in a cell. Don’t hurt the swiftwing. We can still use her.”
Cold hands yanked Tauran’s arms behind his back. He twisted his head, only now noticing the quiet. The sight that met him robbed the breath from his lungs. Excellor still pinned Ibi-shao by the throat, his huffed breaths sending dust into the air. Her eyes were closed. She was no longer fighting.
* * *
The sun was setting.
Kalai flipped Tauran’s pocket watch open and glanced at the time. Tauran and Catria would definitely have reached Valreus, now. Catria had said Emilian’s execution was scheduled for the following morning. Had they already freed him? Or were they lying in wait somewhere, waiting to strike?
The thoughts made Kalai nervous, and he turned his face to the open window. The day had been scorching hot. He was used to the heat, but this was a lot, even for him. Maybe Tauran appreciated a few days away from the Sharoani heat. He had struggled to adjust.
Kalai sighed. He had to stop thinking about Tauran. It had already ruined his appetite for dinner. It was nice to be home, cooking and eating with Aunt Iako. But he would have preferred to have Tauran here, too.
“I’m going to bed,” he said softly, smiling at Iako sitting in the armchair across from him. She twisted the long stiff reeds of a basket into shape, paused and held a hand out to him.
Kalai stood and bent so she could kiss his forehead.
“You miss him,” she said.
Kalai looked down, not bothering to hide the blush that no doubt colored his cheeks. “I do.”
“He’s a good man.” Iako put aside the half-finished basket to take Kalai’s hands. “Brave, kind and loyal. He’ll be okay.”
Kalai smiled. She was right. “Have a good night.”
“You too.”
He straightened and turned to his bedroom, then paused, picking up Dragons and Geology from the table. Sleep wasn’t likely to come easily, and geology seemed as sleep-inducing a topic as he could imagine.
Settling into bed with a pillow at his back, Kalai rested the heavy book against his thighs and flipped it open. He skipped an entire section on landscapes that didn’t even mention dragons, flipped through several pages of tiny, dense paragraphs. Stifling a yawn, he pulled the oil lamp on his bedside closer and skimmed sections with titles like ‘Dragons’ impact on the landscape’ and ‘Ancient claw marks in limestone’. The next title read ‘The sleeping dragon’, and Kalai flipped several pages past it before a thought made him pause. He flipped back.
He traced a finger across the page and read out loud. “The largest volcano in Sharoani was at the peak of its activity known as ‘the dragon mother’. The volcano erupted with great force, where after it remained dormant for one-thousand… years.”
A wave of chills rolled through Kalai.
The mighty dragon sleeps for one thousand years.
Eagerly, he flipped back through the book, searching for the map of volcanoes he’d looked at with Jinhai. He pulled the lamp closer.
There were six of them. One on the island of Risa off Sharoani, one just north-west of Kel Visal, one in the south. Two in Valreus: one by the northern shore of Lake Virastos, one near the country’s center. One in Cadell, in the far south-east.
Kalai sat up straighter, pulling the book closer to his face so he could read the tiny text at the bottom, linking each volcano with a name. The Dragon Mother was labeled as number one; the volcano just north of Kel Visal.
Kalai bit his bottom lip. He’d always known about the volcano, hidden from view somewhere in the mist-covered mountains where Ibi-shao had taken them. He’d never seen it and never worried about it. Most people didn’t even consider it a volcano any longer, but the ghost of one, now a mountain among countless others. But if the note was right…
She breathes fire and wakes her children.
What did that mean?
He flipped through the book, feeling wide awake. Returning to the section about Dragon Mother, he skimmed the page, the hairs on his arms rising when he found what he was looking for.
When the Dragon Mother erupts, she risks setting off a chain reaction, setting underground rivers of lava connecting all major volcanoes on the continent into motion, and waking smaller volcanoes as far away as Cadell.
Upon eruption, toxic fumes caught under the topmost crusts of the volcanoes escape into the air, turning the sky red for up to several days at a time. This event is known as Red Sun. While rarely