Queen Of The Great Underworld

35

Then, whoever was behind the exportation of dragons—the Luminary Council, or someone else?—had come and taken the dragons from the Pit.

Even worse, it meant that the removal of dragons from the Crescent Prominence sanctuary wasn’t an isolated event. This was so much bigger than I’d realized if the Drakon Warriors’ dragons were victims as well.

The burden of this knowledge shouldn’t have fallen to me. Who was I but a pretty face and mouthpiece for the Luminary Council? They should have been the ones to fix this. Protecting Anabel was the reason they’d been elected and appointed.

And that was the question Yarrow hadn’t asked: why—instead of finding who was responsible for smuggling the dragons, and then making every effort to prevent the Denneth Empire from obtaining the power to destroy the Fallen Isles—had the Luminary Council instead tossed me in the Pit?

I’d told Yarrow what he’d wanted to know, and I hated myself for that. But at least . . . at least I’d only told him part of it.

The rest concerned a weapon: the most dangerous weapon the Fallen Isles had ever seen. Maybe the most dangerous Noore had ever seen. And no one—especially not Drakon Warriors like Yarrow—could be trusted with that kind of power.

I would never tell.

Not even to save my own life.

BEFORE

Seven Months Ago

I MADE A MISTAKE.

I’d made lots of mistakes in my life, yes, but this one was different. It happened in the sanctuary. And we almost died.

SWEET JASMINE PERFUMED the foothills of the Skyfell Mountains as Ilydsey, Jan, and I made our way up the path toward Siff’s lair. She was the final visit for today, and all the hiking showed in our heavy steps and sweat-dampened clothes. Even LaLa and Crystal seemed tired, though they’d been riding on our shoulders for the last hour, and now Crystal had one of Ilydsey’s braids hanging from her jaws like she was about to bite it off.

“I dare you,” Jan told Crystal.

Ilydsey glanced over her shoulder, gently tugging the braid from her dragon’s teeth. “Don’t encourage her bad behavior. She’s rotten enough.”

“I thought you looked good with short hair,” I teased.

“Short hair. Not singed hair.” Ilydsey paused while Crystal flapped and readjusted herself, but I blazed ahead.

That was my mistake.

Heavy foliage sheltered a clearing in front of Siff’s lair, a tangle of passionflower and ferns, and immense trees that reached for the blue sky. While Ilydsey and Jan lagged behind, still joking about dragonish haircuts, I rounded a wall of buttress roots and tripped.

Five things happened at once:

1. LaLa abandoned my shoulder.

2. My knees slammed into something broken and wet: a partially eaten lamb.

3. Ilydsey shouted, “Watch out!” and scrambled for her calm-whistle.

4. Jan grabbed for me, but I’d fallen too quickly.

5. From across the clearing, Siff barreled toward us. Fire poured from her jaws.

She was incredible: a Drakontos ignitus, with wicked facial horns, a large wingspan, and—at least in adults—the ability to cause the very air to burn.

Ilydsey brought the calm-whistle to her lips, and a sweet tone played over the chaos, but it was too late. Already, the air shimmered as Siff’s scales heated, and her great wings fanned, becoming red-gold.

Safety instructions flittered through my head, but instead of playing dead or hiding behind Jan, I reached for the raging dragon and . . . she stopped.

The noise. The heat. The wild look in her golden eyes. One moment, Siff was ready to kill me for falling into her leftovers. The next, she was tugging the lamb carcass out from under me, not minding that Jan was pulling me to my feet. Relief flooded me so thoroughly I could barely stand.

Ilydsey’s whistle must have worked after all.

“Galadriel, what did you do?” Ilydsey whispered as Siff disappeared into her cave, dragging the lamb.

“I messed up.” My throat went tight with residual terror and misery. If Mother ever found out, she’d never let me return to the sanctuary. I’d never see dragons again. “I wasn’t paying attention and I tripped.”

“No, I mean you—”

Jan touched Ilydsey’s hand and gave a slight shake of his head. “Don’t worry her about it now.”

Ilydsey frowned, but she nodded. “All right.”

“You can’t tell anyone,” I whispered. “Especially my family.”

“All right,” Ilydsey said again. “No one will ever know what happened here. Not from us, anyway.”

We never spoke of that afternoon again.

AFTER BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, Yarrow CAME into the infirmary, a set of cuffs hanging from his belt.

The iron clattered with every step, striking two, three, four times as he assumed a position halfway between my bed and the door. He was still too close. “It’s time to go back to your cell, Fancy.”

With great effort, I swung my shaking legs off the edge of the bed and tested my weight. The stone floor was warm, even through my slippers; we were so close to Kyhan that his heat seeped through the rock. It was a strange sensation, being this near another god, and I missed Darina and Damyan even more.

“Come on.” Yarrow grabbed my elbow and jerked me from the room. “We don’t have time for this.”

Maybe he should have thought of that before he’d left me to starve.

Numbers skittered in the back of my head as Yarrow returned me to the first-level cellblock. We came to the anteroom (five paces across, three paces wide), the stairs (thirty), and the empty cells on the way to mine (twenty-four). The numbers had not changed. That was one of the things I liked about the counting. It was reliable.

My cell waited for me. Empty, save the bed, pillow, blanket, and sewage hole (still covered). I stood at the entrance, staring into the dimness. I couldn’t bear the thought of stepping inside, trapping myself between those walls where the light of the nearest noorestone barely reached.

Maybe Yarrow would move the stone if I asked. Since I’d told him what he wanted to know.

But before I could find my voice, he shoved me into the cell and slid the door shut. Iron sang against iron, and through the grille of metal, I saw his eyes even more narrowed, his mouth pulled into a smirk, and the ring of keys on his belt. His fingers brushed across the handle of his baton, not menacingly, but more like a habit.

I’d seen men and women like him before—during my visits to the Luminary Council chamber, or at events with foreign dignitaries, though no weapons were permitted at such secure functions. They’d touch their belts, hips, or even their sleeves, where they sometimes concealed knives in special wrist sheaths (or so I’d heard). Mostly those men and women were Kyhani, accustomed to having weapons on their person, though it always seemed like their bodies counted as weapons, too. Even away from the Isle of Warriors, the Kyhani people were strong; they were trained for combat in ways the rest of us could only imagine.

Unconscious movement or not, every time Yarrow touched his baton, I received a clear message: I would pay if I were lying.