The Dragonet Prophecy (6 page)

“Which one do
we
want to be queen?” Sunny asked. “We get to pick, right? When we fulfill the prophecy?”

“None of them,” Starflight said gloomily. “Blaze is about as smart as a concussed sheep, Blister is most likely plotting to become queen of all the tribes somehow, and if Burn wins, she’ll probably keep the war going just for fun. They’re all pretty nasty. I guess we’ll see what the Talons of Peace decide.”

“The Talons of Peace don’t
get
to decide,” Tsunami said, bristling. “They only
think
they’re in charge of us.”

“We can still hear them out,” Starflight argued. “They want what’s best for us and Pyrrhia.”

“Easy for you to say,” Glory snapped. The ruff around her neck flared orange. “You weren’t stolen from your home. The NightWings were pretty eager to hand over your egg, weren’t they?” Starflight flinched as if she’d burned him.

“Boring!” Clay shouted from his pile of rocks. “Stop fighting with each other! Come fight me for this treasure instead!”

“No one knows what the scavenger did with the sand dragon treasure,” Starflight said in his “top of the class” voice, turning away from Glory. “Among other things, he stole the Lazulite Dragon, the gold SandWing scepter, and the Eye of Onyx, which had been in the SandWing treasury for hundreds of years.”

Clay stamped his feet. Starflight’s lectures always made his scales itch. “I just want to fight somebody!” he said. Somebody who wasn’t trying to beat him into a violent rage, preferably.

As if the thought had summoned her, Kestrel suddenly loomed in the entrance of the cave.

“WHAT is going on in here?” Kestrel’s booming voice made all five dragonets jump to attention. Sunny slipped as she tried to scramble to her feet, and Starflight jumped forward to catch her.

The enormous red SkyWing slithered into the cave, glaring down at them. “This doesn’t look like studying,” she hissed.

“We’re s-s-s-sorry,” Sunny stammered.

“No, we’re not.” Tsunami shot the SandWing a glare. “We
were
studying. We were acting out the death of the queen that started the whole war.”

“You mean play-acting,” Kestrel growled. “You are too old for games.”

“When were we ever
young
enough for games?” Glory muttered.

“It wasn’t a game,” Tsunami said. “It was a different way of learning the history. What’s wrong with that?”

“And now you’re talking back,” Kestrel said. She looked smug, as she always did when Tsunami got in trouble. “That means no sleeping in the river tonight.” Tsunami scowled. Kestrel tapped the pile of scrolls by the entrance with one claw. “The rest of you, learn from the SeaWing’s mistakes and study the correct way.”

“That’s not fair.” Clay spoke up as Kestrel turned to go, even though it made his heart pound. “We were all doing the same thing. We should all be punished.” Glory shook her head at him, but beside him, Sunny nodded.

Kestrel stared down at Clay. “I know who the ringleader was. Cut off the head, and the problem goes away.”

“You’re going to cut off Tsunami’s head?” Sunny squeaked.

Glory sighed. “It’s a metaphor, featherbrain.”

“Now go to bed,” Kestrel said. She turned and swept out of the cave, knocking over Starflight’s neat stacks of scrolls as she went.

Clay nudged Tsunami’s dark blue shoulder with his snout. “Sorry. We tried.”

“I know, thanks,” Tsunami said, brushing her wing against his. “Hey, Sunny, would you mind taking those scrolls back to our sleeping cave?”

The small gold dragon brightened. “Sure, I can do that!” She hurried to the entrance, gathered the scattered scrolls in her front talons, and whisked out of the cave.

“I can’t stand this much longer,” Tsunami said as soon as Sunny was gone. “We have to get out of here, and soon.”

Clay glanced at Glory and Starflight, who didn’t look surprised. “You talked to them about it?”

“Of course,” Tsunami said. “I needed their help figuring out an escape plan.” Clay couldn’t help but notice that she hadn’t asked
him
for any escape plan ideas. Even the dragons who liked him thought he was pretty useless.

“I’m not sure we’re ready,” Starflight said, wrinkling his forehead. “There’s so much we haven’t learned yet. . . .”

“That’s what the teachers want us to think!” Tsunami’s blue scales shifted as she shook herself from head to tail. “But we’ll never know until we get out of these horrible caves and see the world for ourselves.”

“What about the prophecy?” Clay asked. “Shouldn’t we wait two more years?”

“I don’t see why,” Glory said. “I’m with Tsunami. Destiny is destiny, right? So whatever we do must be the right thing. We don’t need a bunch of ancient dragons telling us how to save the world.
They’re
not in the prophecy.”

“When do we tell Sunny?” Starflight asked, glancing at the cave’s dark opening.

“Not until the last minute,” Tsunami said fiercely. “You know she can’t keep a secret. Starflight,
promise
you won’t say anything to her.”

“I won’t, I won’t,” he said. “She’s not going to like it, though. She thinks everything is great here.”

“Of course she does,” Tsunami said. “She doesn’t care that we get treated like cracked eggs even though we’re supposed to be the key to peace or whatever.”

“She cares,” Starflight said defensively. “She just doesn’t whine about it.”

“Yowch,” said Glory.

Tsunami whirled to glare at Starflight, her gills pulsing. “Say that to my face.”

“I
am
saying it to your face,” he said. “Or was I saying it to your rear end? It’s easy to get the two confused.” He ducked behind Clay before Tsunami could even bare her teeth at him.

“Hey, stop. Quit snarling at each other like mini Kestrels,” Clay said, standing up to keep his bulk between Tsunami and Starflight. “Nobody’s happy here. Sunny deals with it differently, that’s all. But remember what we decided — we five stick together or else everything gets worse, right?”

Starflight hunched his wings forward, muttering.

“Clay’s right,” Glory said. “The last thing we want is to be like Kestrel or Webs or Dune.”

Tsunami hissed for a moment, then shook herself. “All right, I know. I’m trying. But this place is slowly killing me,” she said. Clay shivered at the fierce look on her face. He would not want to be the dragon standing in her way.

“As soon as we have a plan, we go,” Tsunami said, looking them each in the eye. “Let’s see them force our destiny on us when they can’t find us anymore.”

Suddenly there was a thundering crash from the central cave. Clay heard the entrance boulder slam back into place, and then the rumble of heavy footsteps. From the extra squish-flap sound of them, he knew that it must be Webs.

“Something’s happening,” Tsunami said. She hurried to the door, her ears twitching and the spiny ridge along her back standing straight up. “We have to go listen.”

Starflight spread his wings slowly. “I’m sure we’ll find out what the fuss is in the morning.”

“I don’t want to wait that long.” Tsunami spun around to jab his underbelly with her tail, and he tipped backward with a grunt. “Don’t be a smoke-breather! Let’s go!” She whirled out of the cave.

Clay winced as his sore muscles sprang into action. He followed Glory to the central cave. Glory’s scales were already changing to match the mottled gray-and-black rocks. In a moment she’d be nearly impossible to see.

Starflight slipped past to join her, and the two of them hurried away toward the tunnel that led to the big dragons’ cave. They vanished almost immediately into the shadows. Hidden by their coloring, they’d get as close as they could to eavesdrop.

But Clay and Tsunami had an even better shot of hearing everything, if they hurried. Tsunami was already charging across the cave to the river.

“What about Sunny?” Clay called quietly. He could hear the little SandWing rummaging around in her sleeping cave, putting scrolls away.

“We’ll come up with something to tell her later,” Tsunami hissed back.

Clay felt sorry that Sunny was the only one who didn’t know about their spying games, but they’d learned their lesson about trusting her with secrets years ago. Sunny hadn’t
meant
to tell Dune about the pile of rocks the dragonets were collecting. Their plan was to build a tower to the sky hole, back when they were too small to fly. They’d only wanted to stick their heads out and look around. But one day Sunny forgot to be careful around Dune, and the next day all the collected rocks were gone from their hiding place. That was the end of that plan — and of Sunny getting to know anything.

Tsunami disappeared into the river with a nearly soundless splash. The pale green flecks under her dark blue scales shimmered as she swam upriver. Clay dove in after her, wishing he could see in the dark like she could. At least she’d remembered to activate the glow-in-the-dark stripe along her tail.

MudWings couldn’t breathe underwater like SeaWings, but they could hold their breath for more than an hour. So whenever the dragonets wanted to spy on their guardians, Clay and Tsunami could use the river to get closer than the others.

He caught up to the SeaWing as she was wriggling through the underwater gap in the cave walls. It made Clay nervous every time, squeezing through such a small space. He wished he hadn’t eaten that extra cow at dinner.

His claws scrabbled on the rocks, catching in the crevices. There was a brief, terrifying moment as his midsection got stuck. Would he drown down here? Would the prophecy be ruined because of an extra cow?

Then, with a whoosh of bubbles, he popped through and shot after Tsunami.

Her tail stripe went dark as they swam quietly into the guardians’ cave. The three older dragons hardly paid any attention to the river, except for Webs, who sometimes slept in the shallows. It would never occur to them that two pairs of dragonet ears might be poking out of the water, listening.

Clay drifted to a stop near the entrance while Tsunami swam to the far side of the room. That way at least one of them could hear, no matter where the minders were talking.

Tonight, however, Clay was pretty sure everyone could hear everything, including Glory and Starflight in the passageway outside. From the way Kestrel was shouting, it was possible even the SkyWings up in the mountain peaks could hear her.

“Coming
here
? With no warning? After six years, suddenly he’s interested?” A jet of fire shot out of her snout and blasted the nearest rock column.

“Maybe he wants to make sure they’re ready to stop the war,” Webs suggested.

Dune snorted. “These dragonets? Then he’s going to be very disappointed.” He eased himself onto a flat boulder, stretching his foreleg stump and mangled wing toward the fire. The big SandWing dragon never discussed his scars or how he lost his foot, but the dragonets could guess from the anger in his voice whenever he talked about the war.

The fact that he couldn’t fly was probably why he was chosen for underground dragonet-minding duty. He clearly wasn’t picked for his warm, nurturing personality.

“We’ve done our best,” Webs said. “The prophecy chose these dragonets, not us.”

“Does he even know what happened?” Kestrel demanded. “Does he know about the broken egg and the RainWing? Or the defective SandWing?”

Clay winced. Poor Sunny. He floated closer, keeping his bulky brown length below the surface of the dark water. Through the ripples he could see the blurred shapes of the large dragons gathered around the fire.

Webs flapped his wings. “I’m not sure what he knows or why he cares. The message just said ‘Morrowseer is coming.’ I’m supposed to meet him and bring him here tomorrow.”

Morrowseer.
That sounded familiar. Clay racked his brain. A dragon from history class? One of the tribe rulers? No, it couldn’t be; all the tribes were ruled by queens.

“I’m not worried about Sunny,” Dune said. “We followed the prophecy’s instructions. It’s not our fault she’s the way she is. But the RainWing — he’s not going to like that.”

A deep growl rumbled in Kestrel’s throat. “I don’t like it either. I never have.”

“Glory’s not that bad,” Webs argued. “She’s smarter than she wants us to know.”

“You overestimate her because you brought her here,” Dune said. “She’s lazy and worthless like the rest of her tribe.”

“And she’s not a SkyWing,” Kestrel snapped. “We’re supposed to have a SkyWing.”

Clay wished Glory didn’t have to hear all this. The guardians never hid how they felt about her, and she never acted like she cared. But he wished he could tell her she was just as important and smart as any SkyWing.

“Well, I never thought Morrowseer would come look at them!” Webs said. “After he dropped off Starflight’s egg, I assumed we’d never see him again. The NightWings have nothing to do with the war.”

So he’s a NightWing. Which means superpowered and mysterious and full of himself.
That was all Clay could remember about NightWings. He found himself actually wishing he could get a lecture from Starflight. The epic wonderfulness of NightWings was the black dragonet’s favorite topic.