Deserter

by Tui T. Sutherland

  “Oh, good,” Dune said sarcastically, stuffing his nose into the blankets. “Just in time.”

  “We’ll be more cautious in the future,” Six-Claws said. The sun was starting to rise off to his left, casting dazzling sunspots in the corners of his eyes. “We’ll find a dragon we can truly trust and respect, and then we’ll have a reason to be loyal. I believe that dragon exists. You’ll see.”

  “Wonderful,” Dune muttered. “Can’t wait.”

  Six-Claws glanced over at Kindle. She was blinking away tears, outlined by the halo of the rising sun.

  “I hope you’re right,” she said.

  “Me too,” he said, and they flew on together, south toward the Scorpion Den, toward an uncertain future, toward that tiny thread of hope.

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  His earliest memory was the voices that came from outside the darkness.

  “Are you sure it’s time? Now? Tonight?”

  “Yes. NightWing mothers always know. And it’s the brightest night, like Foreseer said it would be. Three full moons … we haven’t had a thrice-moonborn dragonet in over a century! Snakes and centipedes, quit pacing. It makes me want to bite your ear off.”

  “Try anything like that and I’ll enchant all your teeth to fall out.”

  A slight pause. “Arctic. I was just kidding.”

  “Right. Me too.”

  He couldn’t understand the words yet, but he was flooded with the emotions that poured from both minds. One (Mother, he knew without knowing) was absorbed with worry, protective, ready to love and defend and rage at a moment’s turn. The other radiated resentment and cold anger, rotten around the edges.

  A scratching noise, and he felt the world tilting. Suddenly there was light, dim and soft but there, beyond the wall he had only just discovered around him. The light was calling him: Come out, come out. Come out now.

  “Why are you moving them?” the angry voice demanded. “We leave ours buried in the snow.”

  “Ours have to hatch in the moonlight,” Mother answered. “Stop scowling at me. It’s completely safe. NightWings have been doing this for hundreds of years.”

  There was a sharp, loud tap near his ear.

  “Don’t touch them!”

  A dizzying rush of motion, followed by warmth and stillness.

  “Why are they two different colors?” asked the voice he didn’t like, as loud and splintery and jagged as the tap had been. “Is it because of us? Maybe that one’s more of an IceWing?”

  “No,” she said. “Most NightWing eggs are black, but the ones that hatch under full moons turn silver like this. I don’t know why that one’s still black. They should hatch at the same time.”

  “Something is wrong with it,” he muttered.

  “Nothing,” said Mother, “is wrong with my dragonets.”

  The world tilted again, and he felt himself settling into a place that wouldn’t roll or shift so easily when he moved.

  Now he could sense something else — another heartbeat, slow and steady and very close by. He reached for her mind, but there was only peace and quiet there. None of the urgency to escape that he felt. He knew he didn’t have forever. Now, that’s what he had, only now.

  “We’re up too high,” grumbled the angry voice. “They could fall. This is a stupid tradition. We should have taken them back to the Ice Kingdom to hatch.”

  “So they could freeze the moment they came out?” Mother said acerbically.

  “They wouldn’t,” he growled. “They are half IceWing, remember.”

  “And your mother would have been so pleased to meet them,” she snapped. “At least my family won’t kill our dragonets on sight. They’ll help us protect them.”

  “Your family has nothing to complain about. I brought royal IceWing blood to their line.”

  Mother hissed dangerously. “I see. I’m so sorry about mixing it with my peasant NightWing blood.”

  A burst of violence, of bloody scales and frozen claws, flashed through the dragonet’s mind. His mother was in danger. Bad things were about to happen. But he could stop it. He just had to come out now.

  He pressed his talons hard against the walls around him, shoving and kicking and straining. A satisfying crack, and the sensation of something giving way beneath his back claws.

  “He’s coming, look.” It worked. They were both distracted from their anger, especially Mother, all her thoughts now on her dragonet, her mind shimmering with excitement.

  He tried to reach the quiet heartbeat again. If he’d had the words, he would have thought Come out with me! Just try! You have to fight!

  But he didn’t have those words yet, and she wasn’t listening in any case.

  “There’s a storm coming. Does that make a difference to your moon superstitions?”

  “I don’t think so, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll be out before it gets here. Look how strong he is.” A moment, a pulse where they almost shared the same emotion, and then she added, “They’re not superstitions, by the way. You don’t have to be a rhinoceros nostril just because you don’t understand something.”

  The danger flashed before him again. Time to fight harder. He dug in his claws and squirmed, pushing in every direction at once.

  The light, the light, the light wanted him out, wanted to run its talons over his wings, drip through his scales, fill him with silver power. He wanted that power, too, all of it, all of it.

  CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.

  The walls fell away.

  The moons poured in.

  Three silver eyes in the sky, huge and perfectly round, with darkness all around them. It felt as if they were sinking into his chest, melting into his eyes. He wanted to scoop them into his talons and swallow them whole.

  He was in a carved stone nest lined with black fur, at the peak of a sharp promontory. Another egg sat quietly in the nest, nearly camouflaged against the fur and the shadows.

  Below him stretched a vast landscape of caverns and ravines, glowing with firelight and echoing with the flutter of wings. It looked as though a giant dragon had raked the ground with her claws, digging secret canyons and caves into the rock all across the terrain, some of them stretching toward the starlit sea in the distance.

  After several heartbeats he realized there were two large dragons behind him, their wings drawn tight against the wind that buffeted them all. One was black as the night, one pale as the moons. He glanced down at his scales, but he didn’t have to see their color to know he belonged with the dark one. That was Mother. She sparked with anger from snout to tail, but there was immense room inside her for love, and she adored him already, heart and soul. He could feel it. It filled him like the moonlight did, setting the world quickly into understandable shapes in his head. He loved her, too, immediately and forever.

  The danger came from the white dragon. This was Father, some kind of partner to the dragon who cared. The newly hatched dragonet could hardly look at him without seeing a spiral of confusing flashes: pain, fury, screaming dragons, and blood, everywhere, blood. This white dragon had done something terrible that haunted him, and he might do worse someday. Father’s mind had patches of damp, rotten vileness all over it.

  The dragonet immediately wanted to turn him into a fireball and blow his ashes away. But inside Father, hidden under layers of ice, pulsed a small, warm ember of love for Mother. That was the thing that saved him.

  Wait and see, thought the dragonet. He did not understand yet that he could see the future. He had no idea what the flashes meant. He couldn’t follow the paths that were unfolding in his brain; cause and effect and consequences were all still beyond him. But in his mother’s mind he found the idea of hope, and in his father’s mind he traced the outline of something called patience.

  He could wait. There was much still to come between him and this father-shaped dragon.

  “Darkstalker,” said Mother. “Hello
, darling.” She held out her talons and he climbed into them willingly, content to be closer to that warmth.

  “Darkstalker?” Father snorted. “You must be joking. That’s the creepiest name I’ve ever heard.”

  “It is not,” she snapped, and the dragonet bared his teeth in sympathy, but neither of them noticed. “The darkness is his prey. He chases back the dark, like a hero.”

  “Sounds more like he creeps through the dark. Like a stalker.”

  “Stop being horrible. It’s not up to you. In my kingdom, mothers choose their dragonets’ names.”

  “In my kingdom, the dragon with the highest rank in the family chooses the dragonets’ names and the queen must approve them.”

  “And of course you think your ‘rank’ is higher than mine,” she snarled. “But we’re not in your kingdom. My dragonets will never set foot in your frozen wasteland. We are here, whether you like it or not, and he is my son, and his name is Darkstalker.”

  Father’s eyes, like fragments of ice, studied Darkstalker’s every scale, and Darkstalker could feel the cold, congealing weight of Father’s resentment.

  “He looks every inch a NightWing,” Father growled. “Not a shred of me in him at all.”

  Suspicion, hatred, outrage flashing on both sides, but none of it spoken.

  “Fine,” said Father at last. “You can have your sinister little Darkstalker. But I want to name the other one.”

  Mother hesitated, glancing at the unhatched egg, which was still black. Darkstalker listened as her mind turned it over, already half detached. She wasn’t sure anyone would ever come out of that egg. She was ready to give all her love to Darkstalker, her perfect thrice-moonborn dragonet. All of it, and he was ready to take it.

  But Darkstalker knew his sister was in that egg. Alive, but not restless. Quiet. She didn’t care for the moons that had called him forth. She couldn’t hear them.

  Something tingled in his claws.

  He could change that.

  He could touch her egg and summon her. He knew it, somehow; he could see in his mind how her egg would turn silver under his talons, how it would splinter and crack open as she scrambled out. He could see the beautiful, odd-looking dragonet that would come out, and he could see the moons sharing their power with her, too.

  Then they would be the same. She would be born under three moons as well. She would have the same power as him … and the same love from Mother.

  Which he already had to share with the undeserving ice monster across from him.

  No. This was his. All he had to do was nothing. His sister would come out in her own time, tomorrow when the moons were no longer full. Then he would be the only special one.

  “All right,” said Mother. “If that egg hatches, you can name the dragonet inside. Only … remember she has to grow up in the NightWing tribe. It’ll be hard enough — just, try to be kind, is all. Think of her future and how she’ll need to fit in.”

  Father nodded, seething internally at being instructed like a low-ranked dragonet in training.

  She’ll be all right, Darkstalker thought. A thousand futures dropped away before him as he made his first choice. Futures where his sister joined his quest for power; futures where she fought him and stopped him; futures where they were best friends; futures where one of them killed the other, or vice versa. As Darkstalker folded his talons together, choosing to keep them still for tonight, every possible future with a thrice-moonborn sister disappeared.

  He saw them blink out, and although he didn’t know exactly what it meant, he felt somehow a tiny bit safer, a tiny bit bigger and stronger.

  Sorry, little sister, he thought, not in so many words, but with visions of his future cascading through his mind. This is my mother. Those are my full moons.

  This is my world now.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Tui T. Sutherland

  Border design © 2016 by Mike Schley

  Illustrations © 2016 by Joy Ang

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  First edition, April 2016

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-95762-5