The ray of weak daylight that cut off some of my vision vanished as something blocked the opening, accompanied by a significant amount of unhappy growling. Being restricted to shadow sight as I was, I got one good look at the dragon who was laboriously making her way in. Then she spat a small stream of liquid fire onto the floor, blinding me entirely as the chamber filled with light and billowing smoke. But in that one look, I’d seen enough.

  I Shifted back around a corner, then awkwardly pressed myself through the corridor and into the room, closing my second eyelids against the smoke. “Sandstorm!” I called with relief. “I am so glad to see you!”

  “Whelp?” she called back, her head reappearing in the small opening. “Little Draka!” she exclaimed when she laid eyes on me through the haze. “You are alive! I thought the big red wyvern got you. Grandfather shall be pleased!”

  “I am, yeah,” I said uncertainly. “You thought I was dead?”

  “Oh, yes! We saw Behold Her And Know That All Things Must End leaving this place in a hurry last night. I tracked you and her by scent to a hole in the ground, but you did not come out or respond when we called. We assumed she must have killed you with her breath.”

  “It was a near thing. But then, why are you digging? What is the use to you of getting my humans out if you thought I was dead?”

  “Oh,” she said dismissively, “Grandfather thought the healers you spoke of may be useful. And your mother had apparently said something about liking some of them, so it would be a favor of sorts to her, I suppose. And I figured they might know where your hoard is. I hoped to claim it.”

  That… did not inspire me to move any closer to her, having just seen her spit a stream of what might as well be napalm. “If I was dead,” I said, more a statement than a question.

  “Indeed,” she said, and perhaps I imagined it, but I thought I heard a small note of regret there. “But you are not, and I am pleased to see it! Especially after Grandfather decided it was too much work to expand the hole he made, and sent me down to continue clearing these strange slanted passages.” She looked around as much as the small hole would allow and said, “This whole cave is strange.”

  “It’s not a cave,” I said, hazarding a few steps toward her. The patch of flaming liquid she’d spat was shrinking quickly. Good to know, I decided. Whatever it was burned out fast. “It’s a room, built by humans.”

  “They like straight lines,” she commented, still looking around. “Is the female human with the bent stick and the stories still alive?”

  “I am,” came Herald’s voice from behind me. “Hello, Great Lady, and thank you for your hard work.”

  “Oh, excellent!” Sandstorm said, sounding more excited to find Herald alive than she did me. “Human, entertain me with stories while I dig away the rest of these stones!”

  “One moment!” I objected. “Herald, go tell the others, would you? I still don’t want them packing up the camp; until Behold Her is gone and it’s safe to move, I think we should use this as a somewhat safe place to rest. But tell them that they can relax for a while.”

  “Of course,” Herald said, leaving down the corridor.

  Sandstorm huffed. “Why did you send her away? I wanted to hear more about this theater thing she told me about last time.”

  “She’ll be back,” I promised. “The other humans have been worrying for a long time, and she’s going to tell them that there’s no danger. We heard a crash. I assume that was Indomitable breaking through into the cellar?”

  “When he made the hole into this place? Maybe. It was quite loud.” She paused, the stones around her shifting and grinding against one another as she turned her head this way and that. “Are all your humans alive?”

  “They are,” I confirmed. “They all made it down safely before Behold Her And Know That All Things Must End collapsed the palace.”

  “Good,” she said, pausing again. I got the distinct impression that she wasn’t going to continue hauling stones until Herald was back. “Are they all as entertaining as the female?”

  “Her name is Herald,” I sighed. “It’s going to get very confusing if you keep calling her the female. More than half of them are.”

  “Oh. Herald,” she said slowly, like she was seeing how the name felt in her mouth. “Do they all have names?”

  “Yes. All humans have names.”

  “Oh. I did not know that.”

  “Well, they do.”

  “I will learn their names, if they are interesting.”

  I did my best not to sigh. “I’m sure they’ll appreciate that. Humans like when someone makes an effort to learn their name.”

  “Like dragons,” Sandstorm mused. “Do they all have whelp names?”

  “Whelp names?” I asked. “Like… short names?”

  “Mrrrm,” she rumbled, and I took that as a yes.

  “Some have longer names than others… and some have two names. But—”

  “Are they older?”

  “What?”

  “The ones with two names. Are they older than the others?”

  “Um… no? Herald has two names, and she is the youngest of the humans here. But…” I racked my brain for a way to explain how family names worked here, and quickly settled on one that I thought she would understand. “The ones with two names have bigger hoards than the ones with only one.”

  “Oh! That makes sense,” the dragonette said, then immediately lost interest and changed subjects. “What happened?”

  “To me? You’re asking why I’m down here,” I guessed. Then, when she didn’t object, I told her how we’d hidden in the underground chamber—which I had to describe as a human-made cave for her to really understand what I was talking about—and how Behold Her had found the entrance and begun to fill the place with her breath. I was trying to make her understand doors when Herald returned, along with Mak and Maglan.

  At the sight of them, Sandstorm’s face lit up. “Herald!” she said with what I thought must be much more excitement than she intended. “You brought more humans!”

  “I did, Great Lady,” she agreed. “They wished to see you.”

  More like they insisted on coming along now that there was no danger, I thought. Herald was a terrible liar. But Sandstorm didn’t know the first thing about reading people, so she entirely missed the hesitation in Herald’s voice.

  “Do they have names?” the dragonette asked curiously, poking her head as far into the small chamber as she could. A few small pieces of smashed masonry fell in when her neck dislodged them.

  “They do,” Herald told her. “Great Lady, this is Maglan, my… mate.”

  Mak and Maglan both looked as calm as I’d ever seen them around Embers. Meaning that Mak was almost serene, while Maglan smelled faintly of fear but controlled his anxiety well enough.

  “This is a male, then?” Sandstorm asked, focusing on Mag. “Bring him closer.”

  Herald looked to me for confirmation, and I gave her a small bob of my head. And while Mag pretty clearly didn’t like it, at Herald’s gentle prodding he approached the dragonette, coughing softly in the lingering smoke of the dead fire.

  Sandstorm sniffed him carefully, perhaps remembering what I’d said about being gentle with Herald. Once she was satisfied she said, “Very well. And the little one, is he a male, too?”

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  “Ah… no, Great One?” Herald said, puzzled. “This is my sister.”

  “But she is small,” Sandstorm stated, as though this was an excellent argument. “The male is smaller than you, and this one, your sister, is smaller still.” She paused, pondering this, then asked, “Is she very young, then? I thought you were the youngest of the humans.”

  “I am,” Herald confirmed, thrown somewhat off kilter by the, to her, no doubt odd reasoning. “She is older than me by several years. Let me start over. Great Lady, this is Drakonum Makanna, my older sister and the head of my House.”

  “Oh?” Sandstorm looked at me. “So she has a large hoard?”

  “She does,” I confirmed.

  “But she is tiny!”

  “Humans do not grow with their hoards,” I explained. “Only with time. And it is very common for human females to be smaller than males.”

  “Oh.” Sandstorm looked between the three humans, but finally seemed to accept my explanation as she declared, “Humans are quite different from dragons, are they not?”

  “They are indeed,” I agreed.

  Sandstorm went back to clearing out the stairwell after that, while Herald stood by the hole telling her random things about the great institution that was Karakani—or rather, Sareyan—theater. There was very little rhyme or reason to how she moved between subjects; Sandstorm would latch on the seemingly most random things, so that Herald might move from talking about a particular play, perhaps describing the masques used, to explaining why the actors wore masques at all, only to then have to talk for several minutes about human facial expressions, which confused the dragonette no end.

  “She’s very curious, isn’t she?” Mak asked, smiling widely.

  “That she is,” I agreed, shaking my head. I was pretty sure that I liked Sandstorm, but she could be tiring. “Her father wasn’t particularly interested in humans, so everything is very new to her.”

  “But she speaks Karakani?” Mak continued. Not as an objection, though; from her tone it was more of a leading question.

  “She does. And Tavvanarian.”

  “And presumably all sorts of languages,” she stated.

  “Seems likely, yeah. I don’t see how she could have learned Karakani somewhere off the far coast of Vanar.”

  “So she’s got the Advancement that lets her speak, very specifically, all human languages.”

  “Also seems likely,” I agreed.

  “Sounds to me like she was interested in humans before she ever met Herald.”

  “Huh.” I thought about it for a bit. “She was pretty dismissive of the whole idea of even talking to humans when I first met her, but it did sound kind of like a learned opinion.”

  “And she’s your cousin, of sorts?”

  “I suppose? I don’t know what else to call her. Her several times great-grandfather is my mother’s uncle.”

  “So your second cousin, however many times removed.”

  “Something like that.”

  She gave me a pleased little hum. “That’s nice.”

  “Oh?” I said, then immediately regretted it. I really didn’t want to sound like Sandstorm just then, even if she was legitimately helping us.

  “Yes. When we met you, you were all alone in the world. Now you have a mother, a granduncle, and even a cousin. Maybe she could even be a friend. Especially if you share an interest in humans. It’s something you can bond over, you know?”

  “A friend, huh?” Could Sandstorm be a friend? I’d promised Indomitable to let my cousin stay on my island. Having her here would be a damn lot more pleasant if we were friendly. “Maybe,” I said. Then I thought of the rest of what she’d said and rested my head on the floor as my mood sank. “I’m not so sure that I have a mother anymore, though”

  “I’m sure she only needs some time to digest what she’s learned. Everything I saw of the two of you together suggested that she adores you,” Mak said, sitting down crosslegged beside me. “And while it’s unfortunate that she left the way she did, giving Behold Her an opening, well… dragons are people, but they aren’t human. I’m sure she doesn’t think the way we do.”

  “You’re right about that,” I said, huffing softly. “I hope you’re right about the rest.”

  It didn’t take long for Sandstorm to finish. As she got the larger chunks of fallen masonry out of there, the smaller ones naturally fell into the room where we were waiting, and Maglan and Mak piled them in a corner. When she was finally done I saw her there in the stairwell, squeezed in so that she must have had to shuffle backward with every load she removed, and I felt rather bad about how impatient I’d been with her, even if it hadn’t been to her face. She’d been pretty clear that she was only there because Indomitable wanted her to, but she’d still put herself through some real discomfort and inconvenience for our sake.

  “Thank you,” I told her after she pushed her way into the room with us. “I appreciate all your effort.”

  “You should!” she replied without a shred of embarrassment. “Now come. We should let grandfather know that you are alive. And I think your mother will wish to speak with you, too.”

  I froze. Just stopped entirely for a moment. Not a sound, not a movement, barely even a thought. “Excuse me,” I said carefully, “did you just say that my mother will wish to speak with me? As in, she is here?”

  “Yes!” She didn’t even try to hide her impatience. “She returned yesterday, but has been very busy trying to kill that ruby wyvern. And no matter how many times Behold Her And Know That All Things Must End flees, she keeps coming back. It is very annoying.”

  “Right. Yeah.” The words just came. For a moment I thought it was Conscience who’d spoken through me, but no, that had just been my mouth working on autopilot while my mind tried to catch up.

  Embers had returned, and she was actively trying to kill Behold Her. That she apparently hadn’t succeeded yet, and that Behold Her kept coming back despite repeated attempts, was disturbing, but it wasn’t the important thing. I allowed myself a glimmer of hope. Embers was back. She was trying to kill the one who had hurt me. The optimistic reading here was that she was furious that someone had harmed her child because she still cared about me, and would be overjoyed to see me alive. The somewhat less optimistic possibility was that she was furious that someone had harmed her child because that was an insult to her and she didn’t give a damn about me, but I doubted very much that she would hurt me if she put so much effort into avenging me.

  Of course, there was also the extra pessimistic version, where she’d been moved to a murderous rage by the destruction of the shrine and either didn’t give a damn about me, or intended to kill me and everyone I loved. But if I believed that I might as well give up now, because there was simply no way for me to escape her in the long run. Even the deepest part of this underground complex wouldn’t give me any shelter. She always knew where Herald and I were, and I’d seen her dig through solid stone like warm ice cream; hiding simply wouldn’t work.

  Besides, it wasn’t like I could avoid her now unless I wanted to arouse some serious suspicion.

  “Do you think she’s up there now?” I asked a little nervously as Sandstorm tucked her wings in tightly against her body, preparing to squeeze back up the stairs.

  “Maybe,” she said with complete disinterest. “She comes and goes.” Then she began her slow journey upward. It was quite a feat at her size, and as I waited for her to vacate the stairs I turned to Herald and asked, “Do you think you should come? In case Embers is up there, I mean?”

  “We shall come,” Instinct replied through Herald’s mouth. “And if she is not there, then we shall tell Indomitable about us, if Mother has not told him already. The Herald is right; we should have told Mother about our shared existence before she learned of it herself.”

  “I don’t remember you pushing for honesty,” I grumbled.

  Instinct somehow made Herald growl with annoyance; not like a human imitating a growl, but an actual deep rumble that I had no idea how she managed. Much like how Conscience had spoken through my entirely draconic mouth without hissing, something I’d given up on.

  Once Sandstorm was entirely up the stairs she didn’t waste a second. She turned around, looking down the stairs and asking, “Well? Come!” then vanished with a leap. Frantic scrabbling came from upstairs as I ascended, the girls and Maglan in tow, and I reached the top just in time to see Sandstorm awkwardly heave herself over the edge of a gaping hole in the ceiling.

  I heaved a deep, disappointed sigh. In the end they, or more likely Indomitable, hadn't bothered with clearing the stairs; he’d simply broken through the floor into the cellar, which must have been the loud crash we heard earlier. Most of the room we were in that was away from the stairs down was filled with chunks of broken stone and other detritus, too much to be just what Sandstorm had removed from the stairwell down to the lower lever. I could only assume that Sandstorm had moved the remains of the ceiling out of the way to give herself room to work.

  Unfortunately for me the ceiling on this level was ten feet tall, and that ceiling, being the floor of the palace and the ground itself, was two feet thick. I was forced to make an awkward jump up to the edge, then scrabble up best I could. I heaved myself out of the hole that now connected the cellars to the open air, one good wing flapping awkwardly and feet scrabbling against the only piece of wall in reach of the edge; if Sandstorm hadn’t had just as rough of a time getting out before me, I would have been terribly embarrassed.

  It was probably ungrateful of me, but would it have killed them to consider that no one down there was a dragon with two functioning wings? Hell, even my cousin hadn’t had an easy time of it.

  And because I couldn’t carry the humans up there—I really couldn’t risk letting Indomitable see me being treated with anything but the utmost respect by the humans—we had to wait for Maglan to go to the camp and return with a coil of rope. Then I had to stand there, holding the rope and enduring Sandstorm’s very curious looks while the humans climbed up.

  Other than the wind and the gray-brown billows of dust it swept into the air, the ruins of the palace and the small patch of wasteland surrounding it was silent and empty. No one was waiting for us. All it took was an upward glance for me to recognize the sinuous shape of my granduncle gliding in lazy circles high above us, but he was alone. Mother was nowhere to be seen.

  Not seeing Embers there was both a disappointment and a relief. At least now I’d have a moment to unburden myself to Indomitable.

  “Sandstorm,” I said, “would you please go up there and tell your grandfather that I’m alive, and that I wish to speak with him?”

  “Why me?” she asked immediately, giving me an annoyed look, like I was just being lazy. Then her eyes landed on my ruined wing, and she turned her head away in embarrassment and said, “Ah, yes. That. I will be back in a moment.” Then she leaped into the air, rising quickly to join our elder in the sky.

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