Wings of Fire Book Four: The Dark Secret (4 page)

“Up,” he snarled. “The queen of the NightWings wants to see you.”

Starflight’s experience with dragon queens thus far had not been exactly wonderful.

“M-me?” he stammered. “Now? You mean, right now? Shouldn’t I — I mean, I’m not really prepared to, or, I — I don’t really look — to see a queen, I mean — maybe —”

“Stop blithering and follow me.” Morrowseer swept out of the cave with a growl.

“Go, go, go,” Mightyclaws hissed, flapping his wings as Starflight hesitated.

Starflight’s claws caught on small holes in the rocky floor and he stumbled as he chased after the giant NightWing.
Volcanic rock,
he thought, peering at the walls around him.
I wonder when it last erupted.
From the rumbling under his talons and the heat rising through the floor, it didn’t seem like the most dormant volcano.

Morrowseer led the way up a winding tunnel without looking back.

“My friends —” Starflight started to say. “Sunny and the others — are they —”

The large black dragon didn’t turn around.

Starflight kept walking for a few minutes, then took a deep breath and tried again. “When can I go back?”

His only answer was a snort of disgust. Starflight swallowed his questions and nervously tucked his wings in. The walls felt like they were getting closer.

He didn’t see any guards or rivers of lava. He didn’t see any other NightWings at all.

But as they moved along the tunnel, Starflight heard something up ahead — a hissing, murmuring sound that grew louder as they approached.

Dragon voices, jumbled and arguing.

Dread prickled through every scale on Starflight’s body. If he hadn’t been more terrified of what Morrowseer would do to him, he would have turned and bolted back down the tunnel.

Finally Morrowseer and Starflight stepped through an archway into a cave full of dragons. The walls were packed with dragon wings, with NightWings hanging from crags and rocks and the ceiling like bats. One by one, dark-scaled dragon heads turned toward them. The gathered NightWings fell silent.

A last voice cried, “We should attack
now
. We should have attacked
yester
—!” before cutting off abruptly as the speaker noticed Starflight.

Starflight wondered again if he was dreaming, because this was his biggest nightmare come to life: a room full of angry NightWings, all of them glaring at him.

“Watch it,” Morrowseer growled as Starflight stumbled into him, and then Starflight saw what lay ahead of their talons.

A few steps into the cave, the rocky path abruptly fell away on either side, leaving only a thin strip of stone to stand on. Below him was a bubbling lake of glowing orange lava. He could feel the heat crackling along his scales.

Morrowseer stepped back to the safety of the doorway and prodded Starflight forward, so the dragonet was left alone on the spur of rock, surrounded by lava.

Lava and NightWings.

And they’re all reading my mind
, he thought with another jolt of terror.
They can see all my thoughts. They know I’m terrified and weak and useless and that I don’t think Blister should be the next SandWing queen and that I think this is a horrible place to live and —

Stop thinking about all the things I don’t want them to see in my head!

With a massive effort, Starflight focused on the details of the room around him.
Think about what you see. Don’t think about anything else.

First, there weren’t actually hundreds of dragons staring at him. He did a quick estimate, hiding his other thoughts inside mountains of numbers. Maybe forty. About forty black dragons filled the cave, most of them as large as Morrowseer, which meant they must be quite old. They were all as thin as the dragonets in the dormitory, and many of them had worn patches on their scales, sores on their snouts and wings, and traces of blood around their nostrils. These dragons looked like the tribal opposite of the colorful, healthy, well-fed RainWings.

There was a clear spot on the cave walls right across from him. It looked like a circle had been carved into the rock, as wide across as Starflight’s wingspan, and then jabbed full of small holes, none of them bigger than a dragon’s eye.

The other dragons kept glancing at this circle as if waiting for it to do something.

On a ledge beside the circle perched a dragon with a scar rippling down her chest. Her wings drooped in an odd way, as if they were weighted down with rocks, and she wore a cluster of diamonds around her neck. Another chain of smaller teardrop diamonds was wound around the horns on her head.

But that can’t be the queen
, Starflight thought. She didn’t have authority in her bones. She didn’t radiate power all the way through her wingtips, like the other queens he’d met.

It took him only a moment of puzzling this out before he realized that there must be a dragon
behind
the screen, staring through those holes at him. A chill sliced through his scales. Nobody could see her, but her presence filled the cave like heavy smoke.

The queen of the NightWings
.

The scrolls always referred to her as mysterious and unknown, but Starflight hadn’t imagined that she would keep herself hidden even from her own tribe.

Why?

Because it’s extra-terrifying,
he answered himself.

“
This
is him?” barked one of the dragons.

“Yes,” Morrowseer growled. “We snatched him from the rainforest this morning.”

Wings rustled uneasily all around the cave.

“Has he told us anything?” asked another dragon. “What do they know? What are they planning?”

“How soon will they attack?” growled another.

“And how did that RainWing escape?” another one shouted as several dragons began to speak at once. “We’ve heard reports that there was a MudWing with her. A MudWing! How did he get here? Why didn’t we kill them before they got away?”

They’re talking about Glory and Clay
, Starflight thought with a shudder.

“That’s the RainWing I warned you about,” Morrowseer snarled. “The one the Talons of Peace got to replace the SkyWing they lost.” He spat into the lava. “This is exactly why I told them to kill her.”

“A RainWing, of all things,” said the dragon with the diamonds. “What an unfortunate mistake.”

“We had her,” said a dragon with twisted horns. “
Here
. In our talons.
And nobody killed her?
”

“Who knows what she saw?” cried another dragon. “If she warns the RainWings what we’re planning —”

“She can’t possibly know that,” Morrowseer said.

“She knows about the tunnel between our kingdoms,” challenged a dragon from the far wall. “And that little one escaped with her. She’ll have told her everything she saw in the fortress. What if they figure it out?”

A clamor of voices filled the cave.

Figure what out?
Starflight looked down at his talons and wished they weren’t shaking so much. He was half afraid that he’d tremble himself off balance and into the lava, but that wasn’t even in the top twenty things he was worrying about right now.
What are they planning?

He glanced up at the screen where the queen was hidden. She hadn’t spoken at all yet. But he could feel her watching; from the way his skin prickled, he thought she hadn’t taken her eyes off him since he’d entered the cave.

All at once, the dragon with the diamonds leaned toward the screen, tilting her head.

A hush fell instantly around the room. Nothing moved except the
bloop-bloop
of bubbles in the lava. Every NightWing present seemed to be holding his or her breath.

Starflight didn’t hear anything — no queen’s voice issuing regally from her hiding spot — but the diamond dragon nodded and straightened up again.

“Queen Battlewinner says to shut up and ask
him
.” To his horror, she pointed at Starflight. “That’s why he’s here. Make
him
tell us what they know and what they’re going to do next.”

The listening dragons all swiveled their heads toward him.

Falling into the lava suddenly sounded like a pretty great option.

“Um,” Starflight stammered several times. “I — I — um —”

“Speak or I kill you right now,” Morrowseer growled behind him.

Starflight pressed his front talons together and took a deep breath. “Her name is Glory,” he blurted.

The dragons all hissed. This was not something they cared about.

“She — she said you have RainWing prisoners.”
Please tell me she’s wrong. Tell me it’s all a mistake.

But no one corrected him.

Should he tell them Glory’s plan? That she was trying to become queen of the RainWings so she could build an army to come rescue their lost dragons? That they shouldn’t underestimate her?

Would he be betraying his friends if he said all that to the NightWings?

Or would he be betraying his tribe if he didn’t?

The close, smoky air of the cave pressed down around Starflight.

What if I can fix everything?

This is the chance you wanted. You asked Glory to let you talk to the NightWings. You wanted to give them a chance to explain themselves — you wanted to find a peaceful solution, so you wouldn’t have to pick sides in a war.

But now that he was here, facing their dark eyes, he couldn’t find any of the brilliant words he’d meant to use.

Suddenly one of the nearest dragons snapped, “Just tell us if they’re planning an attack!”

“Yes,” Starflight blurted. “I mean — I think so.”

This met with such an uproar that Starflight had to sit
down and cover his head with his wings. He’d said the worst possible thing. He’d made everything worse for Glory and the RainWings, and he couldn’t even bring himself to speak up and try that famous “diplomacy” he’d always thought was such a good idea.

They wouldn’t listen to me anyway,
he told himself, but he didn’t know if that was true. He wasn’t brave enough to find out.

“It doesn’t matter,” rasped a hoarse, wet voice. “RainWings are no match for us.”

A horribly disfigured dragon pushed past Morrowseer, slithered into the cave, and glowered at the other dragons. His snout was twisted and deformed by a terrible scar that had closed one nostril, melted several scales, and left nasty oozing bubbles along his jawline.

The dragon with the diamonds frowned. “Vengeance, you were not invited to this council.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” he hissed. “And yet I know more than any dragon about RainWings and what they can do.” He gestured to his face. “And I can tell you that this was a fluke. RainWings are too stupid and cowardly to be dangerous. Most of you know I got this when I grabbed their queen — well, turns out, just one of their queens — stupid tribe — and she had no idea what she was doing, or I’d be dead. She didn’t even mean to spray me. They never do.” Vengeance shook his head, breathing loudly through his mouth. “They have Pyrrhia’s most powerful weapon and they’re too pathetic to use it.”

“Maybe they were before this
Glory
came along,” said one of the other dragons. “From what Morrowseer says about her, she’s not as weak as the rest of them.”

You have no idea
, Starflight thought.

“And it’s your fault they found out about us,” the diamond dragon said. “You’re the one who brought her here, even though Deathbringer warned us the dragonets were in the forest, and that we should stay away until they were gone.”

“Deathbringer.” Vengeance smirked. “Oh, yeah. How is your pet, Greatness? I’ve heard a very interesting story about him.” He turned and beckoned with his tail.

Starflight recognized the NightWing assassin who was dragged into the cave by four guards. It was starting to get crowded on the ledge by the door. Vengeance seized Deathbringer’s ear and virtually threw him onto the stone outcropping with Starflight. They knocked into each other and flung out their wings for balance.

Deathbringer wasn’t much bigger than Starflight, after all — he’d looked larger when he was attacking Queen Blaze and threatening Glory. But here, in the same lava predicament as Starflight, with everyone looking just as displeased with him, he seemed a lot less intimidating.

“Ah,” he said to Starflight in a friendly way. “You’re here, too.” His eyes looked as if he wanted to ask something but didn’t dare.

“This dragon,” Vengeance bellowed, pointing at Deathbringer. “
This
pet assassin of Princess Greatness was
actually
conspiring with the enemy.
He
is the one who brought the MudWing here and
he
helped them both to escape.”

Princess,
Starflight thought.
So the diamond dragon — Greatness — speaks for her mother, for some reason.

“Hang on,” Deathbringer said, hopping neatly over Starflight’s head so the dragonet was between him and Vengeance. He looked around at the other dragons and spread his wings with an innocent air. “Conspiring with the enemy? Do you have any proof?”

“Yeah, I have witnesses,” Vengeance hissed. “One of the guards she attacked on the way out saw you helping them. And the guards you distracted from the tunnel so the MudWing could come through — they can tell us all about that.”

A terrible silence followed. Starflight wondered whether they were all searching Deathbringer’s mind to find out what was true. He kept his own mind carefully blank, just in case.

“Deathbringer,” said Greatness, twisting her diamond necklace in her front claws. “That kind of betrayal … the punishment is death.”

The NightWing assassin spread his wings and bowed deeply toward the queen. “I swear I have only ever done what I thought would be best for my tribe.”

“Oh, yeah?” Vengeance coughed wetly. “So why are all the dragonets still alive, then?”

Deathbringer glanced under his wing and met Starflight’s eyes. There was a question in them, and this time Starflight guessed what it was.
Are they? All still alive?
Starflight nodded
as imperceptibly as he could, and a look of relief flitted across Deathbringer’s face, then was gone.