In the Kingdom of the Sea, a class of young dragonets on an overnight trip was terrified half to death by a pale phantom that dove from the sky. It swept around the island where they were camped, hissing and snapping, and at least five of the dragonets swore it glared at them with beady black eyes. Rumors spread quickly that the tribe was being haunted … by the vengeful ghost of Albatross.
And far to the north, in the Ice Kingdom, in the midst of a blizzard, Winter’s brother Hailstorm stood before the wall of rankings, shivering with fever. His claws brushed over the last spot, where Winter’s name had been not long ago.
Why is this happening to our tribe?
Are we being punished for what happened between me and Winter?
A dragon trudged through the snow toward him but had to stop halfway, his body wracked with deep, lung-churning coughs.
“Is there news?” Hailstorm asked. “Are my parents any better?”
“No,” the other IceWing wheezed. “They’re getting worse. But there’s something else — someone else.”
Hailstorm waited through another storm of coughs. “What is it?” he said finally. “What’s happened?”
“It’s Queen Glacier,” said the other dragon. “She got the plague first, three days ago.”
“I know,” said Hailstorm. The world was swimming before his eyes. Heat blurred his vision, pounded through his blood.
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s over,” said the messenger. Snow covered his wings, his tail; snow piled up around his talons, consuming him from all sides. He bowed his head as though he was ready to sink into it and become a part of the frozen landscape forever.
“The queen of the IceWings is dead.”
“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 thous
and 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.
TUI T. SUTHERLAND is the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling Wings of Fire series, the Menagerie trilogy, and the Pet Trouble series, as well as a contributing author to the bestselling Spirit Animals and Seekers series (as part of the Erin Hunter team). In 2009, she was a two-day champion on Jeopardy! She lives in Massachusetts with her wonderful husband, two adorable sons, and one very patient dog. To learn more about Tui’s books, visit her online at www.tuibooks.com.
Text copyright © 2017 by Tui T. Sutherland
Map and border design © 2017 by Mike Schley
Dragon illustrations © 2017 by Joy Ang
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First printing, January 2017
Book design by Phil Falco
Cover art © 2017 by Joy Ang
Cover design by Phil Falco
e-ISBN 978-0-545-68542-9
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