It made Safire tremble with fury.
There was only one clue left behind: an ugly gray thistle. Safire had never seen anything like it, with its stem littered with thorns, some as long as her smallest finger and nearly half as thick. So she showed it to the palace physician.
A scarp thistle, he told her. It grows on the scarps of the Star Isles. A single thorn carries enough poison to make a person sleep for days.
More than both of these things, though, it was the mark of a criminal. A thief known as the Death Dancer because he walked through walls, was uncatchable, and constantly eluded death. He’d been haunting the halls (and treasuries) of barons and kings for years.
Well, thought Safire that day, he won’t elude me.
So she’d doubled the guards and started patrolling the palace herself.
Now, two days later, she stood staring down at a second scarp thistle. Only this one lay on her own desk, behind her own locked door.
As the soldats in the room around her whispered to themselves, all of them watching their commandant, Safire’s eyes lifted to the wall beyond it.
This morning, a tapestry hung on that wall. It had been a gift from Asha, her cousin. The tapestry was gone now. The plaster wall stripped bare.
The thistle on her desk told her the thief had taken it.
Why?
Safire’s eyes narrowed. She understood the king’s ruby. It was worth more money than most people saw in a lifetime. But a ratty old tapestry? What could possibly be the value in that?
Unless, thought Safire, he’s trying to taunt me.
And then, suddenly, that young soldat’s lilting voice rang through her mind.
How do you know it’s a he?
Safire’s stomach twisted.
She’d been in such a hurry, she’d thought nothing of the girl’s morion—which, now that she was thinking about it, was far too big for her and shielded half her face.
But there were other things, too.
The soldat carried no weapon, and she spoke with an unfamiliar accent. Safire had never heard a lilting voice quite like hers. It was almost . . . lyrical.
Not to mention that rolled-up bundle tucked beneath her arm.
Safire froze, thinking back to that bundle. The old, fraying threads. The considerable size.
It was a tapestry.
Her tapestry.
The one Asha had given her.
Safire sank down in her chair. “That thieving bastard.”
Safire tripled the guards. She stopped leaving the palace and remained on patrol through the night. The next day, despite her vigilance, the king’s seal went missing from Safire’s drawer. The day after that, Safire left her rooms only to return and find every single one of her uniforms gone. And in their place? Scarp thistles.
It was enough to make a person lose her mind.
Safire now had a collection of the gray thistles sitting in a glass jar on the windowsill of her bedroom. When she was feeling particularly broody, she would lock herself in and glare at them for hours, trying to think of a solution to this infuriating problem.
“I don’t think she’s a threat,” said Asha as she picked out a rock lodged in Kozu’s claw. The First Dragon stood over her like a shadow while Safire lay in the warm grass beside them, staring up at the indigo sky.
Where they sat, the former hunting paths ended in a scrubby field surrounded by forest. To the north, a huge round tent was pitched, and between them and the tent several dragons prowled, all of them being trained by hopeful riders. Safire could hear the clicked commands from where she stood.
These were the dragon fields. Asha hoped to build a school here—one that would simultaneously preserve the old stories while repairing the damaged relationship between draksors and dragons.
“A thief who can walk through the palace halls completely undetected doesn’t sound like a threat to you?” Safire asked, her hands cradling her head.
Asha set Kozu’s foot down, thought about it, then shook her head. “This one doesn’t.”
Safire sat up and crossed her legs. “Please explain.”
Kozu—an enormous black dragon with a scar through one eye—nudged Asha’s hip with his snout, as if to tell her something. But whatever passed between them was a mystery to Safire.
“She sounds . . . bored,” said Asha, rubbing the First Dragon’s scaly neck. “Like she’s tired of being the cleverest person in the room. What if she’s provoking you because she needs a challenge?”
Safire frowned at this. “Do you think I should give her one?”
Asha left Kozu and came to sit in the grass. Her black gaze held Safire’s. “Can you? Right now she seems three steps ahead of you.”
Safire bristled at this.
Seeing it, Asha leaned forward. “All you need is to get one step ahead.”
Propping her elbow on her knee, Safire rested her chin on her fist. “And how do you propose I do that?”
In the rising heat, Asha began undoing the brass buttons of her scarlet flight jacket. Dax had it sewn especially for Asha, to mark her as his Namsara. As Asha shrugged it off, the buttons flashed in the sun and Safire leaned in, squinting, to find that each brass orb was impressed with the image of a flame-like seven-petaled flower—the namsara, Asha’s namesake.
“These are the things you know about her,” Asha said, laying her new jacket down beside her, then ticking fingers off her burned hand as she spoke. “She’s brash—there’s no room in the palace she won’t break into. She steals things that have monetary value—the ruby, Dax’s seal. And she steals things that are valuable only to you—like the tapestry I gave you and your uniforms.”
Asha leaned back, planting her palms on the red-brown earth beneath her. “So,” she said thoughtfully, looking out over the dragon fields, “what is the brashest, most valuable thing she could possibly steal from the king’s commandant?”
They both fell silent, thinking.
Safire didn’t have any valuables—other than maybe her throwing knives, which were a gift from Asha. She might have royal blood running through her veins, but there had been nothing royal about her upbringing. Safire didn’t like to think about the time before the revolt, when she was kept out of sight, forbidden to touch or even stand near her cousins, taunted and abused while the palace staff looked the other way.
Just as she was shaking off the memories, a sound issued from across the field.
It was a series of quiet, nervous clicks familiar to both Safire and Asha, who looked up. Across the grassy plain, away from the commotion of the dragons and their riders, a tall, thin boy with coppery hair and freckled skin made his way toward them.
Torwin.
Several paces behind Torwin walked an ivory-scaled dragon with one broken horn. He stepped warily, casting his gaze ahead and behind, looking like he would bolt at the slightest irregular movement. Safire knew this dragon. His name was Sorrow.
Several weeks ago, while Asha and Torwin were collecting old stories in Firefall—a city west of Darmoor—they’d found this half-starved creature chained in the courtyard of a wealthy home, with an iron muzzle locked around his jaws. He’d been severely abused by the children of the house, who were keeping him as a pet.
As a result, Sorrow let very few people get close. He stayed deep in the Rift mountains and never came near the city. Asha didn’t think he’d ever pair with a rider, because he was so mistrustful of humans. A few had tried, but the bond that normally formed in first flight never took.