but I know for sure he hatched underground.

Yes, on a brightest night, with three full moons,
Darkstalker growled.
What a waste. Think of the power he could have had.