Sunny caught up to her outside, where the SkyWing was curled up small in the middle of the sand, rubbing her claws together.
“She’s wrong,” Sunny said to Peril’s back. She hesitated, glancing back at Smolder and Thorn as Smolder relocked the tower. “Don’t let her make you hate yourself. I can’t promise you anything about Clay, but I think — I mean, if I know him at all, I can tell you the way to his heart is by helping his friends.” Although I cannot picture him with you. The kindest dragon in Pyrrhia … and someone who’s killed who knows how many dragons? How could you ever deserve him? She didn’t say any of that out loud, though. If she was being perfectly honest, she’d have to admit to herself that she’d never think anyone was worthy of Clay.
Peril sniffed and then nodded.
“And I don’t think you’re a monster,” Sunny added, thinking, You’ve been monstrous, but maybe you can change. I have to believe you can change. “You’re a dragon like anyone else. You can remake yourself however you want to.”
Peril snorted. “Easy for you to say.”
Not really, Sunny thought. My friends think they know who I am, too, no matter how much I try to show them I’m more than that.
“You don’t have to set Scarlet free,” Sunny reminded her. “You could come with me instead.”
Peril tossed her head, folding her wings back. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
Which means “I don’t want any more sympathy right now,” Sunny thought.
She turned back toward the tower as her mother and Smolder approached.
“I think we have something that belongs to you,” Smolder was saying to Thorn. “If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll go check Burn’s library.”
Thorn gave him a suspicious look and he chuckled. “Or you can come along, but it’s rather a mess, is all.” He glanced at Peril. “Lots of papers everywhere.”
“I’ll wait here,” Peril said sadly. She drew her tail in close to herself, leaving a moon-shaped swathe in the sand.
“Lead on,” Thorn said to Smolder. Sunny joined them, and they headed into yet another twisting set of corridors, these ones lined with flickering diamond-shaped mirrors that caught the sunlight from small holes in the roof and walls.
“Mother,” Sunny said as they walked. “What’s going on? I thought you hated NightWings. Why did you think you might care about that one?”
Thorn stopped and waited until Smolder was far ahead, picking through his keys with a bright, brassy jingling sound.
“I don’t hate all NightWings,” Thorn said quietly. “I mean, I’m not fond of them, and I don’t trust them, as a rule. But I’m looking for one in particular, an animus dragon named Stonemover.”
“Because he did something to my egg?” Sunny guessed. “Is that why?”
“Not exactly. Well, ha — I guess in a manner of speaking,” Thorn said, glancing up at the skylights with an odd half smile.
Sunny stared at her. She had a pretty good idea what that look meant. “He isn’t,” she whispered.
“You wondered why you don’t look like a regular SandWing,” Thorn said.
“So it’s because —” Sunny’s claws trembled with shock. Of all the theories she’d ever imagined … yes, this one had crossed her mind, but of all the tribes she’d wondered about, never this one, never, never this one.
“Yes, Sunny,” said Thorn, her voice falling like drops of water into the stillness between them. “It’s because you’re half NightWing.”
“But the NightWings are awful!” Sunny cried. “I don’t want to be anything like them!”
“So don’t be,” her mother said. She started walking again, and Sunny hurried to keep up. “No one’s making you be awful. And didn’t you say you’re friends with one?”
“Starflight is different,” Sunny said.
“So was Stonemover,” said Thorn. “At least, I thought so. It’s been a long time.”
Sunny’s scales seemed suddenly too large, or maybe too small. Everything felt wrong, as if she was wearing someone else’s wings. Half NightWing, by all the moons. “Please tell me about him. I want to know everything. I mean, I think I do. Do I? How did you fall in love with a NightWing, of all the tribes?”
Thorn folded her wings back and ducked under a low archway. “Eight years ago, I met a dragon, out in the sands not far from here, actually. His scales were like the desert sky at night and he was always nervous, in a sweet, worried way, like no other dragon I’d ever met. Remember, I grew up in the Scorpion Den. There you have to be tough and cutthroat all the time, or you’re dead. I liked the way Stonemover fidgeted and the questions he was always asking, and I liked that he wasn’t pretending to be scarier and meaner than he really was. He was just himself. And he was very smart.”
“He sounds a lot like Starflight,” Sunny said. She wondered if that meant anything. If she was like her mother, did that mean she would end up in love with a dragon who was like her father? Was that her type? Was that her destiny, her and Starflight together?