Clearly Fatespeaker didn’t know very much about queens or tribes and how they worked. Perhaps the Talons of Peace camp was a little more open to input from all dragons. Or perhaps Fatespeaker would have been like this no matter where she was raised.
She stopped abruptly, frowning and tipping her head from side to side. “How do we get there?” she muttered to herself. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Having a vision?” Starflight asked, recognizing the expression on her face.
“Trying to,” she said. “But all I can see is walls. Rrrgh.”
“Let’s try this way,” Starflight suggested.
They followed winding passages that seemed to be circling the council room, but he couldn’t find any doors that might lead to the place where the queen had been hidden.
But he did find one room with the door open, and it was empty when he peered inside. It was a strange room, too. The space was dominated by a giant map on the wall — Pyrrhia, but with more detail in it than he’d ever seen on any map before. Every inlet, every fjord was drawn with scientific precision. Even the rainforest sparkled with information: the location of the main RainWing village, all the rivers and streams that crisscrossed the jungle, and the two tunnels that led to the Kingdom of Sand and the NightWing island. Each was marked and carefully labeled.
Starflight noticed that the SeaWings’ Summer Palace was noted on there as well, in ink that looked darker and newer than some of the other marks, and he wondered whether the NightWings had only learned of its location when it burned. The Deep Palace was not on there — still a SeaWing secret, apparently.
But strangest of all, the map was covered with tiny squares that were each labeled “Scavenger Den.” There were seven of them, from the outer islands of the Kingdom of the Sea to the peninsula below the Kingdom of Sand; there was even one among the snowy wastes of the Ice Kingdom. And each one had a careful, deliberate X slashed across it in green ink.
What are they doing? Starflight thought, staring at the map. Why track scavengers? What do the X’s mean?
“What’s a scavenger den?” Fatespeaker asked from behind him.
“Have you ever seen a scavenger?” Starflight asked. She shook her head. “They’re these little creatures with hardly any fur, and they run around on two legs, and they love to steal treasure — kind of like magpies or raccoons, but bigger. And sometimes they get pointy sticks and poke dragons with them, which means they can’t be very intelligent.”
“Oh,” Fatespeaker said, “right, like the scavenger who killed Queen Oasis and started the whole war in the first place.”
“Exactly,” Starflight said. He shivered, remembering the only ones he’d ever encountered — the two who’d tried to kill him in Scarlet’s arena. In his nightmares they always stared at him with big, dragonlike eyes, and even though he found them terrifying, he couldn’t help thinking, They’re in the same situation I am. They’re just trying to survive this arena.
“So these dens — that’s where they live?” Fatespeaker reached up and traced the outline of one of the dens with her claw.
“I guess so,” Starflight said. “I’ve never seen one. I always imagined warrens of tunnels — the scrolls say they like to live in big groups, like meerkats. But they try to keep their dens hidden, according to what I’ve read. They’re safer from predators that way.”
“Predators like us,” Fatespeaker said cheerfully.
“I have no idea why the NightWings would care about them,” Starflight said, scratching his head. A theory was bubbling at the back of his mind, but before he could put it together, Fatespeaker slid her talons along to the outer edge of the map and let out a yelp.
“Look! There’s something behind here!”
She unpinned one corner of the map and lifted it up, and sure enough, there was a small tunnel hidden behind it.
“Let’s go,” she whispered, ducking into it with no hesitation.
Starflight’s heart was trying to clamber up his throat and strangle him. But what else could he do? If this tunnel led where it looked like it might — he couldn’t leave Fatespeaker to face Queen Battlewinner alone.
If only Tsunami were here, or Clay! They’d at least be some use in a fight, unlike him.
His claws shook as he lifted the corner of the map and slid into the dark tunnel behind Fatespeaker.
“I’m having a vision!” Fatespeaker whispered dramatically in his ear, nearly making him leap out of his scales. “Of us standing in front of Queen Battlewinner! This is going to work!”
“You scared me half to death,” he said, clutching his chest.
“Sorry,” she said, and even in the dark he could sense her grinning.
“So,” he whispered as they started creeping forward, “in your visions, there is a Queen Battlewinner. She’s alive? She exists?”