Tamri knew she should take in Watermight again and hurl the dragon from her brain. But a little bubble of curiosity swam up through the terrible void of grief threatening to overwhelm her. What could it hurt to ask more? “You would teach me? What’s in it for you?”
The dragon gave that shivery chuckle again. “I am like you, Little Bird. I crave knowledge. I need understanding of this changed world that the thunderbirds cannot offer.”
Tamri frowned. It made a kind of sense. Dara had defeated the Lightning dragon in the skies above Sharoth, something she hadn’t been expecting. She could be telling the truth about her need for knowledge. Tamri imagined the chasm inside Thunderbird Island and the churning mass of Lightning in its depths. Her skin prickled at the thought of approaching that chasm and learning how to draw on the power.
Suddenly, Rook shook himself so hard that Tamri nearly pitched off his back.
“Hey! Easy there.”
Rook snorted and ruffled his wings urgently. The sounds of the real world came rushing back—the roar of the sea against the cliffside, the wind whistling through her hair, and the thud of her heart. The prickling, shuddering feeling of the Lightning receded.
“I wasn’t going to agree to anything,” Tamri told her companion. “I just need to hear what the Thunderbird Queen wants. That information could help us beat her.”
Rook gurgled, clearly not believing her. He rotated his wing shoulders, urging her to take back the Watermight lining his bones.
Tamri started to reach for the power then hesitated. The Lightning dragon could have more to say. That’s exactly what she wants you to think. Tamri was plummeting into the lowest, darkest place she’d ever been. The Lightning dragon was offering a lifeline to pull her from the void. But it was a trick. Rook’s warning pulled her back from the brink.
When the Lightning dragon tried to speak to her again, Tamri blocked it out with vicious finality. She had seen how this worked with Lord Latch. She wouldn’t let the creature ensnare her too.
“I’m fine, Rook.” She patted his neck reassuringly. Well, she wasn’t fine. She was so sad that her bones ached. But she couldn’t put off returning to Starry Cove any longer. She had to put her gramma to rest. “Let’s go home.”
Rook took flight in a flurry of scarlet feathers, his Watermight-enhanced wings carrying him aloft. He turned once around the rocky isle and headed west.
They reached Starry Cove a little before midnight, dehydrated and utterly exhausted. Tamri only processed what happened next in flashes—Heath coming to meet her with a waterskin; Boru touching her shoulder with his white-feathered wings; Dara looking up from a pile of charred papers, ash smudging her cheeks; then shapes covered in sheets laid out in a room she’d never seen before, one with steel-gray hair held back by a pewter dragonfly; a line of red stitches; a cold, wrinkled hand.
The next thing she knew, Tamri was sitting on the threadbare cot on Gramma Teall’s bed, which someone had stripped clean. The dragonfly clasp was clutched tight in her hand, and the room smelled of smoke. There was no hint of blood or of Gramma Teall’s familiar tea-and-saltwater scent. She was really gone.
A sharp pounding sound filled the room. Heath was boarding up the broken window, though Tamri couldn’t remember whether or not they’d walked here together. He must be ushering her through the things she needed to do, guiding her the way she had guided Gramma Teall whenever she lost her way.
Heath finished repairing the window and sat on the floor beside Tamri’s bed. He didn’t touch her, perhaps sensing the feral, self-protective instinct that would cause her to lash out at him with her fingernails as likely as not. But he stayed at her side when she curled into a ball on her grandmother’s bed. His silence created a warm little pocket in the void in her mind, where it was safe to cry herself to sleep.
6
The morning found Tamri in the charred remains of the dining room that had served as their headquarters. The damage was catastrophic. All the furniture was burnt and crumbling, the maps on the walls little more than ash.
A large group of survivors gathered for a briefing amid the carnage. Tamri took her place among them quietly, not wanting to draw unnecessary attention. She wore the same tunic and trousers as yesterday, and she held Gramma Teall’s pewter dragonfly so tightly that it hurt. She hadn’t spoken or eaten all morning. Her grief was too enormous. Gramma Teall had been her reason for living for so long, and she barely felt alive now that she was gone.
But one thought had crystallized in her mind the moment she awoke—someone was responsible for this crime. She needed to know who.
The meeting included the manor guards and dragon riders and the remaining Soolen Wielder-scholars and Wielder-soldiers, most of whom wore their slate-gray uniforms in varying states of disarray. The Lord of Starry Cove paced about in his sleep clothes, and a handful of his retainers scurried after him, trying to get him to don a silk coat and comb his hair.
Heath stood with his arms crossed, looking as stern and formidable as the first day Tamri had seen him. Taklin, one of the other dragon riders, fidgeted at his side, his clothes still covered in soot. When Tamri arrived, Taklin met her eyes then glanced away quickly. She didn’t go over to join them.
Dara arrived in the dining room last. The Fire Queen’s face was pale, and tufts of golden hair stuck out of her braid at odd angles. She looked as though she hadn’t slept since the day before.
She stepped over a charred ceiling beam and called the meeting to order. “Thank you all for gathering here. I’ll let you get back to work soon, but I want to make sure everyone understands what happened here yesterday.”
She explained that five guards, including those posted around the manor’s Watermight vent, had been discovered with their throats cut. Their enemies had crept into the manor in broad daylight, likely in the guise of servants, couriers, or supplicants from the village. People came and went from the busy manor all the time during the day, and the guards were less vigilant than they would have been at night. While the Wielder-scholars were eating lunch in the courtyard, the attackers stole as much of their research about the Lightning as they could carry and torched the rest.
“We don’t know exactly what they took,” Dara said. “Most of the documents we had here were copies. The original letters and papers we’ve compiled about the Lightning are safe in the Royal Archives back in Sharoth.”
“We can recreate our more recent notes, which don’t have copies in the archive,” said Rosh, the lead scholar in charge of the Lightning project while Lord Latch was away.
“We can,” Dara said. “But our enemies now have our conclusions, which are more useful than the original documents, anyway. Their knowledge of the Lightning will catch up with ours.”
“Who were they?” asked the Lord of Starry Cove, who’d stopped pacing to listen to Dara. He waved an ashy handkerchief at his ruined manor. “Who did this?”
“We think they were Khrillin’s people,” Dara said. “Spies from the king of Pendark.”
The Lord of Starry Cove cursed. “The Crown Prince’s murderer?”
“Yes.” Dara pressed her hand to mouth briefly, as if the reminder made her queasy. “Khrillin saw the Lightning in action during the invasion of Sharoth. He wants it for himself.”