“Always,” Thorn said fiercely.
“I’ll see you soon,” Sunny said, tilting her wings.
“Sunny!” Thorn called. “Be careful!”
“I will,” Sunny called back, already soaring toward the mountains.
“No, I mean —” Thorn swooped out of the formation for a moment, catching up to her and circling her in the air. “I mean, if you go see your father. I know you’re thinking about it.” She nodded at the line of mountains, where the jagged peak of Jade Mountain towered darkly over the rest. “Be careful with Stonemover. If all that is true about being an animus … well, I saw him do a lot of magic. We don’t know how much soul he has left.”
“Are you going to go see him?” Sunny asked.
“Someday,” Thorn said with a small flicker of anger in her eyes. “Apparently he’s in no hurry, so I’ll take care of my dragons first.”
“I should do that, too,” Sunny said. “With my dragons, I mean.”
Thorn smiled at her. “See you soon, daughter.”
Sunny watched as the Outclaws soared away across the desert, all their wingbeats together stirring up small sandstorms below them. Then she oriented herself toward the mountains again and flew, beating her wings as fast as they would move.
She couldn’t use the tunnel to the rainforest; she couldn’t risk the trip past Burn’s stronghold to get to it. It would be safer, if longer, to go over the mountains. But she should have a head start on Peril and Scarlet, who had flown the other way and who didn’t know about the tunnels. I hope, she thought. I don’t think there’s any way they could know.
Her breath seemed to come more easily with every wingbeat, even as the forest and the mountains came closer and closer. She was leaving the desert — but she was going back to her friends at last.
The plan was to go straight to the rainforest.
As tempted as Sunny was by the idea of meeting her father, she was more worried about her friends. She needed to get back and warn them, fast.
But the weather had other plans.
A gale-force wind howled down the mountains that night, carrying with it the worst storm Sunny had ever been caught in. Not that she’d encountered many, living in caves her whole life — but there was that one hurricane in the Kingdom of the Sea, and Sunny was pretty sure this was worse.
Or maybe it only felt worse because she was alone and caught outside with no shelter and rapidly becoming very, very wet.
The rain pelted in her eyes and dragged down her wings, while the wind kept trying to slam her into the cliffs, and the whole time, thunder roared as though the clouds were playing drums on the mountaintops. Lightning cracked terrifyingly close to her wings, and Sunny thought, I won’t be able to save anyone if I end up as a fiery heap in a ravine.
She veered toward the peak of Jade Mountain, the one solid thing she could identify in the driving storm.
Will he be there?
Will he want to meet me?
Will he be scary, or awful, or dangerous? Will he be like Orca, the crazy animus SeaWing who killed all those dragonets?
She wished she had Clay or Tsunami with her. That would have been better, if she could have gone back to the rainforest first and gotten one of them to come along, so she didn’t have to meet her mysterious, powerful, potentially homicidal father alone.
But the storm drove her on as if it had talons of its own, dragging her up the mountain with shrieking fury.
Soaking wet, exhausted, and shivering with anxiety, Sunny finally crash-landed in a cave high up on the mountain’s south side. She stumbled to a stop, scraping her scales painfully on the rocky floor, and shook out her wings in a flurry of droplets.
It was dark inside, and Sunny thought it was unlikely that she’d have accidentally wandered into the exact cave where her father lived. Surely there were other caves all over the mountain. But the darkness made her uneasy, and cautiously she breathed out a plume of fire.
Nothing. An empty stone cavern loomed around her, not that different from the ones she’d grown up in. She breathed more fire, letting it warm her from the inside, and searched the cave until she found a thick branch that had been swept inside by the storm. She set it ablaze and held it up to use as a torch.
The flickering light revealed a gap in the rocks in the back corner. When she investigated, she found a sort of natural tunnel that seemed to lead farther into the mountain, to a cave system that probably ran all the way through it.
Sunny hesitated, leaning against the stone wall. Should she rest here and fly on in the morning? Maybe she could leave unnoticed and come back when she had reinforcements.
But how could I get this close to my father and not try to see him?
She thought of Peril and Kestrel, and how Peril had thought they’d have more time to get to know each other. You never know what might happen.