“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I have been investigating a mystery for the last twenty years or so,” said Smolder. “Occasionally I ask other dragons what they think. Invariably, they disappoint me. But you seem unusual — more unusual than most — so I figured I’d try again. Ever hopeful, that’s me.”
“Twenty years?” Sunny said. “I hope it’s not a very urgent mystery.”
Smolder chuckled, then said, “Well, it rather is. But it’s been resolutely impossible to solve nonetheless.” He led the way through a room of pillars, all of them carved with swirls that looked like dragon tails, and into a long hallway lined with sparkling rust-colored tiles in a spiraling pattern. Sunny brushed one of the tiles with her wing, thinking that it was the first beautiful thing she’d seen in this palace.
The hallway slanted down and down and down until Sunny was sure they were underground, and finally it ended in a room with four locked doors.
Smolder walked to each door and opened them with large brass keys from around his neck, revealing four rooms of roughly equal size, with thick stone walls and plain gray stone floors. All of them were completely empty.
“The rumors about the SandWing treasure were never entirely accurate,” he said as he did this, twisting the keys in his claws. “We were very wealthy, yes, but we weren’t quite stupid enough to keep it all in one place. Almost that stupid, but not quite. We kept only our most prized possessions in our treasure rooms — along with a backup stash of rubies, diamonds, and gold in case we ever needed it. So it wasn’t our entire wealth or a palace full of treasure that went missing. Only the contents of these four rooms … but they contained quite a lot.”
He held up a talon for Flower to climb onto, then set her carefully on the floor in front of the treasure rooms. She looked even smaller next to the massive rooms. Sunny realized that Flower was probably small enough to squeeze under the doors.
The scavenger put her tiny paws on her hips, tossed her head fur back, and looked for all the world like she was bored of this dragon game.
“So here’s what I’d like to know,” Smolder said. “How did three scavengers about this size — two, actually, once they lost this one — manage to carry four rooms’ worth of treasure off into the desert?”
Sunny studied the little scavenger in front of her. It was actually a very good question. Flower was only about as tall as a full-grown dragon’s head. She had no wings and miniature, practically useless paws.
Well, maybe not that useless, she thought, remembering the sketch of her face from the night before.
“Could they have built something to carry it?” she said, crouching to examine Flower’s paws. The scavenger squeaked at her. “I saw the ruins of one of their villages on my way here. Their dens look like real houses, and there was an iron bell in the wreckage, too. So they’re good at making things … maybe they made some kind of wagon to carry it in?”
“A wagon would have left tracks across the sand,” Smolder pointed out. “The only tracks we found were hoofprints — three horses, galloping flat out. You tell me how they could do that with more than two bags of gold on their backs, let alone all of this.”
“Oh, you found prints?” Sunny said, stepping into the first room and peering around. “Didn’t you follow them?” She moved to the second room, which was the same as the first, except perhaps with a little more sand on the floor.
“Follow them!” said Smolder. “If only we’d thought of that.”
“Aha,” Sunny said. “That was definitely sarcasm.”
He gave her a crooked smile. “Well, look. There was a lot of confusion when we first found the queen’s body. We all heard her roaring in the middle of the night — it must have woken every dragon for miles. That’s what brought us outside the palace, thinking something terrible had happened. All we found at first was Mother, lying there, dead. Had one of her daughters killed her? Why not in a proper duel? Who else would dare kill the SandWing queen? Who else could — and why wouldn’t they admit to it? The first clue we found was this little creature, trying to hide by burying herself in a dune. She was injured and, of course, had no treasure on her, apart from a cute little claw-sword thing.”
Smolder reached into the bag around his neck and, somewhat startlingly, produced a banana. He handed it to Flower, who sat down and began peeling it with expert little twitches of her slender paws.