Dragonslayer

by Tui T. Sutherland

  “What?” Undauntable could sense a new simmering rage building under his father’s skin. “But there was a dead dragon! The last two spies said he has its tail!”

  “He does, but it turns out it was his brother who did the slaying,” said Boar. “But that one’s a lost cause, your great and powerful lordship. And the Dragonslayer has been utterly disgraced. Neither one is the hero you’re looking for.”

  “Have you come to tell me that you are?” Father said with enormous disdain.

  “No, no.” Boar raised his hands. “That’s not the interesting part of the story, milord. The interesting part is that the Dragonslayer confessed his lies because a dragon showed up in Valor and demanded the treasure back.”

  “Demanded — what?” the lord growled. “How could a dragon say anything?”

  “He didn’t, exactly. But he had someone with him.” Boar paused for dramatic effect. The room was deathly silent, everyone listening with wide-eyed fascination. “The dragon was working with a girl.”

  “A girl?” The Invincible Lord snorted with disgust. “Impossible.”

  “This girl was riding the dragon,” Boar insisted. “I saw it with my own two eyes. She stood up there on his shoulder, and she didn’t say a word, but you could tell: she was the one who understood the dragon. She was the one who really brought the message. She made him roar when she wanted to; she told him when to leave — with the treasure, mind you. There is a girl, sir, who can control dragons.”

  The Invincible Lord stared at him for a long moment. Undauntable tried to study his father’s face without staring too obviously. It looked as though wheels were spinning in his mind, gears clicking into place. Undauntable knew he was already figuring out how to use this to his benefit.

  “Where is this girl now?” he said in a smooth, silky voice.

  “She left with the dragon,” Boar answered. “But she’s out there, sir. She’s the one you want. And she can’t be too hard to find, if she sticks with that dragon. I ain’t never seen one that color before. It was a kind of light orange, like the mountain dragons but all washed out.”

  A shock like lightning ran through Undauntable’s veins.

  Pale orange scales.

  A girl who rides a dragon.

  If there was anyone in the world he could imagine riding a dragon, it was Wren. Had she been bringing him scales from her very own dragon all these years? Hadn’t she been nine when he met her? Had she had her own dragon when she was nine years old?

  And could she really control them?

  He suddenly realized, with a cold, creeping feeling, that his father was staring at him.

  “Everybody out,” said the Invincible Lord. “Boar, good work, and don’t go far. I want every detail of this story.” Undauntable stood, hoping to escape with the rest of the people in the room — but his father caught his arm. “You. Stay.”

  Undauntable could feel his heartbeat like a panicked rabbit in his wrist; he was afraid his father could feel it, too, thrumming through the fingers pressed into his skin.

  I can’t tell him about her. I don’t want him to take Wren away from me.

  But … wouldn’t he be thrilled? Wouldn’t he be pleased that I could finally be of some use to him? That after all this time of doing nothing, it turns out I could bring him the one person he wants now?

  He looked into his father’s cold, predatory eyes. This would finally make me the son he truly wants.

  And yet, when he tried to imagine what would happen to Wren in his father’s power, his heart felt like it was shrinking into a little iron pellet.

  Wren would hate being Father’s puppet. She’d hate being trapped here, or working for him. She’d hate me for giving her to him.

  And he would crush her.

  Wren was sunlight and wind and far-off horizons; she was claws and wings and bursts of flame. She was everything the Indestructible City was not. That’s why I love her, he admitted to himself.

  “Undauntable,” his father said in his icy voice. The room was empty now except for the two of them. “That man described a dragon whose scales seem to match the ones you wear. I think it’s time you told me where you’ve been getting them.”

  His fingers tightened mercilessly on Undauntable’s arm, cutting off the circulation so Undauntable’s hand felt numb.

  “An old woman,” Undauntable blurted. “I met her once in the market a long time ago. She had a small bag full of the scales, so I bought them all, because I didn’t want anyone else to have them. I’ve just been adding them to my jewels one a time for — for effect because you said st-style was partly about t-timing and —”

  “Stop sniveling,” his father snapped. Undauntable fell silent. The lord regarded him for a long, hooded moment. “You’re lying,” he said at last. “You’re terrible at it.”

  Undauntable had thought that was a rather good lie, actually, considering he’d only had a moment to think of it. I’m sorry, Wren. I’ll try to protect you as long as I can.

  “I will find this girl,” hissed the Invincible Lord, and Undauntable felt a stab of fear for Wren. “I will find her, and her dragon — or dragons, if Boar’s theory is correct. You can be of use to me, or you can be a stupid waste of space, as usual. But either way, one day I will control the girl who controls dragons, and then … then the whole world will be mine at last.”

  Discover where it all began …

  “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 unde
r 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.

  TUI T. SUTHERLAND is the author of the #1 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 awesome sons, and two very patient dogs. To learn more about Tui’s books, visit her online at www.tuibooks.com.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Tui T. Sutherland

  Map and border design © 2020 by Mike Schley

  Dragon illustrations © 2020 by Joy Ang

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

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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, March 2020

  Cover art © 2020 by Joy Ang

  Cover design by Phil Falco

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-21462-8

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