Ivy couldn’t remember being inside Uncle Stone’s cave before. It was small, with almost no furniture, and cobwebs everywhere.

She sat gingerly on the least dusty bench. Violet sat down next to her, but Daffodil was wandering around the cave, inspecting the very few things that could be lifted and inspected.

They’d seen the ice dragon fly away again. Squirrel had escorted them back to the nearest entrance to Valor, then gone to find Foxglove. Ivy had expected her uncle to seek out the Dragonslayer right away, but he’d brought them here instead.

“I’d offer you tea,” Stone said, running one hand through his hair. “But I don’t seem to have any supplies left.”

“You have been gone awhile,” Ivy said. “Mother came and took all the food so it wouldn’t go to waste.”

“Right,” he said with a vague nod. “Right.” He gave Daffodil a disgruntled look as she pried open the lid of a jar and peeked inside.

“So,” Violet said. “Rose?”

“Right,” he said again. Stone stepped over to a shelf high on the wall, lifted down a book, and took a worn-thin piece of paper out of it. “Rose was our sister.”

“Sister?” Ivy echoed. “I have an aunt?” He handed her the paper and she studied the teenage face sketched on it:dark, laughing eyes, a mischievous grin, wild hair.

“She looks like you,” Violet observed, nudging Ivy. “Except she looks like she’s about to get into trouble, and you never look like that.”

Across the room, Daffodil laughed. “That’s true. Your ‘about to get into trouble’ face is more of an ‘oh no, what are Violet and Daffodil dragging me into now’ face.”

“Rose drew that herself,” Stone said. “That’s exactly how she looked, especially whenever she and Heath came up with mad schemes.”

“So she was an artist like you, too,” Violet said to Ivy.

“But … she’s dead now?” Ivy asked. “What happened?”

“She came with us to the desert queen’s palace.” Stone sat down heavily on his straw pallet, sending up a billow of dust from the blankets. “She’s the one who climbed in to steal the treasure. She wasn’t much older than you are now. Brave, and clever, and always doing stupid things, usually because Heath teased her or promised her something.”

“Oh no,” Ivy said. She’d always thought she was really lucky that no one she knew had ever been eaten by a dragon. Lucky, and living underground, of course. She knew, abstractly, that she must have had family in the old village — grandparents who didn’t make it, maybe — but her parents never talked about them. They avoided any mention of the dragon attack.

But the Rose smiling in this sketch felt real. And lost, long before Ivy was even born.

“I didn’t see what happened to her,” Stone said, wiping his eyes. “Heath said he did, but he didn’t give me any details. We were too busy running and hiding. But that’s why I thought — when I had that dream, I thought maybe he was wrong. Maybe she survived somehow. I’m such an idiot, chasing a dream of a dead girl into a dragon city.” He shook his head and fell silent.

“Where’s the rest of your treasure?” Daffodil asked.

“DAFFODIL,” Violet said. “Can’t you see a MOMENT is happening?”

“There was a pause in the conversation!” Daffodil argued. “Maybe I’m lightening the mood!”

“I didn’t take any,” Stone said. “I couldn’t bear the sight of it after what happened to Rose. I kept the chain, but I let Heath take the rest. So poke around all you want.”

“All right,” Daffodil said cheerfully, opening another box.

“Wow,” Violet said. She glanced at Ivy with a “did you know your dad took all the treasure?” look.

Ivy had not known that. She’d assumed Stone must have something, because the night he left, her father had searched Stone’s cave from top to bottom, then come home and shouted at her mother because he hadn’t found anything. Ivy had been lying in bed, listening, thinking, leave her alone, it’s not HER fault and why do you care where his treasure is; don’t you have enough of your own? He must have been looking for the chain, the one thing he didn’t already have. Knowing he had everything else made that memory seem even worse.

She didn’t mention any of that, though. She didn’t talk to anyone about her father’s temper, not even Violet and Daffodil. She could sometimes calm him down when he was really mad, or help him and Mother make peace again after their fights. Or when that didn’t work, she was also really good at staying out of his way.

“I can’t believe no one ever told me about Aunt Rose,” she said instead. “All the times I’ve heard the Dragonslayer story — but everyone leaves her out.”

“That is messed up,” Violet said.

“Doesn’t quite fit the heroic happy ending, does it?” Stone frowned down at his hands. “I bet you don’t hear much about the scorched villages or the dragons’ vengeance either.”

“The what?” all three of them asked at once.

“My brother destroyed the world,” Stone said. He stood up, took the magic chain out of his pocket, and started flipping it absentmindedly through his fingers. “And I helped him do it.”

“The world’s not destroyed,” Daffodil said, looking at him like he’d lost his mind. “I mean, we were just out there. There are mountains and trees and rivers —”

“Not that we get to see them very often,” Violet said.

“And there are animals and people and underground villages and —”

“Underground villages!” Stone scoffed. “People living like scared rabbits because it’s not safe outside anymore. The dragons are still angry with us, even twenty years later. They are still destroying any humans they can find to punish us for what Heath did.”

Ivy felt like the room was spinning. Violet put one hand on her shoulder.

“Hey now,” Violet said. “That can’t be all the Dragonslayer’s fault. Dragons have been eating people and burning places forever. That’s literally what a dragon is.”

“No, not like this,” Stone said. “I remember how it was, and when I start to forget, I read the old stories, the ones they won’t give you in school anymore. People used to live aboveground, in ordinary towns, all over this continent. Occasionally someone would get eaten, but the dragons rarely burned whole villages. Not until we stole their treasure, killed their queen, and gave them something to be really vengeful about.”

“But … everyone thinks the Dragonslayer is a hero,” Daffodil said.

“Everyone here, sure,” Stone said. “You can’t live in Valor unless you do.”

That’s true. In Valor, home of the mighty Dragonslayer, any criticism of Dad — any questioning of the heroic story — will get you banished. Sent away from all safety, tossed out into the world.

Ivy thought of all the banishments she’d seen over the years, the odd lies and flimsy reasons she’d noticed for why those people had been kicked out. Was it really because they’d questioned the story? Was it because they mentioned Rose, or talked about a time before humans lived underground?

Were they sent away to be eaten because her father needed to protect his image?

She leaned forward, wrapping her arms around her stomach. Daffodil came over to sit next to her, and she felt both her friends put their arms over her back, like an invisible shield around her.

“My dad’s a liar,” she said quietly to them. “He let his sister die. And all the people he’s banished, and who knows how many hundreds of people in all those villages the dragons destroyed. That’s all because of him.”

“But not because of you,” Violet said, shaking her a little. “You’re still our wonderful Ivy. Don’t blame yourself for what he did.”

“Yeah, we love you anyway,” Daffodil said. “So what if your dad is the worst? My sister is totally evil, and I’m still awesome.”

Ivy let out a half laugh, half sob at the idea that harmless Daisy could be compared to Heath on any sort of evil scale.

“Plus, remember he didn’t do it on purpose,” Violet said. “He didn’t even mean to kill a dragon. Right?” She looked at Stone for confirmation and he nodded. “They just went to steal treasure, like people have been trying to do for centuries. It’s a basic fact of human-dragon existence — they have treasure, idiots try to steal it. It was a weird fluke that this one time this one idiot managed to kill a dragon who happened to be important. Right?” She looked toward Stone again, but he had accidentally flipped the chain around his wrists and disappeared. He appeared again a moment later, gazing at the wall.

But then that idiot went on to rule a whole town, Ivy thought, and he did it with lies and punishments that were probably as bad as executions. Even if killing the dragon was an accident, you can’t say that about anything he’s done since.

“We can deal with this, Ivy,” Violet said. “Together. We’re here for you.”

“Maybe we can fix it!” Daffodil said suddenly.

Ivy could feel the daggers Violet was shooting from her eyes even with her head down. “Fix what?” Violet said.

“The dragons being mad!” Daffodil jumped up and lifted the chain out of Stone’s hands so deftly that his fingers kept moving for a moment, catching up to the fact that the chain was gone. He gave her his most disgruntled look yet.

“How do we fix dragons being mad?” Violet asked, her voice dripping with scorn. “Send them a politely worded apology letter?”

“That would be great if we spoke Dragon,” Daffodil scoffed right back. “But we speak at least one language the same: We all love treasure.” She held the chain over her head with a flourish like a banner.

“Aha,” Violet said. “So we’ll spell out ‘Sorry about killing your queen’ in gold coins?”

“Shut UP and let me finish explaining!” Daffodil cried. “What if we give the dragons back the treasure Heath stole?”

There was an awed silence for a moment.

“Yes,” Ivy said. She stood up and pointed at Daffodil. “Yes. We can do that! It won’t save the people who are gone, but it’ll show the dragons we’re sorry. And then maybe they’ll stop attacking everyone!”

“No,” Violet said. “No, no, no. You’ve both lost your minds. Just think about the logistics for one second! Do we walk up to the sand palace with a sack of coins and wave it at the guards? Here’s some treasure — may or may not look familiar — with three extra-delicious snacks on the side! At what point in this fantastic transaction do we escape with our lives?”

“Doesn’t matter!” said Daffodil.

“Um, matters a little bit!” Violet yelped.

“We’ll figure that out,” Ivy said. “First we have to get the treasure.”

“That’s where your plan falls apart,” Stone said gloomily.

“One of many places where your ‘plan’ falls apart,” Violet muttered.

“Heath will never give up his treasure,” Stone said. “Not in a million years, not to save a single soul, or a thousand souls. He loves it more than anything in the world.”

Daffodil and Violet both glanced at Ivy, but she’d always known that, and nothing else could hurt her right now. She was Ivy and she had spent her whole life making peace between angry people. So what if one side of this fight happened to be giant man-eating lizards?

“Then we won’t ask him,” she said. “We’ll find his stolen treasure ourselves and then … we’ll steal it back.”