We waited in the same spot where I’d spoken to The Sun Need Not Rise In His Presence. It was nowhere near as visible as where we’d waited for Indomitable and Sandstorm, so to make sure that we’d be seen we had done a few circles above the area the two males had claimed for themselves. Even so, we waited, and waited, and waited.

  Mother had warned me that Grace might not come out to meet us and that Presence was in no state to, and I was almost at the point of suggesting we give up when finally, after what felt like an hour, the mottled gray of The Winds Weep To See His Grace’s scales rose over the treetops and joined us on the wall.

  “Be quick,” he said, the only trace of politeness being that he chose to speak in Tekereteki for my benefit. “I would not have come had The Sun Need Not Rise In His Presence not asked me to, and I am loath to be absent for long. What do you want?”

  Mother bristled at his directness, but I spoke before she could say anything to inflame things.

  Grace was direct, so I would be as well. “I have heard that The Sun Need Not Rise In His Presence is grievously injured,” I told him. “I have two human healers. I offer their services.”

  “Humans,” he said dismissively. “For this you waste the time I could spend by my Sun’s side? What good can humans do?”

  “They have healed me of terrible wounds before,” I told him, silently forgiving him for his rudeness and hoping that Mother wouldn’t explode at him. “I believe that they can help. And if they cannot, since you place no hope in them you will have lost nothing.”

  “Why?” His eyes narrowed in suspicion, focusing entirely on me. “Why make this offer? He is here to support me. I am here because I desire something that you have. If your humans fail, you risk my ire. If they succeed, you will have strengthened a rival. So why?”

  “I have asked her the same,” Mother said. “I think she has spent too much time with the humans. But it is her territory, and her servants.”

  I really couldn’t tell if she’d seen right through me, or if she wanted to cover for the more mercenary reasons I’d given her when she asked me. Either way, she had been clear that I needed to speak for myself to earn any respect.

  “I do not wish your companion to suffer,” I told him. “And beyond that I wish to spite that ruby wyvern. Is that not reason enough?”

  Now, that, it seemed, was something Grace could believe. He snorted and said, “I will accept your offer, on one condition.”

  “Speak it,” I said, almost impressed by his sheer arrogance in making demands of me when I was offering to save the life of his partner.

  “Only you and the humans, Draka. Sower of Embers, Reaper of Flame, I wish to believe in your honor but I respect your might too much to risk leading you to my wounded ally.”

  Behind me, I sensed Mother draw herself up in outrage. “Out of the question! You must think me a fool to—”

  “Mother, PLEASE!” I said, twisting to face her and raising my voice as much as my comparatively tiny lungs would allow. To my surprise it worked, and she stopped midsentence. “I wish to do this. And I would be in no danger. Or do you think our guest such a fool that he would try to harm me with you only a wingbeat away?”

  Grace added something in Draconic that I didn’t catch any of at all, but which seemed to, if not satisfy, then at least mollify Embers enough to agree. But that didn’t mean that she was going to just trust the male.

  “Know that if any harm comes to my daughter, I will place the blame on you,” she growled. “Know also that my protection extends to my daughter’s humans. I expect you to protect them as you would The Sun Need Not Rise In His Presence.”

  Grace made some noises in Draconic that sounded very much like he was protesting, but Mother cut him off.

  “No!” she thundered. She drew herself up, and the weight of her presence grew tenfold. “She is going. You will watch over her. We will return presently with the humans. Rise to show her where to land, and I will return here to wait.”

  I almost felt a little bad for him. But only almost, and only a little. He’d grudgingly accepted my offer of help, as though he was doing me a favor, and now Mother had completely turned the situation on its head, bullying him into accepting terms. Hell, she didn’t even give him the offer of refusing: she’d dictated what would happen, and Mercies help him if he tried to refuse. But no matter how upset and suspicious he might be, I knew that I meant absolutely no harm, and I was sure that Mother would never leave my safety in the hands of two strangers. If anyone else approached, she’d be by our side in a moment. Really, my presence would be an extra layer of protection for them, and nothing else.

  I was not at all worried about my own safety. Grace might feel a bit resentful now, but I’d meant what I said to Mother. I could not see any world in which Grace or Presence were stupid enough to try to harm me. Mother would be on them in an instant, and with Presence weakened and Mother being the flying apocalypse that she was, that would be the end of them.

  “Are you certain you wish to do this?” Mother asked once we set down outside the shrine. “We do not know them. They may be unpredictable, especially, The Sun Need Not Rise In His Presence. He may lash out in his pain, even if he would not normally.”

  “I am. I truly do not think that I am at risk,” I told her. “You know that I would never take Mak and Kira with me if I were the least bit uncertain.”

  “I suppose so.” She was still clearly unhappy, but if she’d had any lingering doubts, that seemed to have dispelled them. “Go on, then. Fetch your humans,” she said. Then her expression turned hard. “But carry them both in your arms when you go! I will not have you seen with a human on your back, no matter that you may think it acceptable. It is bad enough that you do it in front of humans. If it became known here that you have allowed yourself to be… ridden—” she lowered her voice to a low hiss on that hateful word, “your reputation might be irreparably ruined. You would enjoy no respect but what you could compel through fear. Do not forget what I said about the male you carried south on your back: if I fear you may be seen like that, I will remove the human, no matter who they may be to you.”

  I believed her. She would absolutely kill any one of my humans if she thought it necessary to keep me safe, and there was no chance that I was going to defy her on that. As she spoke, her displeasure had grown heavier and heavier, to the point that when she finished I found myself instinctively crouched low, looking at the ground between her feet and baring my neck to her in submission. I was so cowed that I couldn’t even be mad about her doing that to me before my humans. If anything, I wondered if she did it on purpose, to make sure that they all understood her position on the matter; she was speaking Karakani, after all, and I couldn’t see any of them missing a word she said.

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  “I understand, Mother,” I told her curtly. Then I entered the rotunda and told the humans what had happened, and what was going to happen. None of them commented on what they’d just seen and heard between Mother and me, but when Mak and Kira came out, they stood silently side by side, waiting to be picked up. Clever girls that they were, neither of them made a single move that might be interpreted as even suggesting I allow them to mount me.

  With them being the smallest members of my little flock, carrying Mak and Kira one under each arm was easy. And though Mak was less than thrilled with the arrangement, she didn’t make a fuss. They were both far more concerned with their imminent meeting with not one but two completely unfamiliar dragons, neither of whom was in any way related to me.

  They hung silent in my arms during the short flight and as I flew slow, non-threatening circles above where I thought I’d once seen Presence take off from. But when the large, grey form of Grace appeared from the trees, barely more than a leap to show me where to go, Kira went rigid.

  Mak didn’t. Whether that was because she was made of sterner stuff or because she had her eyes screwed tightly shut was, I thought, best left as a mystery.

  The place to which Grace had directed me was at the foot of the hill that held the high city. It was nominally in the area that Presence had claimed, but everyone in the city knew that the two males held their two small territories together. It had perhaps once been a small square or plaza — or maybe a courtyard. It was hard to say with the way the overgrown piles of ruined buildings lay around it. Whatever it was, the low, carbonized remains of stumps and scattered bits of coal and ashes showed that they’d recently cleared it with fire, leaving an area not much more than fifty feet wide in any direction to take off and land. I wondered how they managed; I was sure that both of their wingspans were larger than that.

  It was plenty for me, anyway. I set my precious cargo down as carefully as I could, staying on my back legs until they’d scrambled clear. Only once I was comfortable back on all fours did I see the looming shape of Grace watching us from the shade of the trees.

  My first reaction — other than the spike of anxiety that accompanied meeting any dragon besides Mother — was relief. Despite his expressed opinion of humans as rather useless, I saw none of the disgust on his face that I’d feared. There was a little bit of disdain there, sure, which was only to be expected, but there was also a heaping of curiosity as he looked at my two healers. Perhaps even, unless I imagined it, a sliver of hope.

  “The Winds Weep To See His Grace,” I greeted him. “This is Drakonum Makanna, and this is Bekiratag, who prefers to be called Kira. They are both gifted with healing, and have come to attempt to help your friend. They speak Tekereteki, should you wish to address them.”

  Grace, as it turned out, was not at all interested in talking to my two dear friends. Once I spoke he looked directly at me and said, “While this intervention is unasked for, your presence here without your protector forces me to accept that your offer was made sincerely. I… appreciate your gesture of good will. Whatever the outcome, I shall not forget it. Come. Collect your humans, and I shall show you to The Sun Need Not Rise In His Presence.”

  As he turned to lead us to wherever Presence was, a patch of scales on his left hindquarters, maybe a foot wide and three long, caught my attention. Grace’s scales were normally nowhere near as brilliant as Mother’s or most of the other dragons, with their metal or gemstone hues, but they had a gloss to them. This patch was dull, more like my own, but in my case there was a reason for it. My scales ate and scattered light in a way that made me incredibly stealthy when I wanted to be; in Grace’s case it made the scales look lifeless, and when I looked more closely it became clear that they were even peeling in places.

  Whatever Behold Her had done to Presence, Grace hadn’t gotten away unscathed.

  “He’s rude, isn’t he,” Mak said as we followed Grace beneath the almost solid canopy of the trees. Kira hovered close by my sister, who was still a little unsteady on her feet. “He might’ve at least acknowledged us.”

  “He is a bit, yeah,” I agreed. “But from his perspective, I think he was making a serious effort. Deigning to speak in a human language is a pretty big thing. And even if that was mostly for my benefit, he also admitted that he appreciates me bringing you here. That’s as good as recognizing that you may be able to help.”

  Neither of them replied to that, but I could sense, in that semi-mystical way that had been happening every so often, that Mak was seething silently. She just couldn’t find a way to voice it, probably because she felt it would contradict me.

  “Listen,” I said. “He may be an ally. He may not. I’m not sure yet. But I want to help his… well, his mate, I guess even if no one else has called Presence that. So even if he’s being a bit of a cock, you have my thanks, all right? I hope that counts for something.” Even if I did basically order you to come, I added silently to myself. Conscience might not be there at the moment, but I could self-flagellate just fine without her.

  “You know it does,” Mak said, turning to look up at me adoringly.

  “Eyes ahead, please,” Kira murmured, putting gentle pressure on Mak’s shoulder so she’d turn to face the way she was going. “And she is right, Draka. Your thanks matter.”

  As much as I loved Mak, that was more meaningful coming from Kira. Mak would never — could never — lie to me, but I suspected that she had a tendency to choose what to say and how to say it based on what moods she felt from me in any given moment. With Kira, though she was always kind, I got the raw, unvarnished truth or nothing.

  I’d barely started wondering where Grace was leading us before we were there. He’d taken us to the remains of a particularly sturdy stone building. It wasn’t preserved by enchantment the way the temple, the library, and the shrine were, but the Old Mallineans had been capable of creating marvels of construction and engineering without it. While nobody could deny that it had seen better days, it also wasn’t in anything comparable to the sad state of most of its neighbors. It looked run-down, not ruined; fallen on hard times, not fallen over.

  The building, or perhaps complex was more appropriate, had a generally military or at least militarized look and feel to it. Square, sturdy, and utilitarian, imposing and grand even without decoration; the lack of armed people in uniform stomping around felt more wrong in that place than the holes in the high ceiling and the plants that had taken root in the soil that had built up over the centuries from leaf debris and animals using it as a convenient nesting ground.

  Unfortunately, wonder of construction or not, two dragons taking up residence hadn’t done the place any favors. In the few days that they’d been there, they’d done quite a bit of remodelling. For one, they’d torn out much of the floor in the entrance hall, creating a dragon-sized passage into the expansive basement level. There they’d continued, tearing up not only the floor but removing several walls — miraculously without collapsing everything on top of themselves. Where all the stone might have gone, I couldn’t say, but there must have been a lot of it somewhere because they’d then kept going, carving into the rock beneath to turn the basement into something like an improvised cavern.

  That was where we found Presence.

  I didn’t see him immediately, being too focused on getting us down safely. The way down was in no way adapted for humans or even for very young dragons like myself, consisting of a sheer, twenty foot drop. While Grace simply stepped down, doing his name justice in every way with the smooth way that he moved, I had to take Mak and Kira in my arms and leap down, using my wings to slow my fall and taking most of the shock on my legs. Only once we were all down there in one piece did I take the time to look around, and what I saw stunned and absolutely horrified me. It also gave me a new appreciation for just how dangerous Behold Her was.

  While I carefully got myself and the girls down, Grace had gone on ahead without so much as a backward glance. It probably didn’t even occur to him that we might need a moment. He hadn’t gone far, though. Past the rubble and the patches of what looked like — I wasn’t sure, actually; stone, but lumpy, as though it had melted and then congealed, maybe — the two had dug out a deep, downward sloping chamber. It wasn’t huge, but it was large enough for, say, two adult dragons to curl up if they didn’t mind snuggling a bit. That was where Grace had gone, and that was where Presence languished, sprawled on his side.

  It was dark down there. Dark enough that I had to switch to shadowsight to see, and when I did I stopped, overcome with sympathy, anger, and fear. Sympathy for Presence; anger for Behold Her for what she’d done, and fear that she might do the same to me.

  The girls couldn’t see, but my reaction was enough for Mak to hesitate before casting her nightvision spell on herself and Kira. When she did, when she saw what I saw, she gasped, leaving us still and dumbstruck beside each other.

  Not Kira. When Kira could see, she let out a small, pained moan and a whispered, “Oh, you poor creature,” but she never stopped. It was only when Grace turned to glare at her that I was spurred back into action, following Kira to Presence’s side.

  I nearly jumped when the copper dragon spoke. His voice was strained with agony, his breaths so shallow that I could barely tell that he was alive, but he still made an effort. “Oh,” he whispered. “Little Draka. And… are these humans? Odd.”

  He must have known me by my scent, and recognized the presence of Mak and Kira the same way. I couldn’t see any other explanation. He certainly couldn’t see us. Not without eyes.

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