It's not supposed to snow in the South Forest, but the weather in the second-emptiest corner of Shelha is not the only thing behaving strangely. When an ex-tyrant started acting up again, Sethral had hoped it meant the end of lazy days and monotonou...
Silversand stood at the cliffs' edge and gazed out over the flats. Under the dark sky, they were somehow even redder than she remembered. Not that she remembered them very well. She began to walk west along the clifftop. Boulder fields carpeted long stretches of it, so she amused herself by hopping patterns across them. The first field she crossed entirely in zigzags. On the next, she strove to make as straight a line as possible. It was almost impossible.
She was so absorbed in magnificent leaps that it took the screech of a Drakon to alert her to the nearby flight. Silversand dove between two boulders, remembered snakes and dove back out again. She hunkered down on the stones. Drakons. Winter had been calling forest Drakons when she had left the Mountainair camp two days ago. But that was definitely one of Winter's messengers out on the flats now, a skinny thing with long wings and a painted underside. It was talking to a Rock Flat flight.
Silversand shivered in the light wind. Her South Forest knowledge was coming back to her, bit by bit. That was a Drakon lord, a commander of at least a double flight. More Drakons lived on the Rock Flats and Rocklands than in all the South Forest combined, and most of them had lords. She remembered flights of twenty, even thirty Drakons from her kithood days. Was Winter trying to recruit all of them? The idea seemed absurd.
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Sethral stayed camouflaged in a tree canopy, her heart pounding as a Rock Flat Drakon lord drifted down into the Mountainairs' clearing. Two forest lords were already there, their dulled shells and stout wings dwarfed by the newcomer's long, sweeping wingspan. Their flights chattered nervously in the trees.
Winter was smiling like a Saggitayria winglet with a worm. This was the sixth such gathering this morning. She was acquainting forest and flatland Drakons with each other in a systematic manner: a process, Sethral was certain, that could never end well.
Sethral knew it was probably time to get out of here. She was dangerously close to the camp and it would only take one observant Drakon to end this game. Yet somehow she couldn't leave. She had a pristine view of the goings-on, and the knowledge of Drakons to make sense of them. Was she feeling a sense of duty? As if, by spying here, she was somehow contributing to the fight against Winter? Or was she still feeling guilty for having wished an attack onto the Coppertail herd?
Sethral shifted her weight on the branch. A breeze covered the rustling, but a Drakon glanced her way. Its gaze lingered just a little too long. She had to get out of here. What would the black fuzz do in her position? She had seen his shadow here just a moment ago.
Then she realized she already knew.
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