Rylan was sitting at his kitchen table, sipping tea and reading a book on the spice trade that built the Sapphire Coast, when a knock came at his front door. The curtains above the sink let in a bare amount of light; it was early, reckoning having come and gone a short while ago.
The knock came again, louder.
Rylan closed the book and stood, curious who would have come so early. A third knock came as he trudged toward the door. “I’m coming, already!” He opened the door to find Hollis looking worried.
“What’s wrong?” Rylan asked.
The morning sunlight glinted off Hollis’s earrings. His long olive coat was dotted with rain. “Can I come in?”
Rylan stepped aside. “Of course.”
Hollis entered, and Rylan closed the door behind him. “I’ve just come from visiting my sister in Andalingr. On the way back to the vyrd, Blythe waylaid me.”
“Waylaid you?”
“Yes. She gave me this.” He handed Rylan a folded piece of paper. “Burn it after you memorize it.”
Rylan unfolded it. It was a map, roughly the size of his palm, showing several landmarks far east of Glaeyand—the Diamondflow, the Deepwood Fens, a set of gently rolling hills known as the Maundering Downs. Between them was an X near what appeared to be an excessively large citadel tree.
“What is it?”
“The Rookery,” he said, rubbing his hands together, though it was not cold in Rylan’s burrow. “She wants you to visit her.”
Hollis wasn’t a Knife, but that would hardly matter to the inquisitors if word got out he’d so much as touched a piece of paper with the location of the Rookery on it. He’d be brought in for questioning immediately. He might even be shipped to one of the capitals and handed over to the Church so they could put him to the question.
“And why, pray tell, does she want me to visit her?” Rylan asked.
“She said it has to do with Bellicor. He’s in a state.”
Bellicor was Aarik’s mount, a particularly nasty onyx dragon. Rylan had a fondness for all dragons, even those with terrible tempers—perhaps especially those, because an intemperate dragon was almost never the dragon’s fault, but the owner’s. Rylan had tended to Bellicor years ago when he’d become sick from an infection. The onyx had been lashing out at everyone who came near, including Aarik, which had made it all the more satisfying when Rylan had helped cure the infection.
“Aarik’s gone to Ancris,” Hollis continued. “Bellicor’s grown restless, angry. Blythe wants help calming him before he attacks the other dragons.” Hollis paused. “She wanted you to know it’s important. She said to come straight away if you believe in Aarik’s vision.”
The note of desperation in Hollis’s voice was worrying but hardly surprising. He was a fence for stolen goods; he arranged for the occasional theft; he worked from the shadows, and he was good at it. That he’d managed to maintain a low profile for so long was an achievement in and of itself, but the Knives were like a flaming brand, bringing heat on everyone and everything they touched.
“So?” Hollis asked.
Rylan had already made plans to visit Ancris to look into Master Renato for Aarik, but he had to set those aside. He needed to know why Aarik had gone to Ancris, and that meant going to the Rookery and checking on Bellicor. “I’ll go, Hollis.”
Looking relieved, Hollis nodded, then pointed at the paper in Rylan’s hand. “Burn that.”
Hollis opened the door to leave but stopped. Bashira was standing outside, one hand raised about to knock. The axe-nosed chamberlain of Valdavyn and one of Marstan’s closest confidants put her hand down.
“Bashira,” Rylan said, “please, come in. Hollis was just leaving.”
Rylan used Hollis’s abrupt exit to stuff the paper into his shirt. Bashira stared at Hollis as he left, then stepped across the threshold.
“Your father wishes to see you,” she said as Rylan closed the door.
“What about?”
“The iron dragon you’ve been tending to, Rugio, is on death’s doorstep. He wants you to go to Caldoras to give Rugio what succor you can and to pass along our regrets to Soraya.”
“I see,” Rylan said, buying time.
Bashira’s stared at him for a moment. “He’d like you to go straight away. We have a silver waiting to fly you there.”
“Yes, I understand.” A trip to Caldoras would delay him a day at least, maybe more. He pulled on his boots and his coat, then grabbed his foraging sack. “Tell my father I’ll come as soon as I can.”
“You aren’t going now?”
“Lady Alevada might want Rugio put down.” He ushered Bashira outside, followed her, and locked the door. “I’ll need a good supply of black henbane for that.”
Bashira opened her mouth and closed it again. “Don’t we have some at the eyrie?”
“Not enough, and we don’t want the job half done.” He left Bashira standing there and headed downtree. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
His father would be wroth with him, but there was nothing for it. Rylan had to learn more about Aarik’s sudden trip to Ancris first.
• • •
Two hours later, Rylan jogged into Vedron’s nesting ground huffing and puffing. He caught a flash in his mind of her lounging on a bridgebough, looked up, and spotted her. She was deliberating whether to chase the deer she’d seen passing through the marsh. When she sensed Rylan, however, all thoughts of chasing deer were forgotten. She thumped her tail, sending bits of bark flying, then dropped from the bridgebough, snapped her wings wide, and soared through the trees. But when Rylan shared with her that they needed to visit Bellicor, she pulled up and clawed hold on the trunk of a citadel.
“Come on, now, it’s not his fault,” Rylan said through their bond. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s Aarik. He trained Bellicor to be mean.” And though Rylan disliked it, Aarik’s reasons for doing so were understandable. Bellicor had been hunted from the moment he’d emerged from his egg.
Vedron dropped from the tree and weaved between the massive citadels toward him. The green marbling of her wings shimmered brilliantly in the bright sunlight. She landed some twenty yards away, huffed, and gouged the earth with her wing talons.
Rylan merely waited. When they had stared at each other for several breaths, Vedron beat her wings, folded them at her sides, and lay on the ground.
Rylan retrieved her tack from the hollow in the oak, saddled her, and secured her bridle. Then she lowered her chest so Rylan could climb on, and they soared up into the sky. Despite the tenseness leading up to their flight, Vedron’s relief and joy at being reunited began to melt Rylan’s worries away. At one point, he laughed from the sheer joy of flying above the Great Forest on the back of a dragon.
The longer they flew, though, the more Vedron’s bright mood faded, and a vague sense of dread began to dominate her thoughts. As often happened, Rylan’s mood soured, too, as his thoughts drifted to a vision of Blythe, wide-eyed as she drove a knife into his gut. Vedron suddenly dipped, and the vision faded.
At a bend in the Diamondflow, he adjusted their heading left, toward the Maundering Downs. When he spotted the rolling hills in the distance, he veered right and headed toward the Deepwood Fens and guided Vedron toward a citadel that stuck out from the rest of the forest. Vedron fought him—trying to fly to their left.
“There’s nothing there but a stinking fen.” When she continued to fight him, Rylan pictured her litter-mate, Velox, a viridian dragon that would likely be at the Rookery. “Don’t you want to fly with him awhile?”
Vedron finally swerved toward the high citadel. A man in buckskin clothing was standing on a lookout platform of an adjacent tree. He blew a sequence of notes on a horn, giving Rylan permission to land. Vedron dropped below the canopy and wove through the trees toward a cluster of nests close to the ground. Two were occupied by a pair of narrow-bodied, flame-eyed auburns, who craned their necks and watched Vedron land. Another nest held Kreòs, an amber vixen with canary-yellow scales and mottled brown eyes, but she barely blinked at them and went back to sleep.
When Vedron had settled in the nest, Rylan dismounted, walked over the bridgebough, and descended along a set of spiraling stairs. A few rough-hewn decks and small burrows stood along the citadel’s trunk. The Rookery wasn’t meant to be permanent. The Red Knives moved it every few years when it was spotted by the empire’s scouts.
The acrid, floral smell of drugs being made permeated the air. The source, a long, wooden workhouse camouflaged with dead branches and citadel bark, lay along the forest floor below. Euphorics, hallucinogens, stimulants, depressants, even palliative drugs were the lifeblood of the Red Knives. Everything from mushrooms to rare flowers to dragon carcasses were rendered to manufacture them.
Raef sat on a stool in front of the workhouse with Ayasha, the Rookery’s Master of Dragons, standing behind him, braiding his red hair in tight rows. A group of men and women in homespun clothes leaned against the workhouse wall next to them.
When Raef spotted Rylan he pointed his stump up at him and said, “The fuck you doing here?”
“I asked him to come,” called a voice from below. Rylan leaned over the railing and saw Blythe standing on the same set of stairs, one circuit down.
“What the hell for?” Raef called.
“To help Bellicor. Or is the wellbeing of your King’s mount not good enough reason for you?”
Raef gazed at Bellicor as if he didn’t much care what happened to Aarik’s mount one way or the other, then he stood, spat on the ground, and strode into the workhouse.