“Are you being Glory now?” Sunny asked. “Queen of Sarcasm?”
“I can be sarcastic, too! She doesn’t get to be queen of everything,” Tsunami grumbled. She tilted her wings to do another sweep over the shoreline. They were on the eastern outskirts of the Mud Kingdom, on the edge of the Kingdom of the Sea. Below them, the ocean rushed up onto the beach and then back, wave upon white-topped wave. The sky was gray from edge to edge, and the air was wet with something that couldn’t decide if it was mist or rain.
It was dreary. Sunny missed the hot, dry desert. You couldn’t even tell it was almost the middle of the day; the sun was well hidden behind those ranks of clouds. Her wings felt unpleasantly damp as she circled around behind Tsunami.
“Where is that blasted MudWing?” Tsunami muttered, scanning the beach.
“I wish we hadn’t had to bring him,” Sunny said. “I’m not convinced he really knows where he’s going. I wish we could have brought our MudWing instead.”
“Our MudWing doesn’t know where the Talons of Peace camp is,” Tsunami pointed out. “Ochre supposedly does.”
Ochre was the disagreeable MudWing Sunny had met in the rainforest; it turned out he was one of the alternate dragonets as well. So he’d grown up with the Talons of Peace and had agreed to go back to them and guide Sunny and Tsunami there.
The other two options, Flame and Fatespeaker, had had slightly more violent reactions. Fatespeaker had declared passionately that she wouldn’t leave Starflight’s side — she said he needed her, which gave Sunny another jealous twinge — and added that the Talons never particularly liked her anyway.
Flame, on the other talon, had thrown an entire bowl of mangoes at them and roared that he wasn’t letting anyone see him with his face all destroyed, least of all the Talons who’d just handed him over to the stupid NightWings in the first place.
So they were stuck with Ochre. Which had meant three days of travel with a dragonet whom Sunny liked less and less. He was like the not-funny, not-adorable opposite of Clay, constantly hungry but in a pushy way instead of a sweetly embarrassed way. He’d even made himself a sack out of leaves with a handle of vines that he could hang over his neck, and he’d filled this with half the fruits in the rainforest, as far as Sunny could tell. That way he could eat and fly at the same time, dripping bright yellow and purple juice all over his brown scales and spattering the ground below them. And, incidentally, refusing to share, not that she wanted anything from a bag he’d drooled all over anyway.
“Besides,” Tsunami added, “Glory still needs Clay back at camp, to help with the NightWings. Especially if Queen Scarlet is on her way.”
“I don’t understand why she hasn’t come after us yet,” Sunny said with a shiver. She glanced down at her own small necklace, a pouch containing the dreamvisitor. They’d been using it for the last few days to check in with her friends back in the rainforest, but so far everything was quiet there. It made Sunny’s scales feel wriggly and oversized, not knowing where Scarlet was and what she was plotting.
Tsunami followed her gaze to the dreamvisitor pouch. “We could have avoided this whole trip,” she pointed out.
Sunny shook her head. “It’s not safe. If we used the dreamvisitor to contact Blister — or even the Talons of Peace — or to check on Scarlet — they might catch a glimpse of the rainforest and realize where we are. Like I figured out where the scavenger was when she dreamvisited me. Or Glory said she caught a glimpse of the weirdling tower behind Scarlet, too. We couldn’t risk it.”
“I know,” Tsunami sighed. “So here we are, looking for the Talons of Peace. My —”
“Your favorite dragons,” Sunny finished for her.
“I don’t trust them,” Tsunami added.
“That’s why you’re here,” Sunny agreed. “Because you think otherwise they might grab me and do something nefarious.”
“Trapping us in an underground cave for six years comes to mind,” Tsunami muttered.
Sunny squinted at a dark shape winging out of the fog up ahead. “That’s Ochre, right?”
“And there’s someone with him,” Tsunami said, snapping her head up and frowning fiercely. “A few someones.” As the group of dragons came closer, she hmmphed with surprise. “I’ve seen that dragon before,” she told Sunny. “The one in the lead, the SeaWing with the black spirals on his scales. I saw him meeting with Riptide, the very first time I saw Riptide in the Kingdom of the Sea. I didn’t realize at the time that he was with the Talons of Peace.”
“He’s flashing something at us,” Sunny pointed out. The SeaWing’s glow-in-the-dark scales were lighting up in some kind of pattern.