“The dragons are a common subject of literary fancy. Rarely is their intelligence called into doubt. The dragons of Alti were allegedly the equal of any man in intellect. It seems they are our equal in other ways as well.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

Silver’s eyes crept to the door as Illian led Cevora inside. She could hear something moving beyond those doors. Something massive. But it was not until the thing spoke that Silver realized what it was. A voice like a landslide, the heat of a furnace…. a dragon…

She felt her eyes turn towards the door of their own accord.

“Keep your guard up, Silver,” Bek reminded her.

“I know,” she whispered.

“If you know, what are you doing?”

Silver twisted around to put her finger to her lips. Again, the voice came, and the walls of the castle vibrated with it. Deep in the pit of her stomach, she felt a cold weight. Goosebumps had risen along her arms, prickling across her flesh. That voice sent shivers down her spine. But what she felt was not the overwhelming terror of the Zara. It was a different fear, and it was mingled with a rage that seemed to come from nowhere at all. Weakness. Helplessness. She shivered, balling her hands into fists at her sides.

They were shaking.

Bek reached across the distance between them, clearly watching her out of the corner of his eye as he settled the weight of his hand on her shoulder. He thought she was nervous. Silver felt the wolf sidle up close to her, pressing its shoulder into her leg. They both did.

“Then why did you kill my mother?” she heard Cevora ask icily, suddenly closer to the door than she had been moments ago. Those words were like fire in Silver’s mind. Around them, the very castle seemed to shudder now. Bek’s eyes flew to the stone ceiling.

“What was that?” she could just make out Sori hissing to Ren.

“What better way to start a war?”

For an instant, the previous day’s pain hit Silver, but just an instant. What a stupid reason. In her life, she had never been so angry as she was in that moment. Not even when she had faced the Zara. And yet…she had no real reason to be so enraged. Cevora’s loss had happened years ago, long before they met.

Her hand crept over her mouth as she turned towards the door, but she froze at the beast’s next words.

“Who have you brought with you, princess? I believe there’s someone I know…”

Silver looked up in time to see Sori glance back at the door and then at her, visibly paling. Silver had no idea why. And she had no opportunity to find out, for in that same moment, she felt something that she could not explain. A sense of impending danger, an instinct that everything was about to go terribly awry.

“Someone’s coming,” she hissed. Sori heard. Bek heard.

“Where?” Sori demanded, turning back to the hallway.

“From the other direction. We have to go now,” Silver declared just loudly enough for Illian to hear. Whatever parting words Cevora had thrown back at the dragon, Silver had not heard them. There might not even have been parting words, judging by the princess’s furious expression as she hurried into the corridor with Illian directly behind her.

“Go, now. Bek, with me at the rear,” Illian commanded, gesturing back the way they had come. Sori and Ren were already running. The dragon’s hiss of mocking laughter followed them as Silver bolted ahead with the wolf at her side. Somehow, Cevora had ended up behind her, but they were lucky yet again; the passage Cevora had brought them through remained opened, a narrow chink in the dim hallway.

Sori and Ren hesitated, but Silver did not. She wanted nothing so much as to leave that dragon behind. So, she pelted into the darkness ahead of them, hearing Cevora’s curse and then blinking at the flood of light from behind her. Footsteps pounded in the darkness at her back. How many of them had made it into the tunnel? She had no idea.

“Sori, Ren, follow her now,” Cevora’s voice echoed up to her. Seconds later, Silver could hear the rocky passage sliding closed.

She turned, drawing everyone behind her to the right. There were more footsteps now, hissed whispers somewhere in the darkness to her rear.

“Silver,” Cevora half-shouted. The princess’s voice echoed down the dark hallway, coming from every side. “Silver, it’s a maze.”

Left.

Maybe it was because she had been so terrified before that their path blazed so clearly in Silver’s mind.

“I remember,” she cried back.

No one argued with her after that, and she did not stop running. None of them did, for a good two miles beneath the earth. Then, finally, Silver slowed.

“Is everyone back there?” she called, reaching for the wolf and finding its cold nose with her palm.

“Yes,” Illian’s voice echoed up the narrow hall.

“Let me pass,” Cevora said from somewhere at the back of the line. Silver shielded her eyes as she pressed herself against the wall, doubtful that anyone could fit past her in the narrow space. Somehow, she was wrong.

“We should be nearing the end of this tunnel,” Ren’s voice echoed just like Cevora’s had.

“It’s not much farther,” Cevora agreed.

“Let’s just hope we don’t have a welcoming party from our srinn,” Sori observed darkly, “I doubt we can count on that dragon to keep quiet about us.”

No one said anything after that, and they all hung back, tensed and ready, when the passage ended and Cevora opened the earth again with her magic. The stone slid away to reveal the pitch-black canopy of the trees at night, silvered faintly by a moon outside of their vision.

“There are no humans here,” the wolf growled, sniffing delicately, “and there haven’t been since we passed this way.” Silver relayed the wolf’s words, knowing everyone in their party was used to it. Most of them did not know how well she understood Elorian, but not one of them had ever once questioned that she understood.

“I’d keep my eyes and ears open all the same,” Ren stated, slipping cautiously past her and Cevora to stand at the top of the stairwell and peer around.

“Is it clear, Ren?” Illian asked.

“Clear.”

“Then hurry,” Illian said as they all dragged themselves up the stairs and fell into line behind him for a second time. Silver felt a wash of relief when she felt Seijelar’s mind brush against her own, the dragon glimmering suddenly into visibility before they had traveled more than half a mile into the woods. The beast vanished soon after, but Silver caught glimpses of the other hatchlings as well, watching them from between the trees. It was easy to forget how quiet they could be excepting in moments like this one.

There was a palpable release of tension in the rest of the group as well when they finally reunited with the brothers, Kit and Terald, and Estir, Ami, Gormin, and Hiyein. There were no greetings, however, aside from a few swift mutterings and shoulder pats.

If Silver thought that they were going to head straight back to the outpost, she was sorely mistaken. They marched through the night instead, picking their way over boulders and fallen logs, skirting clearings that would have been bright with moonlight if it were not overcast, and twice wading through the shallower points of a raging river. In the night, its waters glittered deceptively, sliding like glass over river rocks that glowed faintly with their own light. If only, Silver thought after the second crossing, that made the water warm.

Finally, when the sky began to gray, they stopped to set up camp. There were no blankets, no bedrolls, no shelter, no fire. Silver lay on her back in the dark wondering how on earth Hiyein could be so deep asleep as to be snoring, and at the same time how Ren and Terald were wide awake enough to keep first watch. With the dragons in tow, it hardly seemed like they even needed a lookout.

Left to the silence, her mind replayed what she had heard in the castle corridor time after time after time. Her hands were still shaking, and she was not sure if, when she shivered, it was with the chill or disgust. How could a dragon be so twisted? A dragon like her beloved Seijelar.

“There is evil in all things,” the wolf rumbled, seeming to sense her thoughts.

“And there is light in all things,” Silver whispered back, wondering if the fact that she had not seen the dragon had made everything worse. If he were anywhere near the size of Etrion, srinn of dragons, he must have filled the entire chamber.

“If you’re still awake,” Bek said from her other side, “you should drink some of the tea Sara gave to you. Get some rest while you can.”

“Says the guy reading a book instead of sleeping,” Silver pointed out, turning her head to stare at him. She had not seen the Encyclopedia of Beasts in weeks, but he had his nose buried in it now. His elbow rested on Skourett’s bony skull, which was apparently comfortable for the dragon. Seijelar would have complained. “What are you reading about so intently?”

“Anything that might be helpful,” he said, flipping the page. “By the way, what you did earlier was impressive. Remembering all the twists and turns we had taken to get through that passage couldn’t have been easy.”

“I think I was so on edge when we went in that they stuck in my head,” Silver said off-handedly.

“It was still impressive. Sometimes I underestimate you.”

“I agree,” Cevora, who had settled nearby to watch the other hatchlings wade into the frigid river waters, said softly. If there was one thing Silver had learned in the intervening weeks since their arrival in Alti, it was how much dragons seemed to love water. “I didn’t think it was possible for someone else to guide us out of there. Those passages were made to confound intruders.”

“Maybe because you were with me, the castle went easy on us,” Silver suggested with a bit of a laugh. Even in the dark she could tell that Cevora did not think it was funny.

“Maybe,” the princess admitted after a long pause.

“I’m just glad we got out when we did,” Sori interjected, “when that dragon said it knew one of us, I just about had a heart attack.”

“You think it was you?” Cevora asked.

“Who else? If that really was the dragon that killed your mother, it killed mine, too.”

“He,” Cevora corrected almost automatically, “he killed them both, that’s true. And he never identified himself.”

“You know how touchy the dragons are, our lovely kids aside,” Sori amended quickly, when several pairs of bright eyes turned on them from the water’s edge. “Frankly, we’re lucky he spoke to you at all.”

“I don’t understand why. He made it clear there was nothing I could offer him,” Cevora sounded disturbed, and Silver agreed. It felt, somehow, as if they had played into the dragon’s schemes, but it was unclear how. Another shiver passed down her spine, and the wolf swished its tail against her shoulder reassuringly.

“Maybe he needed to ascertain that there was nothing you could do for him,” Bek suggested, never looking up from his book. “If it’s true he instrumented the conflict between beasts and men, or at least pushed it over the breaking point, he must have some goal in mind. The king sounds like an imperfect means to his goals, at best. Maybe he thought you could be better, until the two of you met face-to-face.”

“That’s a disturbing thought,” Sori muttered.

“Whatever goals a dragon might have, they would be obscure to us,” Cevora finally said. “Bek’s right. We should all rest. Silver, you most of all.”

“Sure, sure,” Silver muttered.

“You too, Elorian,” Sori said, reaching over and patting the wolf’s silvery head. “You saved our asses today when you told Silver someone was coming.”

Sori could not have noticed the way Silver looked at her in the dark. By the murmurs that followed her exclamation of gratitude, it was clear everyone thought the wolf had somehow noticed their danger and relayed it through her. No one thought for an instant that Silver had noticed it first. And was that so strange, she realized as she lay back on the hard ground, staring through the dark canopy as Bek bugged her about tea and finally took her backpack himself to prepare it. How could she have sensed anything? Magic? Instinct? Or something else. A sensation like someone had warned her, maybe.

But who?