Whatever virtues my mother might have possessed, riding a deadline was clearly one of them.

  I’d taken Herald north to the lake, the place where so much had begun for me. I’d chosen that as the place to wait because it was a good place for Herald to pitch her tent, with easy access to forage and clean water, and because I was feeling dramatic. It was the place where I’d first met Garal and Lalia. It was where I’d found my first few gold coins, the start of my hoard; I still kept those coins in the same box I’d smashed open to get at them. And while it wasn’t the place where I’d first met Herald, it was, more than anywhere else, the place where our friendship had truly begun, when we’d conspired to go on our first little adventure together, just the two of us. Where better to await the Reaper?

  The drama had somewhat dissipated on the morning of our fourth day there. Not that I minded, necessarily — the afternoon and the two days since we’d come here had been something like a little vacation. Just the two of us, talking, watching the rain on the lake, hunting, and going on long flights. We’d visited my hoard, and checked in with Jekrie and the village; they were up to three cabins now, with a fourth in the works. Apparently they just kept building through the rain, which seemed like a miserable and probably bad idea to me, but what did I know? The plan was still to leave for the city to trade and see what they’d been avoiding for so long once the rain stopped, which Madalla, the local weather-woman, insisted would be in the next two weeks. We’d found a Nest Heart to recharge Herald’s reserves, and my own. We’d even risked checking in at Pine Hill, to make sure that Lahnie and the rest of Lalia’s family were all right now that the Wolves barely patrolled the forest anymore. I don’t know what excuse Herald gave them for going all that way on her own and considering what a terrible liar she was, I doubt that they’d believed her. I didn’t care. It was worth the suspicion to know that they were safe.

  All in all, and despite the rain, it was nice.

  All nice things came to an end, in suitable dramatic fashion, on the morning of that fourth day. It only took moments. We were barely awake, talking lazily about what to do with the day as Herald boiled water, when the Whomp! Whomp! of enormous wings came to us from the north. Birds screamed and scattered from the nearby trees, and Sower of Embers, Reaper of Flames flashed above us, so low that the wind of her passing whipped up wet debris from the forest floor and made the tent ripple and pull at its lines. She had rested her three days, and now she had come for me.

  She came around in a long turn that brought her out above the lake and directly toward the campground, where she threw her wings up and braked, setting down with a lightness that displayed her absolute mastery of the art of flight. It was a display of grace and wonder, and neither Herald nor I could tear our eyes away from the moment we first spotted her.

  “Mercies,” Herald said. “Look at her with your shadowsight! She was bright before, but now… she is like the sun. She is magnificent!”

  I changed my sight, and Herald was right. If the glow of magic was true light, I would have been blinded by what I saw. I had always thought of myself as a magical creature, but after eating however many Nest Hearts, Reaper was magic, brighter than anything I’d ever seen from any human magic user. Calling her magnificent was… calling it inadequate was itself inadequate.

  She spoiled the effect somewhat when she shook herself like a wet dog, threw her wings up, and grumbled something in a language I couldn’t understand.

  “Come out, daughter,” she rumbled, facing our way. “I can sense you there, among the trees. It is time we have a proper talk.”

  “If you had a plan,” I murmured to Herald, “now is the time.”

  “Yeah,” she breathed. “I will… I’ll… a moment?”

  The whole four days she had refused to tell me what the plan was. I was beginning to suspect that it never existed in the first place, and was in fact just a ruse to keep me from freaking out too bad about letting her face Reaper again. Or…

  “Was the plan to convince me to bring you here, so you could talk to her?”

  She swallowed, then nodded, too scared to even look guilty. I nodded back, nuzzled her hair a bit, and stepped out.

  I wanted to walk out with my head held high and proud, to face Reaper as an equal. Even if I was sure, intellectually, that she wouldn’t hurt me, it simply wasn’t possible. It was one thing to talk back to her when I had several feet of stone to protect me, but in the open, like this? No. I could perhaps do “defiant,” but I suspected that would only make me look pathetic. So, when I emerged from the ferns and the trees I approached her the way she deserved: with wariness and respect. I stopped twenty feet away — no distance at all for someone like her.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, then raised her voice again. “You too, human. There is no point in hiding. I can smell you.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off Reaper, but I didn’t need to see to know that Herald did as she’d been told. I felt her approach, and then she took her place beside me, boldly putting a possessive arm across my shoulders.

  Reaper’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t comment on it when she spoke.

  “It is good to see you again, daughter. It is past due for us to get to know each other. Though I regret that we must do it in this human tongue.”

  “It’s not my fault I didn’t have anyone to teach me the language of dragons,” I said. One sentence in and I was feeling defensive.

  “No, it is not.” Her tone was unexpectedly soft. “Your father should have been there, once your mind developed. Tell me, little Draka: do you know what became of him? I returned here some years after leaving our eggs in his care, and found no sign of him.”

  “I don’t,” I said, and I felt myself growing more somber as I spoke. I wondered how much I should hide from her, and decided quickly that I might as well tell her most of what I could, only leaving out the whole “human soul squatting in a dragon’s body” situation. Now was not the time for that conversation, if ever. “I don’t remember much. Hiding from him, or at least a big dragon, and squabbling with others like me. Then cages, and fear. Someone must have killed him, somehow. Someone used magic to put me to sleep for centuries, but I have no idea why. And then I woke up, and crawled outside into a world I’d never seen before. That was six, seven months ago.”

  “And you have been alone since?” She lowered herself to the ground, her body language becoming gentler along with her voice.

  “I haven’t been alone. I have friends!” I wrapped my wing close around Herald. Perhaps it was dumb to draw attention to her, but I wanted my mother to see, and to understand.

  Reaper didn’t respond to my tone, or to my demonstration. She lowered her head all the way down to my level, and looked at me with sympathy and understanding, and something else that was hard to interpret. “Human friends, little Draka. I am sure that they have amused you. That you like them. Love them, even. It is only natural — humans are clever little creatures, and easy to like. But I should have been here, daughter. The moment I felt the pull of your thread, all those months ago, I should have come. Instead I was lazy, and unsure, and then it winked out. It still flares and fades, and I do not know what to make of it, but that is no excuse. I should have been here, to teach you and protect you. I was not. And I am sorry.”

  “I…” I was a little stunned, honestly. I myself found it difficult to apologize to anyone for anything, even when I was clearly at fault. It happened, but it was rare. To have an old, powerful dragon like Reaper lower her head and apologize to me like this was hard to process. Finally managed a lame, “It’s not your fault. And I’ve been fine.”

  “She— she has!” Herald spoke up from beside me, and I had an urgent impulse to protect her, in case she annoyed the massive creature in front of me. But Reaper only shifted her eyes slightly, inviting Herald to continue. “Please, great lady. Draka has been a friend to me, and to many others, and she has protected us, but we have done what we could to return her kindness.”

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  “And if a dragon had come? Could you have protected her then, Drakonum Herald? There is a strong male only three days west of here, across the sea.”

  My heart thundered. That was news to me.

  “There is another a few days more to the north. And this island is rich in rifts. If one of them had come here, to claim this island as his own, would you have stood in his way, brave little human?”

  “Yes.” She answered without hesitation.

  “Would you have died to defend my daughter, though it would likely have been useless?”

  “Look into my eyes, Great Lady. Yes! Yes, I would. As would my sister, and a few others.”

  Reaper took one long step. She surged forward, not for the sake of catching us off guard but simply because she was so damn big that anything she did was on a greater scale than I could possibly expect. Her snout pressed into my space, brushing gently against my neck before I even had the idea to try and ward her off. She could have bitten Herald in half, and I couldn’t have reacted until it was already too late.

  Herald could, though. Herald could have run the moment Reaper moved. She didn’t. She stood her ground next to me, and though her arm tightened around me and the smell of fear became strong in the little bubble around us, she barely moved.

  My mother looked at Herald. Really inspected her. She brought her nose in close enough that they were almost touching, and then she sniffed, moving to get her from every angle. Then she gave a long, rumbling, “Hmmm…” and withdrew.

  “I see,” she said finally. “I thought perhaps the eyes were a fluke. But you truly are bound. Daughter, I did not realize you had come so far. I would never have expected one so young to be building a flock of her own.”

  “A— a flock?” I was almost giddy with relief that nothing had happened, and intelligent questions were beyond me for a moment.

  “I believe that humans sometimes call them ‘cults,’” she said dismissively. “Surprising, though perhaps it should not be, with you being forced to rely on humans. And building a flock is only natural. Even the dimmest of our kind do it, by instinct if nothing less. But it is dangerous, my daughter. Terribly dangerous, for one so young as you. I am relieved to find you alive at all! Your flock makes you a target. They are a way for greedy humans to strike at you, if you are not careful.” She sighed, and it meant no more and no less than any human sigh. “Especially these days. It only shows how much you have to learn.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, a fierce pride flaring inside me. “Someone already tried. I destroyed them.”

  “Did you? And did you do it so spectacularly that no one will dare try to follow?”

  I hesitated, and that was all the answer she needed. “Destroying a single enemy means little if no one cares about it. Your response must be measured so no one dares escalate. If a so-called ‘hero’ tries to slay you, you burn his village. If a lord sends his army against you, you raze his city. You must make it known that the cost of failure is unthinkably greater than the reward of success. That is how you enforce peace.”

  Mercies, but the cruel satisfaction that had come into her voice as she spoke made me want to shiver. I had no doubt that there was nothing theoretical about what she said; she spoke from experience. Then she huffed sadly and softened again. “But perhaps you take after your father. At least say that you do not have your humans guard your hoard, or worse yet, that you keep it in that city to the south. I told Night many times that letting so many humans see his hoard would be his death. I fear that it was.”

  “I don’t,” I told her. I was insulted that she’d even suggest it. The idea of letting anyone but my most trusted friends know where my hoard was, much less let them see it, was completely foreign to me. But then, what about my father? If I was right — and based on the scents of gold and silver that still lingered, I thought I was — he’d had his hoard in what I called the throne room. It was connected directly to the tunnels under my mountain, and any human who could open the gate could walk right in. Had he trusted the humans around him so much? Was that what had led to him being killed, and to me being trapped the way I was? Did I only exist the way I did because my father had been, by draconic standards, too soft?

  “Good,” Reaper said. “I am pleased to hear that. But I still shall have to decide what to do about this flock of yours.”

  I’d barely registered her words before I was between her and Herald, my stance low and teeth bared. I could barely speak. I wanted to say something clever. Something confident. Bloody hell, something at least barely intelligent would have done. Instead all I managed was a growled, “Mine!”

  “Hrrm?”

  Of course she didn’t show any fear, or even concern. I could no more threaten her than any human infant could threaten her own mother. Her first reaction was confusion, and genuine surprise that I’d reacted the way I had. Then her eyes crinkled in an amused smile.

  “You misunderstand, little one. I would not take anything from you. You are my daughter, after all.”

  “What, then?” I spat. I was caught in a vicious three-way struggle between trying to fight her, grabbing Herald and fleeing back to the mountains, or trying to talk it out. The last was barely winning out, but I was still too on edge to speak properly.

  “I meant that I must consider if it is better to take some with us, or to leave them here until you are grown. That is all.”

  “I’m not going anywhere!” My shadow, barely visible beneath the overcast sky, went wild. With no flesh to feel pain and no life to lose, it tried to tear away from me, straining to attack the incarnation of magic, fire, and death in front of me.

  “You are being difficult again,” she said, eyeing my frenzied shadow with interest. “Make no mistake. I will teach you what you must know to survive. You may think that you can handle yourself against the humans, but now that you are here, it is only a matter of time before another of our kind finds you. A decade, perhaps two, that is what you have. If you are lucky, it will be one of the nearby males. They will only wish to see if you are a suitable mate, and may well be willing to share a territory when they see how young you are. A female who sees you as weak will simply kill you.”

  I didn’t really have a response to that. No dragon had been spotted near Mallin before me for… how long was it? Decades? Centuries? But Reaper had mentioned that there were two within a few days’ flight. How far was that, exactly? With suitable places to rest I might be able to travel more than a thousand miles in three days, but Reaper seemed to need several days’ rest for every few hundred miles. Did that mean that another dragon could show up here at any time, and they just hadn’t because the trip wasn’t worth it yet?

  Did it matter? I wasn’t abandoning my friends and family, not to mention my hoard. It didn’t matter who Reaper was, or what she could teach me. I wasn’t going. I wasn’t sure how I’d keep her from forcing me if she decided to press the issue; that whole “I won’t take anything of yours” felt very much like it had a silent “Unless…” tacked on to the end. And she’d just pointed out that my “flock” could be used against me…

  When I didn’t reply she seemed to simply take that as me refusing to back down, and she sighed. “I see that you are determined to be stubborn. Very well. I shall simply have to remain and keep an eye on you for the next few decades, and return to my hoard every few months or so. You are cruel to force your old mother to make such a journey so often, but I suppose it cannot be helped.”

  Relief flooded me, but a new concern was right on its heels. “Keep an eye on me?” I asked suspiciously. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean just what I say. I shall have to watch over you, to make sure that your inexperience does not lead you to do anything foolish, and that you do not get hurt. I have seen your scars, daughter. Proud of them you may be, but I know a killing wound when I see one.”

  “My other sister healed me,” I objected.

  “That is fortunate. And if she had not been there? What then? The fact that you were wounded at all, let alone so grievously, tells me that it was a fight you should never have been in.”

  “My sisters—”

  “Yes, your ‘sisters.’ You love them. You fight for them. I understand. They are yours, and you are proud. I do not fault you for that. But you have nearly died for them. Do not pretend otherwise. That is not acceptable, and I must make sure that nothing like that happens again.”

  The urge to flee became almost unbearable. Those words could only mean a few things, and none of them were good. “Mother, please—” I started, but she cut me off.

  “Oh? ‘Please,’ is it now?” She looked at me with mixed amusement and annoyance, and I knew in my gut that she was running out of patience. “Daughter, count yourself lucky that I am old, and patient, and understanding. I told you before that I will not take anything from you. I will not touch your ‘sisters,’ or anyone else who belongs to you, unless they do something monumentally foolish. But the others? It is clear that the humans on this island have forgotten much when it comes to our kind.”

  She sat up to her full height, spreading her wings. Fifteen feet at the shoulder, with another fifteen feet of neck, she towered above us, and the weight of her disapproval was suffocating. It was all I could do not to cower before her, barely getting away with a cringe. I had to smother a placating, chirping sound that desperately wanted to escape, a sign of my submission and harmlessness.

  “Adoration, or fear, little Draka,” she thundered. “Humans must adore you, or they must fear you. Otherwise, you will never be safe. And you will be. You are my daughter, and I will not tolerate anything else. I will make these humans remember fear!”

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