Stowaway-- A Fanfiction

the following may contain mature content
STOWAWAY
Stowaway is the novelization of the original roleplay Stowaway. 
Written by Nibby 
Coded by Cin with help from Forge 
Original roleplayers include Nibby, Rain, Sby, Amber, Cin, Cloud, Sab, Peak, and Arrow
synopsis / story
 
SYNOPSIS
the palace: there is a war in the icewing kingdom. other tribes have ravaged it, stolen the resources, battled the people, these soldiers and pirates and criminals remnants of a long ago war the icewings lost. the kingdom has lost its glory- the last strong queen, taiga, died decades ago, and left her pitiful daughter in her footsteps. crystal is a poor queen- everybody knows, she herself the most. she is terrified. terrified of rogues and assassins and thieves coming for what little she has left. seventeen years ago, barely old enough to be an adult, she shut the doors of the palace with all royals inside. nobody to get in, and nobody to get out. since then, the palace has festered a quiet, pristine royal life, an island of order shielded from the horrors beyond the walls, kept at bay by the diligent guards.
the stowaways: ptarmigan knows the above story very, very well. he has lived it- lived the destruction of his village, lived through being the only survivor of everyone he knows. the palace is the only safe place for miles in any direction in this barren wasteland. he turns to it, desperate for a home. he finds no help in the royals, let alone the queen, but the palace itself- it is different from anything he’s ever known, but it is warm, and there is always food in the courtyard to steal, and he is always safe from outside threats. he learns to live in the rafters, the crawlspaces, the abandoned dungeons, of the palace, slinking around like a rat. he is not alone in this realization- rumors spread, and soon other peasants, with their lives ravaged like his, live within the walls too. they form a society with ptarmigan as the leader, a lonely, kindhearted seawing, effervescent, as the second in command. effer is merely glad to be there- he has never had so many friends at once, and adores the younger stowaways he is tasked to take care of.
the royals: cloud is lonely. not for lack of comforts- as a distant relative of queen crystal, she is a princess, and is thus a well-treated resident of the palace. but because, well— there’s lots of reasons. she has never been outside- the doors closed shortly after her birth. she has no friends, except for a mysterious and rage-filled cousin, periwinkle, who hides almost as many secrets as the palace itself. and she has no future- every adult she knows tells her to step up and repair her broken kingdom, but she has no idea how, and no instruction on how to start. periwinkle seems to know, however. peri wants to be queen, but to earn the respect of her coevals, she must take drastic measures. and among the stowaways, soon well known as pests in the walls, periwinkle begins a quest to clear the palace of them- cloud is of course dragged along.
but things are very, very complicated, as these dragons soon learn. and quests for identity and closure play out very differently in a thousand year old palace surrounded by hell. the stowaways and the royals must face each other, themselves, and the secrets they all keep, if any of them want to get out.
the mysteries only run so deep.
 
THE STORY
click the chapter titles to open
Prologue
The dragon’s talons left only the slightest indents as he hurried through the courtyard, his claws barely impressing into the shallow snow growing deeper and deeper. If he wasn’t fast, he would leave too great of a mark, and would be caught. He was sure of it. He was an IceWing-- no other tribe could melt into their environment like them.
He was concealed by the heavy, blurred flakes of snow whipped by the winds around him, and a thick, royal-blue night, and yet felt an urgency turning his stomach and deep fear he barely knew.
His pupils were dilated, used to the comforting darkness, but when he saw the concentrated orbs of light, he felt awakened, rejuvenated. He was here. He made it.
Along the sides of the courtyard were stooping walls and an iced over moat, although the center was rather bare. There were the fountains, forever enchanted to flow even in the coldest winters, and of course the moon globe tree and wall of rankings, but the dragon felt bare. He expected towering pine trees like living shadows and stuffed polar bears glaring at him through glassy eyes-- not a vast, snow-covered, empty space.
One thing, though, that brought his frozen body to life was the scent of food. Crisp polar bear, fresh greylings, fatty walrus, and sweet red berries. The bright abundance of food was stacked and stacked in shelves of spruce wood, under a thin glassy ceiling open to the courtyard.
Slowly, with talons clicking and breath shaky, the dragon entered the room. He stared at the walls of food, his heart pounding.
How could they? How dare they?
How dare the dragons of the palace, the royal IceWings in their own sheltered lives, keep so much food stacked up, hoarded away in one small kitchen? How dare it not be eaten, how dare it sit there when dragons were starving just beyond the borders?
The dragon hissed instinctively, trying to calm his nerves. If only he could go back. If only he could take as many dripping fish and meaty bears and crunchy pine nuts as he could carry and go all the way back to the village, to his home, and share the food in all it’s glory to have wonderful feast.
Oh how he wished.
The fear of being caught still lingered in his head, but he was stuck pacing the kitchen. He had flown in, he had made it. He snuck through one of the spires, the spires that pointed into the sky for miles, and was in the center courtyard, but now there were new problems. Well, his old problems were still there. The problem that his village was killed by thugs and he had nowhere to go but the ignorant palace.
What was he thinking? Was he really going to be able to survive as a stowaway, a peasant IceWing exactly where he shouldn’t be? Hiding out in the walls of the palace, inches from royalty that failed to help him?
If it failed, he didn’t have much to lose. He was once Ptarmigan, the happy member of a poor village. Seventh circle-- the lowest rank. But this night, he wasn’t quite sure.
He carefully pulled a slimy salmon off of a stack of them, the shiny scales slipping against each other. Even in the darkness, it looked so sleek and satisfying-- all meat on the bones and full and plump.
He squinted. Who cared if he ate it? The rich dragons this kitchen would feed wouldn’t mind if it went to waste. It was dark, he was alone, and very, very hungry from all the flying.
Of course, the past few months of famine and pirates taking their food probably helped to that hunger.
He gobbled it up, and instantly felt his spirits lift, like his body finally had weight that anchored him to the ground. He didn’t realize just how tired he was, how exhausted he was from everything that had happened to him.
He closed his eyes for a split second, savoring the gorgeous saltiness of the fish. When he opened them, he saw another figure inch out of a frozen archway into the kitchen.
He panted heavily and stepped back, bracing himself furiously. He glanced around for any escape route, but knew an aerial leave would easily lead to him getting shot down. He wiggled his talons and prayed. It was a move he’d regret later on, when he was more experienced and knew how to stay safe. On his first night in the palace, he easily could have gotten killed.
He got lucky.
Standing in front of him wasn’t a guard, with a readied spear and menacing gaze. It wasn’t a princess, prepared to shout the queen to have him sent to the dungeons. It wasn’t even a low ranking diplomat, forever bored but cursed to live in the palace forever.
It wasn’t even an IceWing.
It was… a SeaWing, bright pink but with scales shining in a rainbow in the soft Moon Tree light.
His jaw quivered, his eyes big and fearful. “Oh… oh no,” he whispered breathlessly. “I-- I am so sorry, Sir. It’s…. not what it looks like.”
The stranger carefully inched towards a knife casted in glass, his talons shaking. Ptar glanced quickly at it, claws scraping.
He vaulted over the table and snatched the knife, in a flurry of scales and wingbeats. A second later, he was pinning the SeaWing down on his side against a wall with a shelf of meat, in a cooled fridge room. He held the knife above the back of the dragon’s head, preparing to whack the back of it with the seamless blade.
“Stop, guard!” the bright dragon yelped, with surprising ferocity. He spun around to face his attacker, eyes wild.
“What?” Ptarmigan dropped it onto the smooth ground, cracking it slightly. “I’m not a guard!” he spat.
“W-what?” the SeaWing stuttered, backing away. He seemed extra conscious of his head, where the knife had almost struck.
“Who are you?” Ptar demanded. “Where do you come from?”
“I-- I snuck into the palace. I’m a SeaWing obviously, but I was cast aside as a child.” He glared, his muscles tensing. “I hoped to have a better life here in the palace, hiding out. The outside of the palace is, so, so war ridden, it’s impossible to live.”
The dragon nodded slowly, and approached the SeaWing like he was an old friend. He nodded, lost in thought. “I was an IceWing. A villager, once.” He spat on the ground, furious at this kitchen and the palace. “But the crime, the war, the rogues. I hoped for a better life here.”
He made eye contact with the SeaWing once more. “I didn’t imagine I’d have company.”
“Effervescent,” the SeaWing blurted. “If we’re gonna survive together, we better know each other’s names. My name is Effervescent.” He extended a shaky webbed talon.
The IceWing shook it. “Ptarmigan,” he replied steadily. He didn’t imagine that names would matter so much.
He checked behind himself again, only to see the courtyard still as still as a painting. “When did you even get here?”
“Just arrived. It does look nice, doesn’t it?” he answered with a hint of cheer in his voice. “I went for the courtyard. You know, I do get very hungry.”
Ptar nodded slowly. How was this dragon happy?
Effervescent smiled. “Well, I’ll see you around the palace, I suppose,” he finished awkwardly, grunting. “Not sure where I’ll stay, but--”
“Dungeons,” Ptarmigan suddenly stated. “There are dungeons, buried deep under the palace. I was always told as dragonet that I’d get thrown into them if I was bad.” He shook his head. “They’re never used--”
“We could hide out there,” Effer piped up. “Together. I mean, what else are we gonna do?”
Ptarmigan knew that most dragons hated a stand offish one. Nobody liked the rogue who went alone.
“Yes,” he agreed hesitantly.
The SeaWing nodded, bright glowing scales lighting up for a split second.
“Come on, then, palace dweller.” Effervescent depeed his voice to sound like a royal. “We shall go to the dungeon, like esteemed, uh, well…”
“Stowaways,” Ptarmigan stated. “That’s all we are, really.”
The SeaWing shrugged. “Sure. Let’s find that path to the dungeon. Like stowaways.”
close chapter
Chapter 1
Much like any other pest, Ptar slept in the rafters.
Effer wasn’t keen on the hidden attics and caverns of the palace the way the other Stowaways were. He was drawn to water. He spent many nights hunkered at the bottom of the grand fountain, or curled behind a manufactured waterfall in a common room. He was a SeaWing at heart, no matter how many years he spent in the IceWing kingdom. Besides, he was big and clunky with rubbery scales and deformed wings that wouldn’t fold properly and webbed feet that slid on the ice floors.
But he was well familiar with those dry and dusty hideouts Ptarmigan kept to. He picked his way over the chipped stone beams of the rafters, tail dripping cold water along the ground, his wings bent to avoid the glass ceiling.
“Ptarmigan,” he whispered, his voice soft and creaky. “Ptarmigan?” He bent down his head to get a better view at the form of the IceWing. His body was curled on a cracked beam, facing the wall, his rib-dotted chest rising and falling ever so slightly. “Ptarmigan, wake up.”
He could see his friend’s eyes open in the foggy reflection of the glass. Even though he surely heard Effer’s voice and knew who it was, his claws still flexed in his hands.
“What do you want?” Ptarmigan had a gruff and bleak voice, one that could be charming and smooth when he wanted, but never with Effer.
“You have to get up, Ptar. We need to get to the dungeon.” Effer rapped his claws on the stone beams, glancing to the sides of the room. He knew he should be able to look Ptarmigan in the eyes, but he still found his eyes pulled to the corners of the attic.
“Those Stowaways can rescue themselves. It’s not my job to save them,” Ptarmigan growled. Still, he rolled over, landing on his feet and snapping open his wings. “It’s their fault, you know, for not learning the lock-picking I taught them.”
“Come on, Ptar, don’t do this.” Effer tried to force a smile, but it just forced his words to be shaky. “It is your job and you know it. None of this is their fault.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Ptarmigan’s horns brushed the ceiling as he stood up. This attic was a beautiful spire from the outside, that much Effer knew. Still, the inside looked no different from every other hiding spot in the palace. Scattered with bones and fragments of rock, it was hard to believe tiny attics and rooms like these made up the shimmering palace on the outside.
Effer nudged his head in the direction of the ground. “Ready to go?”
“Sure, I’ll just grab my belongings on the way out.”
“Oh, of course, Prince Ptarmigan, you and all your precious jewels.” Effer’s green eyes twinkled, his body relaxing with the joke. “Yeah right, you have belongings. And I’m a king.”
The two were still chuckling when they dropped from the slats between the rafter beams to the floor below. The supports of the roof had a layer of ice underneath, but months of Stowaway claws had formed cracks wide enough to slip through.
The hallway was empty and silent, one of the dozens of long, clear corridors circling the throne room. Every new stowaway seemed to ask why they couldn’t just sleep here, why they had to arrange themselves in the hidden rafters and attics. They didn’t understand the guards, how they moved. They couldn’t even draw a map of the palace. They didn’t understand the danger that always lurked below the surface, that everything Ptarmigan did was so carefully calculated, that no matter how hard Effer laughed, nothing would replace the feeling of freedom.
Ptarmigan didn’t open the door for them after he picked the lock, he simply let it swing on its rusty hinges until the captives got out themselves. Effer watched the three exchange a glance of confusion, before Loon boldy left the bench first and marched out into the open.
“What took you so long?” She flapped her wings in irritation. “We were waiting all night. Those guards could have come back to us and put us in an even worse prison cell?”
“There isn’t one. This is the only dungeon still accessible.” Ptarmigan narrowed his eyes. “Being a Stowaway means a lot of waiting, kid. And if you can’t wait one night you’re never going to get by here.”
Effer carefully stepped in front of Ptarmigan. “We all would appreciate you learning a thing or two about freeing yourselves,” he said with a stern voice but kind eyes. “You’re out now, alright?”
“Thank you, Ptarmigan,” the other Stowaways mumbled, their faces to the ground as they stepped out. Unlike Loon, they were all relatively quiet and shy around Ptarmigan.
Despite being closer to him than anybody else, Effer could see why they were so cautious. Ptarmigan was a strong and blunt leader to the Stowaways, never masking his words or feelings, even with the youngest. Effer could never tell if Ptarmigan really intended for the group to grow so big, or if it was all an accident. Maybe he secretly resented having any company at all, even Effer.
But he seemed to have a soft spot for the youngest Stowaways-- and Loon seemed to have one for him, too. She was the only one who ever seemed to like to talk to him. She tagged along beside him whenever she was with him, always gazing up at him like he was the real royalty. The stowaway wasn’t a pure IceWing, but rather a hybrid, one who was a messy and ugly combination of her two parent tribes. To Effer, the idea of an IceWing falling in love with a swamp-dwelling MudWing was laughable, but it must have happened, because here she was, dingy brown scales and all.
Frostine stepped through the door on delicate and carefully poised feet, beckoning for Kabibi to follow with a graceful flick of her tail. She was glittery and thin, a diplomat’s daughter who fled to the Stowaways with perfect manners that never truly faded. Effer always sensed a spitefulness in Ptar whenever he interacted with her, the distaste he had for all the royal stinging his words. She explained time and time again to the group that she wasn’t really royal, her family was just in the palace when the doors closed. She hated the royals, she said, would never go back to them for the world. Loon, her closest ally, seemed to be the only one who believed her.
Kabibi was the last to leave the cell, glaring at Ptarmigan as she walked past him. Effer flashed a smile which she returned, if begrudgingly. She was a SeaWing like him, the only other in the group, likely in the whole kingdom. That seemed to be where the similarities ended.
“Do any of you know if another Stowaway replenished the food rations?” Ptarmigan asked.
“Why would we? Like we said, nobody came by.” Loon studied a piece of fish bone between her talons. “We’ve just been all alone.”
“Quit whining, it was fine.” Kabibi studied her claws. “Those guards have thrown me in the dungeon so many times I could probably break out myself if I wanted to. I just didn’t want to leave you alone.”
Frostine frowned. “What about me?”
Kabibi rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m sick of this dungeon.” She beat her wings and seemed prepared to leave, flicking her tail to motion her friends to follow.
“Wait!” Effer called out behind her. “How about we all go restore the rations? If none of the other Stowaways have gone today, then there will be plenty to take.”
“We can’t be sure of that, you know,” Ptarmigan muttered. “There’s no guarantees in palace life.”
Effer smiled, rolling his eyes playfully, but Ptarmigan didn’t respond. “Uh, why don’t you stay back here and hold down the base, and me and the kids can get food.”
Ptarmigan nodded quickly. “Don’t get caught.”
“I won’t.”
The IceWing kingdom to the south was all pine forests and flat tundras not unlike the deserts they bordered, and the north broke away into fragments of tall, sloping glaciers that concealed myths and stories in the cold water they floated on. But the middle of the kingdom, where this palace was, was the coldest, isolated, the horizon covered by the mountains and the thick snow and fog. The palace was never designed to be easily found; not by enemies, not by peasants, not by the queens of the other tribes. The building was complicated, with hallways weaving in and out of each other, random empty rooms that led to flight paths, and towers arranged in strange shapes. Perhaps the goal was, initially, to confuse and humble anything less than royalty that stepped foot in, a constant, suffocating reminder that this place belonged to birthright royalty only; and none other.
To the Stowaways, all it did was make it easier to hide.
Effer and the dragons behind him circled the courtyard from the dark hall surrounding it, watching the bright space through the tiny holes and puckers in the ice wall. Corridors like dragon tails snaked in and out of the yard, all of them dark, none monitored.
“That guard will move to the east side of the tower in a little bit,” Effer said, his voice breathy. He crouched to the ground, awkward wings balancing his body. Kabibi, Frostine, and Loon nearly stepped over each other, trying to see into the yard. “Come on, be patient, you can get out soon enough.” Effer pushed them to the side with a gentle sweep of his tail. “See? He’s about to turn.”
“What’s to stop him from just seeing us from a tiny corner of his eye and raining down spears?” Loon said it with an awfully cheerful tone.
“Because he can’t see us as long as we stay in the shadows.” It was early morning-- any later and the sun would make them stand out too much. “And he can’t hear us, either. We’re too far down, and his head’s so full of thoughts he wouldn’t focus on us anyways.”
Every trip to the courtyard, one Stowaway asked if they would get caught. And Effer always had to explain, and show them when to move, and ensue none stepped out of line. The threat of even being near discovery was enough. And in months, no Stowaway had ever been caught in the courtyard. Because the courtyard wasn’t like getting thrown into a dungeon by a drunk guard after slinking around near a feast. The courtyard out in the open, where the towers nearby were full of guards armed with arrows and spears ready to be dropped at anything outside, on the ground or in air. And anything outside the palace was certain death.
Effer always made sure they knew this. Ptarmigan was clear-- the Stowaways, the younger ones, at last, had to know that their safety was their responsibility. If they knew of Ptarmigan’s razor sharp claws and the spikes on the end of his tail, they wouldn’t fear the guards. If a dragon as powerful as Ptarmigan watched over them, they would never learn anything.
At least that was what Ptar had told Effer. Maybe the dragonets would be scared, if they saw Ptarmigan in a fight, his head cloudy with rage. Maybe they wouldn’t trust him anymore.
“Effer!” Kabibi jabbed her wing into his side. “The guard’s facing away from us!”
Silently, Effer pulled the tattered sack from the ground and took off into the courtyard. The sun struck his eyes and warmed his scales, and the smells from the tents hit him all at once. He never felt as alive as he did on a mission like this, with the dragonets behind him and air, pure, cold, clear air, on every side of him.
He stumbled into the nearest tent; he knew by now the layout by heart, and still it excited him. Crates of fish from the northern ocean lined every surface, some hanging on hooks on the poles and others yet to be unpacked. He took fish from every surface, hoping to even out the quantity after it was stolen from. He didn’t really know why he did this, perhaps as a bit of courtesy, or to make it harder to notice the missing goods.
The saltwater fish soaked in sprayed over his talons and onto the floor, and the bag quickly grew heavy. He pushed through to the next tent, insulated with blocks of ice and full of specialty meats. He knew the more wild of the IceWings liked these foods, and he tried to take as many as he could, no matter how disgusting it was to him.
When the sack was full he pulled up against the fountain, the cool, shadowy side pressed against his body and the bag held close to his chest. He could see the others rustling through the other tents, dashing between them. More Stowaways too, those who lived on opposite ends of the palace, moved and and out of his field of view. He nodded his head to them. These were dragons he didn’t know the names of and didn’t see each other often, but who he was allied with nonetheless. Not just because Ptarmigan controlled all the Stowaways in the palace (none could hide from him for too long), but because, in a moment like this, they were his brothers in arms, in the same situation with the same dangers.
They took their small share of food and took back into the darkness on the edge of the courtyard.
“Effer,” Loon appeared beside him, a torn cloak filled with food held between her teeth. “I got everything I could fit…”
“Go back where we came from, quickly. Don’t hang around here too long.” He jabbed his tail in the right direction, and she fluttered along, already chewing something. Frostine and Kabibi trailed behind her, talking, laughing, quietly, but louder than they would do indoors. Maybe the sun had some affect on their brain, Effer had always wondered. Maybe it made them want to talk and laugh and shout into the sky that they were here and made them hate wanting to retreat into the darkness and coldness of indoors.
He scanned the courtyard one last time, not for guards, but for other Stowaways. They were all gone, and, knowing that alone is never a good place to be in the courtyard, he hurried back inside. It only took his eyes a minute to adjust to the darkness once more, and his footsteps quickly fell back into the quiet, stiff movement they always had. His wings tucked under themselves, his tail was tightened so as not to drag on the floor. He made himself small again, until the package he held wobbled in his arms, and he headed down to the dungeon.
When they ate, all of them together, with farther dragons having made their way to the dungeon, they ate loudly. They gnawed on the meat until their teeth scraped against the bone, and even after held them in their mouth for a little longer. Meat was hard to come by, and Stowaways quickly learned a bone could feed a hungry stomach long after it was cleaned. Blood and juice spattered on the floor and their bodies-- the few Stowaways with pure, shiny pastel scales lost their good looks pretty quickly. Grime and dust floated around them in the air like smoke, and only Effer and Kabibi could breath easily with their gills.
The laughter was loud and often for no reason and dragons poked each other in the side, rough and playful. Effer joined in, watching the younger ones, hearing reports from the older ones. Only the three girls had been sighted last night at the banquet, although the news of recent Stowaways was spreading quickly.
“I doubt any of them remember what they heard,” grumbled an older dragom. Blizzard, from between the food in his mouth. He had escaped the worst of the crime in the world outside and ate every meal like it was his last. He was convinced that his enemies could find them at any moment, Ptarmigan had told Effer. Despite this, Blizzard himself was quite talkative. “The royals were so drunk on their fine little wine half of them left dragged out by the tail! The halls reek of alcohol stronger than the wine room itself”
The crowd around him all laughed.
“I almost feel bad for guards on days like these.” Loon was draped between the bars of an old cell, one the Stowaways had long used to sharpen their claws and build their muscle on. The old steel bars were wide enough for the little dragon to fit through, but thin enough to keep her hidden. “Imagine having to drag all these dragons down to their rooms just so they don’t pass out in a pool of spilled wine.”
“How can you say that when two of their meanest threw you down here?”
Loon blinked for a second, but soon was talking again. “It doesn’t matter, because I know I’m safe down here. And they were low ranking-- it’s not like they can do anything.”
“Mm,” Blizzard growled. “The guard system is more complicated than that--”
“There’s a lot we still have to figure out.” Ptarmigan parted the small crowd, giving Effer a knowing look. Effer nodded, although he didn’t really know what he was supposed to do. He just knew that when Ptarmigan’s eyes were so serious, flickering like that for just a moment, it was best to stay quiet.
“The low ranking guards might think they’re through with us, but the second some of the smarter ones catch wind of the fact that we’re still here, we could be in trouble.” Ptarmigan made his way over to Loon, although his eyes were still fixed on Blizzard. “I expect all of you to learn combat training.”
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Chapter 2
Queen Crystal had always liked sleep.
Sleeping meant that she got to relax, heal from the stress of the day, in probably the only part of the continent she was allowed to be alone in, without guards clambering over her at any second (Hadn’t some of them taken the hint she didn’t like them? She always asked for Polar, she didn’t ask for Tundra or Caribou or whoever!).
It meant nobody could bother her or want anything from her, because that was her beauty sleep, a time to do nothing but rest instead of running a kingdom and failing. It was the only time when she wasn’t doing something horribly wrong.
She had one arm dangled off the ledge, all the blood flowing to it, and her face planted in the pillow. Her foggy eyes woke to the pale colors of her room, with so many chairs and ledges and pillows and tables she was sure she would knock something over one day. One wall was all ledges, the biggest and lowest one perfectly wide and round, with a big, polar-bear fur pillow to curl up on paintings of past queens hung above her bed, all the eyes staring down, right at her, no matter where she was in the room .
As she woke up groggily, she quickly pulled her arm back up and tried to tuck it under her body. She could hear her mother yelling at her, Crystal, that’s not proper! Crystal, look ladylike. Crystal, you’ll never ever ever be loved by any of your subjects as a queen, and will cower in your palace with the dragons who haven’t caught on to your stupidity until you are challenged by someone smarter, if you keep this up!
Okay, maybe the last one was a bit made up.
She grabbed her scepter from the floor, seemingly dropped into a fluffy rug at some point the previous night. It was long and elegant, with sketches of winter beasts carved into the long shaft, and a globe fresh from the Moon Globe tree at the end. Enchanted to keep her aware and caring about her subjects forever, it was one of the small comforts in her life.
She settled in front of a huge glassy mirror, spritzing on fresh-scented perfume and polishing her horns to perfection with a fish-skin cloth. She dabbed at her scales with a caribou antler scratcher, and couldn’t help but notice all the bruises and scrapes on her back. Her wings always folded awkwardly when she slept-- or rather, passed out. Last night was still fuzzy, but she was pretty sure it had something to do with celebrating the guards for capturing and dungeon-tossing a “palace peasant.” Some guard, who she swore was missing a few toes, had carried her to her bedroom after passing out cold.
She stretched her wide, pale violet wings again, and poked the membrane. God, they were getting all wrinkled and creased. Was this her curse?
Crystal was just finished checking her claws, her nails filed down to an exact point. The pale cream hourglass indicated she ought to be heading out soon, when the shimmery curtain leading to her room was pushed open, and a guard came up to her. She was an indigo-eyed female Crystal recognized. “Polar!” She clasped her talons together excitedly. Polar always knew how to take care of her well, even taking up servant duties despite being a top guard and warrior.
"Can you go over to the kitchen please? Fetch me a fish, I'm in the mood for something fresher than a polar bear." She flicked her talon back to the doorway, and the guard silently dipped her head, the wooden end of her spear hitting the floor with a tiny thud.
“Move along, toe-less.” Polar shoved her way past the guard, his tired eyes glaring at her every step. Probably because he’ll never move like a guard should without his talons.
His awkward foot made a strange clicking sound, and he clenched his jaw tensely as Polar passed him. “Hey!” He dropped the polar bear he clutched in his talons, dagger-like teeth glinting as he faced Polar, as though he suddenly remembered to stand up for himself.
Polar rolled her dark eyes. “What is it, Eider?” she demanded, recalling his name.
 “I was just getting this bear for a princess,” he snarled, craning his neck towards the pale violet guard. She hummed gleefully as she turned her back to him, now selecting the freshest caught fish. Just behind him was a frustrated looking dragoness, with huge sparkling eyes pleading for Eider to say something.
Polar scoffed, eyeing the three rings on her necklace. “Look at her-- third circle.” Her lip curled up as one dark indigo eye stared at the guard. “So I’m sorry, Eider, but the queen must be served first,” she declared. She started to make her way back inside, chin held high.
The princess sniffed, looking disgustedly at the bear Eider had thrown her. She walked past quartz pillars, meat juice from her claws spattering the immaculate floors as she swerved out of Polar’s path.
Polar had a fish for herself stuffed into her mouth and a pod of tuna held by the tail when she shot a final stare at the princess walking in the opposite direction. Eider had flattened himself against the pillar awkwardly, trying to avoid looking at the two. She almost laughed, finding herself admiring her ability to shut him up.
“Move along. Don’t get drippings on the floor,” Eider finally snarled at the princes, snapping Polar back to attention. At least he wasn’t sucking up to the princess anymore, the dark-eyed guard thought with a smirk.
She didn’t have many more needs than that. Truthfully, all she wished for was a better life for the guards. And deep down, a worse life for the princess.
"Watch your tongue, mongrel," the princess sniffed, shoving the carcass in his face, and promptly walking back to the palace.
Polar rolled her eyes. Time after time she saw one princess after the other-- they seemed to hate just about everybody and yet demanded the most annoying things. As stupid as Eider was, Polar couldn’t help but feel bad for the guard, who must have hunted on request of the dragoness. She scowled, knowing the danger Eider put himself into (without care, mind you) to get the food only for it to be tossed back in his grim face.
As he clutched the pinkish slab of meat, his spear held stiff straight and his face looking down in embarrassment, Polar knew she ought to step in. At worst, she would at least get some excitement by reporting the snobby princesses for once.
"Excuse me dear," grinned Polar, blocking the princess’ path. "But you might want to be careful. I am one of the queen's first guards-- I was the first dragon she spoke to today. I'll be sure to mention this rude behavior. Name, miss?" She spat out the fish, and caught it smoothly in her talons.
"Snowshoe." She spat, "Princess Snowshoe." She walked away without another word.
"Noted, princess." Polar stalked off, the morning’s breakfast clenched in her talons and a fish gulped down her throat.
Dragons were fighting. That was all Tern saw.
Blood was spraying from their claws, dust clouding through the air and making the warring creatures look like spirits, rising from the battlefield and claws interlocked, teeth on necks, weapons through scales.
Tern instinctively lashed out, his frosty breath crossing his vision.
But the dragons before him-- hotheaded SkyWings, burly MudWings, slippery SeaWings didn’t react to the freezing blast. They didn’t move at all.
Instead, the canvas they were painted on was covered in a layer of frost, the earthy pigments flaking away.
As Tern came to his senses and woke himself up fully, he cursed under his breath, and tried to clean up the painting in front of his bed with a calloused talon, stretching his wings as he sat up on his ledge of a bed.
The fight was real. It felt all too real-- because it was. Because he had retraced those exact clawing, aggressive motions time and time again. It was the biggest fight of his career- and it would never end in the storm of his head.
He circled around the room. That painting, titled “The Earthly Underworld,” was expensive. He didn’t exactly know how much in IceWing money, but he knew it was painted by a NightWing, so the queen probably paid much more for it than she needed to. Blasted scammer NightWings, he hissed, his voice raspy.
The huge picture was made decades ago in the SandWing Succession, the great war of the tribes. It’s original intent was probably to illustrate just how “scary” the war was by some privileged NightWing. That never got across, since it ended up in the talons of Princess Blaze, who was allied to Queen Glacier, who was the queen of the IceWings, and now, Prince Tern had it in his small bedroom at the top of an obscure tower in the IceWing Palace.
But everybody else considered him “the ex-king obsessed with war,” so his secluded room was loaded with his old weapons in glass cases and war artwork and literature.
But even without all of the extra stuff lying on the floor that he kicked aside as he prepared to leave, he still had many reminders of the war. From small punctures through his talons and tail, to the rips and creased in his wings, to his cracked horns, to his bony face, to his muscles that never faded, to the long, jagged claw marks along his face, and across his flank.
He clodded down the spiral staircase, his old bones ringing on every step. A window covered in prison bars reflected a sliver of light, although his dingy white and grey scales would never have that classic sparkle of his tribe.
Not that he cared.
A shadowy figure dragged himself along the walkway to the throne. Queen Crystal straightened herself up as Prince Tern approached, his movements slow and plodding as usual. Her lips pressed together as she let the guards escort him to the throne. If the male royalty had just any many etiquette classes as the princesses and ladies, then perhaps the grizzled veteran would hold his head up high and stretch his shoulders back like Crystal was meant to.
“Father?” she called, her high voice echoing against the instricate pillars. The watery light from the huge skylight overhead glinted off of the scarred scales, and Tern seated himself before his daughter.
“Father, dear, why do you look so antsy?" Crystal smiled, dipping her head slightly to the elder. Her eyes darted left and right to the elegant throne room, trying to not see his face. She couldn’t help but be disgusted by the gnarled scar over his snout, pinkish tissue breaking through scuffed scales. She didn’t remember him without any of these gruesome marks, but she had the faintest memories of seeing him barge through the palace doors with a bandage and dried blood around his younger face.
Her father was giving and getting these scars in her childhood, and she was giving and getting pretty looks and etiquette classes.
"I promised you, we've captured all those hidden little peasants. Everything's all right." She tightened her grip on her scepter-- she really did care about her kingdom, she thought.
Tern huffed, clouds of mist forming around his nostrils. He felt like he was the only dragon in the entire palace who still cared about honor. Real honor, not the looks-first ways his wife tried to keep. It was why the former king was one of the only royals to have noticed the feeling of rebellion slowly growing in the kingdom. It was spreading like poison between dragons, and soon it would reach the queen herself-- but Tern would defend her. Or he would turn his back on his failed daughter and side with whatever rebels sought to repair the kingdom.
Either way, he was battling somebody, and that was good enough for him. “All I’m saying is… last night’s celebration couldn’t have saved us from everything. Those peasants could still be lurking within our walls…”
To her father’s surprise, Crystal laughed, flicking her hand. “Why, I have my good guards sweep the entire palace everyday,” she said with a haughty laugh. Somehow her voice felt painfully hollow, thin, as it faded throughout the vast room. Tern’s raspy lungs and the slight rattling of the chandeliers felt painful, like needles pricking through the skin one sound at a time. “There is no need to worry,” she finally said, gesturing to the guards surrounding her. “Trust me— if you saw a disguised peasant, you’d recognize them.”
Quickly, she brushed her pastel scales off and locked both talons around her scepter. “Anyways,” she added, stepping off of the throne, “Polar— you know Polar, right?— says that there was some princess who was drooling all over my floor. I was going to call her in and send her off dramatically. Care to, uh, stay for this?”
For some reason, in the grizzled and seasoned face of the dragon before her on the cool ice floor, she saw a flicker of pain.
“It would be my pleasure ” Tern explained with a slight bow. “What I mean isn’t that there is an abundance of filthy peasants in the palace,” he added as the guards marched down the hall. “What I mean is that back when your mother ruled there weren’t any of them.”
"Well, I'm not like my mother," Crystal said, her tone darkening. Tern tensed up. "Come on."
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Chapter 3
A swarm of guards huddled around the figure. Crystal waited for them to draw nearer, the dragoness in their grasp hidden by their muscular bodies. For the first time that day, she felt a bit excited, and squeezed her father’s talon.
Snowshoe’s was staring at the room blankly, barely struggling under the guards. This really was a royal throne room.
She was never able to get into the throne room with ease— Crystal had ensured that any potential heirs were discouraged from entering on their own— but Tern had caught the IceWing poking her head in at times, or pouring over pictures in the large library where he often sulked.
The space was just about the biggest hallway in the world, with steeping walls of pure ice lining the sides. They gleamed aggressively as a slice of sun from the vast skylight lined the path all the way to the throne.
Despite the smooth quartz pillars, the polished stone structure holding the palace together, the immaculate ice, the almost translucent curtains woven of cobwebs and imbedded with jewels— despite all of the sleek, pure beauty, there were some odd decor choices. Polar bears, stuffed and frozen solid, were perched on rough granite pedestals and snarled at the princess escorted by the guards. Scavengers were depicted cowering beneath the queen a the base of her quartz throne, cared of slate and wood.
And perched on the throne with her wings folded forward and a glint in her was Mother.
“You realize you’re in trouble, right?” the queen said with a smirk. Snowshoe couldn’t help but notice that her voice wasn’t the same voice she used to declare a speech at a feast with, or used to command a diplomat. It was no-nonsense, lacking the grand drawl the queen needed. “You’re not here to gawk at the architecture.”
Snowshoe seemed to snap back to attention. “What is it, your majesty?” She batted her long lashes and tried to smile.
Crystal felt Tern rolling his eyes behind her, but went on. “You disregarded my all important guard,” she snapped, “when she reported some very rude behavior on your part. You shoved a piece of meat into the face of another guard, before making a mess EVERYWHERE.”
“But mother!” Snowshoe whined, her brow furrowing. “We’re royals! We get to boss the guards around!”
Crystal pressed her lips together pensively. “Mother?” she muttered to herself. “Wha—“
“For crying out loud, Crystal,” Tern suddenly snapped from his perch by a water fountain. “She’s your daughter. One of dozens.”
“This isn’t fair! I demand action to be taken immediately!” Snowshoe tried to pry the talons of the guards off of her necklaces, but it was no use.
Crystal closed her eyes again, wishing she could retreat to the darkness. “I am the action,” she snapped, the air stiffening up around her. She straightened herself up, puffing out her chest. “I am the queen, and the highest action possible, and that’s THAT.”
Tern placed a scratched up talon off his daughter's shoulder, but the queen pulled away. “I’ve had it in this palace,” she barked. “I’ve had it with these peasants living in the palace enough, and I most certainly don’t have time to deal with my own third-circle daughter misbehaving.” She rubbed her temples, nearly puncturing the pale skin with her long claws.
She shut her eyes and sat like that for a while, fuming at the world and yet embarrassed at the same time.
“Your honor,” one of the guards began, his voice soft, “where did you want us to take— “
“Just the dungeons,” Crystal interrupted, Tern flinching behind her. “The biggest dungeons we have. Just throw her down there.”
The guards and the whining princess disappeared into the pale hallway, nothing more than misty figures as they faded into the cool shadows of the pillars. Somehow, from the angle of the queen, the room was dark and bleak, not the shimmering expanse it appeared to be.
She glanced back at the only dragon left in the room, aside from the guards. Tern looked at her for a second, his cold eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed, before he broke his daughter’s gaze.
Hobbling away from the throne into the water-like halls, reeking of excessive pine perfume and the faint hint of sugar, the ex-king walked on his wings as though his arms couldn’t bear the pressure.
“Father,” Crystal called, but it was more of a plea. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t respond, only kept moving away, his figure melting into the palace like the guards and Snowshoe. Crystal wasn’t sure if he heard her at all.
Eider’s serrated talons pierced through the fur rag, and with a frustrated huff, he cast the fur aside. The dining table was impossibly spotless, wasn’t it? There was no more he could do.
There were no chairs along the long dining table— only a throne for the queen at the end. Toppled over goblets, cracked glasses, a sugar-spun bouquet spilled on the woven tablecloth… the entire room was always a disaster after the biggest feast.
It wasn’t fair that the royals got to be so dainty and sophisticated, and then make a big mess like this for the guards to clean up. Eider was a high ranking guard —no, a soldier!— why was he cleaning dishes when he should be protecting the kingdom outside the palace?
Outside. It was a long time since he’d been there.
He’d thought about it, of course. He’d thought about fleeing the palace, somehow sneaking away while on guard duty. He’d get a post at the highest towers, and then take off into flight to see his beautiful kingdom belong the stuffy rooms and stuffier royals.
After all, if those suspected “stowaways” had snuck into the palace, how hard would it be for him to sneak out?
But there was a reason. There was a reason he was stuck inside the castle, and it was the same reason all of those peasants tried to get into the safety of the palace.
And there was a reason Eider in particular could never leave the palace. And it was the same reason he was here, shaking out a tablecloth for shards of broken glass and wiping down vases with a scrap of fur, instead of hunting through the palace for any intruders.
The same reason he wasn’t respected by anybody, not even the guards no better off than him.
As if on cue, he stubbed his bad foot against the “paw” of a table leg, and cursed loudly through the pain. There were no claws or long talons to absorb the pressure, and was stuck with an already sore leg now ringing with pain.
“Old toe bothering you, ey?”
Uninvited, a guard strolled into the room. She wasn’t holding any spears, so she marched smoothly on her legs like the royalty themselves instead of balancing on her wing claws. Her dark violet eyes seemed to sneer, although her mouth was a straight line.
“How nice of you to visit me on your break, Polar.” He turned back to his job of cleaning up the room, hoping he looked deep in the task.
She strode in a circle around the long table. “Did you get the message from Commander Igloo?” she asked, picking up something from the ground with her claws.
Eider paused. Was this some cruel test? “No,” he finally answered, studying the ground.
He swore Polar laughed at him. Like it was his fault he never knew what was going on. “Well,” she began, inspecting the object with her claws. “I guess I’ll be the bearer of the news.” She held it up in front of her eyes, her mouth open slightly.
“Just tell me,” Eider snapped as he slapped a plate back onto the table as aggressively as he could without breaking it.
“I reported what went down this morning. In the courtyard.”
He nearly dropped the plate.
“That blasted princess, all spoiled rotten and rude. I’m not your biggest fan, but—“ She poked her head on the floor, sweeping her tail on the hard ice. She shrugged. “Well, I hate to see guards disrespected like that. So I told the queen, and now the princess, Snowshoe, is in the dungeon. Ha. Maybe she’s sleeping with the stowaways.”
Eider paused for a moment to breath, his rattling lungs tired. “R-really?” He made his way to the other side of the table, silently wondering what Polar was doing on the ground.
“The funny part is, the queen didn’t even know she was her daughter—“
“No, I mean, she’s in the dungeon?”
“Maybe. They might still be looking for it. She’ll get there at some point.” She shrugged again.
Blinking again, he shook his head. “Huh. I just didn’t think— well I didn’t— never mind.”
“You thought I was going to get you in trouble? For not being the jerk Snowshoe deserves?”
“Um, yeah.” He rounded the corner, nearly stabbing his wing with the sharp edge of the table.
Polar clicked her tongue and shook her head. It felt so strange to Eider— the stiff guard who was always walking somewhere, with somewhere to be (usually the queen’s quarters) was being, well, casual. He never imagined he’d see Polar, the queen’s favorite guard, picking up trash from the floor of an abandoned dining room. “Nah,” she muttered. “Never even mentioned you by name, I just said she was rude to you. Like I said— I really do care about the guards. I’m above the elementary game of getting someone in trouble when we all know who’s really at fault, you know?”
She glanced up to look at him, and there was something new in her eyes— compassion? Relation? The recognition of the fact that they were no better or worse than each other? “I just— well, us guards don’t have it easy. Some call us ‘stowaways with a permit.’ I mean, aren’t we?”
Every single bit of Eider raised to be an obedient fighter screamed at him to deny her. No, he was supposed to say, The queen is doing a good job and we should appreciate our jobs. Complaining will get us fired and sent out to the crime ridden land outside.
“You’re right,” he blurted, before he could stop himself. “Life is risky for us guards— I mean, we come from the low class places that now nobody can survive through. One wrong move and we’re kicked out.”
Polar nodded thoughtfully. Thoughtfully! As if she had, well, thoughts and feelings and beliefs outside of the unchanging loyalty to the queen!
Eider’s heart began to sank. The queen. Polar would never disregard the queen. She might say the job was hard, but she’d never blame it on the queen.
It struck Eider suddenly, and made him almost physically flinch. He blamed the queen.
As her favorite guard, Polar probably didn’t. That was obvious.
“This is a test,” he uttered, his high head now hanging. “You don’t really think that stuff. Somebody got suspicious of me and they’re testing my loyalty.”
He looked back up at her, and sniffed. “It’s okay— just be honest with me. I failed, didn’t I?”
Polar found a messy napkin and began to gather up the objects on the floor. They were shards of glass, sharp and nearly invisible on the glass floor. “Yeah,” she said plainly, shaking her head. “General Thaw, your superior, thinks you’re incompetent. Your foot, combined with your mate, made him think that he should let you off.”
Eider squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t have a mate, not anymore,” he whispered, although Polar must not have heard, because she continued.
“But… but please understand that I believe everything I said. I think he wanted me to, well, test you in combat, but that’s not fair.”
Her cold, metallic eyes stared straight ahead as she dumped the shards of glass onto the slab of the table, cutting the end of her claw on one. She winced, and shook out her talon, blood spraying away. “I was testing you. Because I wanted to see what you think. I want to know how you feel about, well, everything.”
Eider’s only thought was, How is she the same snooty dragon who shoved me aside just this morning and made fun of my toes?
“What are you on about? And what do you think you’re doing with the broken glass?”
A grin spread along her face. “Can’t you feel it in the palace?” She lashed her tail, the spikes on the end clattering against each other. “There’s a feeling of rebellion. Of something big growing.” She shook out the tablecloth, and gathered the yards with a piece of shark skin. “And us guards— stuck in that place right between the rebel peasants and the royals— are the first to see it.”
She twirled a jagged knife like it was a spear between two fingers. “Don’t you get it? This is the chance for us to prove ourselves— prove we will protect the queen. It’s a test of our abilities— and I think I’m passing.”
Eider inhaled deeply, his breath shaky and legs standing awkwardly.”I have to tell you something,” he began. How was he supposed to begin? “Before you came to the courtyard this morning, before everything happened… I was talking to one of them.”
“One of what?” Polar demanded, her voice commanding again.
Eider thought she knew the answer, but he told her anyways. “A Stowaway. They were stealing food from the kitchen to feed the youngest in their group.”
Polar was the one to sigh— but her breath was sharper, clearer, and a bit of tusk-like teeth showed through. “So you’ve seen them.”
“Yes.” He stood his ground, but could barely resist the urge to offer the female guard the fur-rag for her cut finger. You’re not her friend.
“You know the queen is the first to know. From there it’ll be passed down to Thaw, if Crystal doesn’t want to handle it.”
“I understand.” He went back to his cleaning, trying to hold every single joint as stiff as possible. He didn’t want to look like some horrible wreck of a guard— the dragonets made examples out of in school. That wasn't him. He had to stay as soldier-like as possible. He had to keep it up.
“You have to understand,” he suddenly began, his brows pointing in, “that I can't really, well, catch the Stowaways. There’s so many of them, it’s a whole network. We can't spend all of our time tracking them when they haven’t been harmful.”
“But… but it’s our job. Our final test. Where we prove ourselves.” She seemed almost lost for words, stuck between the fierce guard who would get Eider booted, and the excited and ambitious fighter searching for some kind of sign that there was meaning in the world, that there was a purpose for herself. That there was a reason all of the terrible things were happening, and that the queen knew what she was doing. That side, who believed the best in the queen.
She brushed out her talons. “And those glass shards— well, I didn’t want you to step on them. Just making sure you don’t injure your feet again.”
She had such a genuine smile on her face at the last sentence, like she was satisfied and also relieved, maybe glad she had “defended” Eider from the glass. And she truly expected Eider to agree and be excited with her, and Eider almost gave in. But he couldn’t, not when he was this deep. How was he supposed to side with her now, knowing what he knew?
“Listen, Polar,” he grunted, trying to shove down the rage. “The queen doesn’t know how to stop them. She doesn’t know how to care for her kingdom belong the palace, and even that will be lost soon enough. Like you said. It’s gonna be lost, all of this, to the Stowaways.”
He gestured around the room, his talons still shaky. “All we have to do is let it happen.” He inhaled sharply, and finished with, “I want to be in the right side of history. I want to serve the strong dragons, surrender to them, instead of dying at their talons.”
Polar clicked her tongue again, her lip curling. Ice crystals formed on the edge of his nostrils, and she looked like she was preparing a shot of frostbreath. “Unbelievable,” she hissed, her breath icy cold and her words sharp, staccato. “You really want to give in? Let these invaders, who have no right to this sacred palace, take the reins of the kingdom?”
Eider shrugged this time.
“You think those cowards are running the kingdom better than the queen?” She faced him head on, lunging on top of the table, and even shattered a glass plate with her tail.
“Those cowards have survived the crime outside. The real rebels are the SandWings and SkyWings and NightWings who forced the Stowaways here in the first place. The ‘cowards’ can use experience to make this kingdom a better place.” He slowly raised his neck up, head held back, eyes unwavering.
“Then you’re a coward too.”
As Eider made his proclamation, the speech that played over and over in his head about how the Stowaways were simply trying to survive, maybe even help, he was confident. For the first time in the many years spent arguing, he truly felt in the right. No, he knew he was. And everybody else was lying to themselves.
And yet, when Polar snapped back at him, the cold words simmered on her tongue painfully, and sent tiny needles prickling down Eider’s scales. And when she brushed past him, stomping through the doorway, he felt a deep hot pain inside.
She paused for a second in the wide space of the doorway, the steps to the next room touched by one of her claws. “You’re going down, Eider,” she hissed, her voice low and with an undiluted anger in it’s tone. And yet, it seemed to break on the last fragment.
Before either of them could cram in another emotional word, Polar flitted down the stairs and out, away from the room. Eider stood waiting, pressed against the edge of the table, until the satisfying click of her talonsteps was gone.
And he went back to work.
And from the rafters just above, Ptar stirred.
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Chapter 4
Ice had a loud echo. Effer heard his name ring out from the crawlspace, and he stood to attention.
Being a Stowaway often meant staying very, very still. As he hunched under the stairs of a tower, he forced himself to take slow, deep breaths. The air was thick and dusty in places like this.
He used a shard of glass to hold down the corners of the map. Most Stowaways owned a copy of the palace map. The first was drawn carefully by Ptarmigan a few days after arrival, on a stolen scroll in the blood of a fish. For months it was the only map they owned, held in Ptarmigan’s control tightly, until Frostine led them to a real, official map hanging in one of the unused rooms, the frame tilted on the nail. Ptarmigan rewarded her plenty, although he admitted to Effer he couldn’t help but seethe at not having found it himself.
They compared this map to Ptarmigan’s-- mostly accurate-- and made several more copies. But the palace map contained few words and details, and any additions to it were only made for the royals. Constantly, the Stowaways were editing the maps, drawing their own pathways, taking notes on where was safe, where wasn’t, and where to find food.
Effer was making copies of maps with new details about courtyard blind spots when he heard his name called. He pressed his ears against the wall, trying to locate the sound.
“Up here, genius!”
Through the ice of the ceiling opposite him, he could make out yellow eyes and grey-brown scales. “How’d you get up there?” he whispered.
“Doesn’t matter. Listen, we need to talk.”
Effer halted. “Sure.” He slowly rolled the stylus away from him.
“I have a plan. I overheard something. I--” He stuttered, something rare from Ptarmigan. “I think it could be very, very valuable.”
“Can’t you tell me now?” Effer tilted his head.
Ptar sighed. “No.”
“Come on, Ptar. This is stupid. I can’t even get under you without--”
“Meet me at the split stairs, will you?” Effer could tell Ptarmigan was smiling through his words. “Stay quiet.”
Effer shrugged, gesturing to the maps. “Can I just--?”
“Leave ‘em. Nobody will come looking for them now, will they?”
Of the Stowaways, at first it was only Ptar and Effer. They stuck close to each other, wandering the palace even more cautiously than they did now. That first night in the courtyard, they stole two day’s worth of food, mostly fish. But when they soon ran out, it was Ptarmigan who was the first to steal once more. He decided early in the morning was the best-- when the guards were still sleepy and more closely watching the horizon than the courtyard. The cod they feasted on that morning had never tasted so good to Effer.
At the time, the Stowaways were still unknown to the guards. None knew who first tripped the alarms and put them under the cruel eye of the royals, and Effer was happy that way. He couldn’t live with himself if he knew it was his fault, and if it was another Stowaway, he wouldn’t dare go through with the surefire punishment.
But at some point, a switch flipped. To the royals, The Stowaways were the only villains in the apparent paradise of the palace, aside from each other, of course. They were hunted for their crimes, revered for their cunning, villainized for everything they dared step on.
All that really mattered to Effer was that they were together. The greater the hunt against the Stowaways, the stronger he felt the need to protect the others, especially the children.
Loon, Kabibi, Frostine-- they were so young, and yet they lived every day with a spear at the tip of their tail.
Effer hardly had time to think of what this meant, as he too was hunted, and he wasn’t nearly so easy to hide.
He scrambled through the crawl space, his wings bent. He could hear the echo of his wings against the walls, clanging and shaking the ice flanking him. He bent his head down This, he hated. The crawl spaces and tunnels, endless and meandering and surely longer than they had to be.
“Stay back, or, or, you’ll regret it!”
When Effer made it to the split stairs, he was greeted with a knife at his throat and a threat in his ears. He grinned, leaping to the side of the blade.
“Oh.” Kabibi lowered her hand, green eyes wide. “Just you.”
“Aw, you knew it was me the moment you heard me coming!” Effer punched her wing, glancing around the room as he did so. “You just want to show off your new knife.”
“It’s cool, isn’t it?” She turned it over in her talons, letting the light hit the glass hilt and make a thin rainbow on the floor. The blade was carved of bone, not nearly as sleek and sharp as the spearheads of the guards, but good enough nonetheless. Kabibi pulled it from where a soldier left it in the courtyard fountain while he attended a royal dispute-- she had waited under a crate for hours for him to leave it. Ptarmigan was so proud of her bravery and cleverness he let her keep the knife, so long as she promised to never lose it. Effer doubted that would ever happen soon, with the way she clutched it like her own egg.
“Watch where you point that thing,” he told her, headed towards the window. Night was falling quickly, the stars barely visible from the glow of the moon-tree but there nonetheless.
The split stairs were hardly ever used by the royals. The staircase climbed not into towers but into bridges and walkways outside, crossing the courtyard and intended as fast means of travel for dragons too young to fly, carrying a lot of weight, or simply tired. But the stairs here were cracked and the walkways collapsed in some parts, and the palace simply never got around to fixing it. Effer was starting to wonder if, over the year he had lived in the palace, the dragons whose job it was to repair it simply weren’t around anymore-- lost to the anarchy of the outside world.
“What are you doing here, anyways?” Kabibi asked, spinning the knife through the air. “Done with your homework?”
“Ha, ha,” said Effer. “No, Ptar actually sent me here. I think he has some plan.”
Kabibi stopped twirling the knife. “That might be big.”
“Who knows.” Effer shrugged, trying to be casual while he waited for whatever was coming. “Do me a favor and close the hatch in the ceiling. The last thing we need right now is someone actually finding it.”
“Fine.” She sighed, flying to the arched ceiling and slamming the flimsy trapdoor Effer had come from.
“Hey,” came a muffled complaint from above. Effer felt a jolt chase up his spine, but Kabibi chuckled, landing on the staircase railing. “You should have given some warning before I bashed your snout in.”
Frostine fluttered from the hatch and down to the staircase, rubbing her thin nose. “I didn’t want to make too much noise. Not that you were being quiet.”
“Hey,” Effer said, “I’m here, and it’s safe to talk. Most of the guards are congregating for dinner anyways, and we all know nobody comes here anymore.”
“What about that whole lecture on safety Ptar delivered us? And the ‘incident’ of the dungeon last night?” Frostine was examining her reflection in the wall, smearing off the dust that had built up.
“Look, he means well, but…” Effer winked. “You don’t always have to be, you know, terrified for your life.”
“Whatever. I’m the only one here who was ready to defend against a real intruder.” Kabibi slashed the air with the knife as she spoke. She was lying on the banister, her head back and wings draped over the side of the staircase.
“You could have cut off poor Effer’s head!”
“Would not!”
“Would to!”
Effer grinned. “How did you end up in the dungeon anyways?” He asked this cautiously, hoping to not come across as overly concerned.
“We weren’t doing anything wrong!” Kabibi cried. “We thought everyone had passed out from their feast. Ptar even said so. Except these two guards found us and dragged us to that stupid cage. I guess they thought they were going to tell some higher up.”
“I doubt they even remember it now,” said Frostine, rolling her eyes. “It’s happened before. They catch one of us, and think they’re doing the whole palace a great favor by throwing us in the dungeon. And then they can’t keep track of us well enough to realize we pick the lock every time.”
“Well, Ptar picked the lock last time,” Effer pointed out.
“Speaking of him, where’s his favorite little student?” asked Kabibi, ignoring Effer’s remark.
“Loon?” Effer shrugged. “With him, hopefully. Or maybe Drop, or Lace.”
“Drop patrols the western side, though, and I saw her this morning. I doubt she got that far since then.” Kabibi tossed her nice in the air, to which Frostine gave a yelp and darted away.
“She’s been here long enough,” she pointed out. “I bet she’s found a quick route.”
They sat in silence for a bit, Effer wondering if his maps were well hidden enough while Kabibi tossed her knife around an increasingly skittish Frostine.
Suddenly, all three stood straight up at the sound of four sharp pings against the ice. Effer raced to the far wall, where the staircases opened out into pathways crossing the courtyard. Blizzard was pressed against the wall, half-in the shadow of the staircase but still keeping one eye on the surrounding courtyard and sky. “Ptar says to follow me.”
“He’s not here?” Effer whispered. Frostine and Kabibi gathered behind him.
“He says it’s too dangerous for him to potentially lead someone back to where he’s at. You three follow me.”
“This is ridiculous,” snarled Kabibi. “He’s too good to actually take us to this stupid meeting?”
Blizzard didn’t say anything, but only turned and shook his head. Effer shrugged and asked where they were headed. “If it’s north, Lace recently found a new shortcut in the old tunnels we could take.”
“Not north,” said Blizzard coyly. He seemed to be fighting a smug smile when he whispered, “Underground.”
The thought had never struck him before, but it seemed reasonable to Effer now that there would be structures underneath the palace, carved directly into the rock of the mountain which it sat on. Maybe once used as a short shelter for soldiers, or storage of extra goods, the caverns stood empty now, but certainly not pristine. Effer hated the place nonetheless.
“How did you even arrive here?” Effer asked, approaching Ptarmigan. “It’s certainly secluded.”
“The palace is a finite space,” Ptar responded with a shrug. “I realized recently we didn’t yet know it’s limits.”
“But this isn’t part of the palace,” said Effer. “It’s just a sublevel.”
“It’s connected to the main throne room.” Ptar glanced as more Stowaways arrived from the openings in the rock, breathing heavily from the trek. “Not in use anymore, but this place was once important to the royals.”
Effer stared at the dim walls, dripping with icicles trapping years of dust, and wondered how it could be. “There’s not just this one cavern, is there?”
“There’s more, I believe. Haven’t explored it yet.” The leader inhaled sharply. “The only use of a place like this to us is as a hideout, regardless.”
“The dungeon is still safe,” Effer reminded. “Guards don’t realize we spend so much time there.”
“Yes,” Ptar muttered. “Not yet.”
He shook his head and made his way to the front of the room, motioning for Effer to stand alongside him. Ptar did that increasingly often these days-- gave his speeches with Effer at his side, sometimes Blizzard as well. Kabibi said Ptar must have thought he looked powerful, with two strong men by his side, although Effer would hardly consider himself of that category. And anyways, to whom would he need to look powerful?
The Stowaways quieted as Ptar stood atop a flat rock against the far wall. It wasn’t higher than a foot, but the symbol still got the others attention. Effer stood beside him, while Blizzard gathered the rest of the Stowaways still wandering around the caves. They seemed far more relaxed, knowing there were no guards to be on edge about, or clinking royals to have to listen to through the walls.
Ptar’s shady eyes fell upon the small crowd. “We have been here for a long time as I’m sure many would agree. Over a year, and even those among us who have dwelled for much shorter than that can agree that little has changed since they first arrived.”
A few muttered in the crowds. Blizzard raised an eyebrow at Effer.
“This morning, I have struck up a deal that I believe would make a change for the better for our little organization.”
Effer stared at him, against his better judgement, along with the rest of the Stowaways. Perhaps he should let on that he knew what Ptar was talking about, but truthfully, he didn’t. What did he say earlier, while he was copying the map? He overheard something?
“For as long as we’ve been here, we have only known the guards as our enemies. Largely blundering and easily lost, but still, a threat, perhaps the only real one, to our survival. The royals are far from fond of us, as far as they know, but the guards are the only members of the palace with weapons, and some semblance of jobs. Those royals may claim to hate us, but they haven’t worked a day in the last 20 years.”
The others nodded. Effer bit his lip.
Ptar cleared his throat. “That changes today.”
“Come on,” Blizzard blurted. “You can’t seriously insinuate we strike up some deal with them. They all mindlessly want us dead-- they like hunting us, in fact, it gives them something to do, some threat to stake their names on-- and even the ones that don’t, there’s still too many to matter.”
“The guards as an organization are corrupt, I agree.” Ptar waved his wings as if to soothe the crowd, but the Stowaways seemed silently waiting for his words already. “I know this, and the dragon I’m speaking of knows it all too well.
“I made a deal, with a guard I encountered. Older. Former soldier, actually, although he’s been a mere guard since he was disabled on the front lines. He despises the other guards like we do. Finds his superiors to be cruel, corrupt, motivated only by money and power over the most impressionable of the military. Had an awful lot to say, actually,” he said with a chuckle. “He is, we’ll say, curious of us. Doesn’t believe his peers could ever defeat us.”
“Has that one right,” muttered Kabibi, to the nods of Petrel and Lace.
“You’d really trust him?” asked Drop.
Ptarmigan tilted his head. “Our deal now is just a formality. A sign of the beginnings of an alliance, I suppose. Us and him. He doesn’t turn us in, and gives us information on the guards when we ask, and in return we will offer him protection and shelter.”
“And what if he asks this of others? His family might live there, or more of his guard buddies. Ones who don’t seem as fond of us,” Drop exclaimed, his grizzled voice quickly climbing above other dissenters.
“Trust me, if he had anybody like that, he wouldn’t be so quick to ally himself with us,” Ptar assured.
Effer believed him-- he knew how nearly anybody, peasant or soldier, would stick with whoever was willing. If the guard had companions, they must be long gone.
“I bring this up now before you because the two of us have struck up an arrangement. A first small plan, of potentially more to come,” Ptar announced.
There were groans in the audience. “You didn’t tell us beforehand?” Blizzard demanded. “We’ve known about this supposed ally for a few minutes and before all of this you make an arrangement?”
“It’s a small trap. Testing the waters, really,” Ptar assured. “Trust me-- this is a kind of litmus test. If this fails, I guarantee we will never see the guard again.’
“What is it, then?” Blizzard asked, leaning back to cross his arms.
“Simple. The tunnels that lead here snake through many parts of the palace. Our friend has dropped a hint to his coevals as to our residence down one of these tunnels. When they search for us, they’ll step into an ambush, where we can restrain them.”
“You’re sending them our way?” Effer asked, his brow furrowed with concern. He tried to recall if Ptar had ever done that before. Certainly not at this scale, to the whole of the Stowaways, all collected in one strange place.
“It’s only two guards which he told. We outnumber them easily, and will have them pinned down in minutes. They don’t even know about this place. From there, we have all too many options. Interrogations, a hostage situation-- anything we need, really.”
A part of Effer wondered if the royals, or head guards-- who Ptar was presumably trying to negotiate with for the captured soldiers-- would even care that two of their rank were missing. There were simply so many guards, bored and underpaid ones at that. If one could be driven to working with the Stowaways, the guards as corrupt as they were, would the others really care if a few of their numbers were gone?
Were the Stowaways intimidating enough to pull a trap like that off?
The question lingered in Effer’s mind as Ptar rounded the crowd up, leading them to the bottom of a shaft that opened up to a tunnel, where they waited.
close chapter
Chapter 5
Since you first broke out of an egg and were thrown into the nursery, everything was arranged, planned, and discussed. Talking to friends was exchanged for gossip and watching. Everybody, regardless of whether they were sisters or mates or despised enemies, wasn’t close, but they stayed close together in an attempt to get “dirt” on their family. It was royalty built on what was said in the pauses and what got passed behind your back, layers and layers of pent up rage. From when you were in a basket carried by your parents to when you saw your coffin, you lived this painful life. 
Everybody was disconnected from each other. Some more than others. 
“I don’t care what you say. It’s not my job to fix the war.”
“Cloud, don’t you care about saving your kingdom?” Baroness Vanilla’s expression softened. “You can’t just keep storming away to far corners of the palace. I expect dragonets like you to be the future of our kingdom.”
“There’s no future,” Cloud muttered. “Not much I can do but sit and watch this palace crash and burn.”
“How dare you say that?” Vanilla’s lips began to curl up, normally soft eyes puncturing and painful to look into. “My very niece- imagine what the queen would think of you!”
She gulped back the words she wanted to shout and simply sighed, her breathing almost forming a “sorry.” She knew what she would have said-- that it was only imagination, that the qyeen truly didn’t think of her, because why would she concern herself with a small, forgotten princess when there were real traitors. But that would have opened up old wounds, and caused more yelling, and perhaps a letter to Cloud’s parents, and she was simply too tired for that. 
She stomped away from the baroness, trying to breath deeply but only wanting to smash in her gaunt brownish snout. She was vaguely sure the bitter IceWing was her aunt of some kind- but it seemed everybody in the palace was her relative, and always used it as an excuse to get her to shape up. 
She was glad for one relative. And she didn’t quite know why. 
Periwinkle was a perfect example as to why the social climate of the IceWings wasn’t normal. She was cold, calculating, dismissive. And she fit in perfectly. 
That wasn’t normal. Normal was loving. Normal was liking your family. Normal was having friends and a social life full of dragons you talked to, not about. Cloud wanted to be normal. She didn’t want to fit in. 
If fitting in meant becoming a thief, or a cheater, or a traitor, she didn’t want to fit in. 
She didn’t remember life outside- she’d been in the palace her entire life. She knew nothing different than this stiff, rigid life hiding away from the outside world. Still, she knew it was wrong, on some deep level. Or at least, she knew she hated it. 
But it didn’t take a genius to see that all dragons trapped in the same castle worsened family life. 
Periwinkle wasn’t terrible. She was frigid and shrewed, harsh and strong, but she was smart. She had reality. She was grounded in palace life, not floating aimlessly like Cloud saw herself, directionless. 
They were second cousins, too, although they acted like sisters. They both agreed Baroness Vanilla, Periwinkle’s grandmother, was a horrible dragon. They both agreed all the fuss over the pathetic Stowaways was ridiculous. And they both wished that they could respect the queen, painfully so. 
Cloud’s family was grouped somewhat close together in the chunky maze that was the palace, but she spent a lot of her time wandering. The palace was built from long halls locking together twisting, sharp-edged spires, but there were a million secrets she wanted to explore, to reach. Every niche in the wall, behind every elegant ice sculpture, under ever polar bear bed, she was sure there was a new stretch of land. An entire kingdom was in a nest in the wall, a whole new tribe made of rare glass trinkets she discovered in a closet. If she was lucky, maybe she could see a dragon- a real Stowaway, who she could turn in and save her kingdom through. Then she would get some kind of award at school, and would be called a real activist for the future of her tribe, and would have any accomplishment that wasn’t “least disruptive.”
The spires locked around the central courtyard, but bridges slid out of windows on one side of the palace and might take you somewhere completely different. Cloud sometimes felt as if the royals forgot they could fly, but she wasn’t complaining- soaring between the glittering, needle like towers and watching the IceWings go about their life below made her feel, well, less trapped. If only the guards would let her fly even higher, or past the towers. If only she could someday feel the palace no longer underneath her, with only the beautiful expanse of the kingdom in her blue-tinted field of vision. 
But things were okay for now. The palace was pretty. There was enough to explore there. She knew in her round belly and stocked bookcase that what she had would be enough. 
“I heard your grandmother tried to steal from the treasury.”
“Vanilla would do that. All the low-ranking royals have tried to steal at some point,” Periwinkle replied with a shrug. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Peri?” Cloud ducked around a glittery quartz pillar, her ears flicking. Perwinkle was perched on a ceiling beam, her sharp-edged wings draped down to the dragon she was talking to. They faced away from Cloud, but she recognized her as a classmate. “I didn’t see you there,” Cloud said. 
“Oh,” Periwinkle replied softly. 
“You guys are cousins, right?” the other dragon chirped, her prominent necklace shaking as she spoke. Cloud flicked through her internal library of royalty before eventually settling on Hominy, the aspiring map-maker, for the girl in front of her. 
“Um, I believe so. We share a warden. The baroness.” Cloud looked down at the floor, avoiding Hominy’s beady black gaze. 
“Vanilla is just an idiot. What does she think she’s going to do by stealing the gems? It’s not like she can leave the palace to sell them for more money. If I were her, I’d figure out some way to make it seem like the jewel was stolen by a Stowaway. That way some more attention would go to actually dealing with them.” Peri said all of this so casually, like she’d been thinking about it before the conversation had even began. It sometimes set Cloud on edge, the way she calculated everything with the same neutrality. 
But then again, it was better to be unfeeling than to be like Vanilla- dim, unaware, after what only she wants. 
Cloud hated feeling like she had a million eyes on her, that she was an object, a prize, a goal, a future leader, but it was better to be an object than one seeking an object. And for now, things were good. After all, there was the feast just the previous night to celebrate the dungeon-tossing of those palace-hitchhikers. Cloud had a family, and friends- more than Peri. The dragoness never really said anything outright, but Hominy had heard something about a brother, lost. 
“Didn’t you say the whole hunt for the Stowaways is silly?” Hominy interrupted. She cocked her head, her long ears flopping. 
“It is. They shouldn’t make it a big deal- they should have some actually qualified guards just take them out quietly.” Periwinkle’s nose turned up into the air, clouds of cold breath shrouding her face. She seemed to have this personal mist everywhere she went, almost like protection for her mallow colored scales. 
“Are you implying we’re not qualified?”
The three girls wheeled around, perfectly treated claws scraping against the ice floor. A disheveled looking guard plodded past them, and Cloud noticed he walked with his lowered wings, not his legs. As he passed, the reason was quickly apparent-- on one of his hands, three of the claws were missing. Hominy let out a faint gasp. 
For some reason, Cloud’s heart wouldn’t stop beating. “Who are you?” she finally demanded. He was lower circle than her- she should be able to assert authority. By the looks of him, he was some stupid guard, and yet she couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling. Something about his tired eyes, his missing talons, the way he hunched over on his spear and fiddled with the keys in his hands. 
“Let’s go, Cloud. I’m hungry anyways.” Hominy tugged on the royal’s arm, her moon white scales blocking Cloud’s view of the guard. 
The spines on the dragon’s back bristled for a minute as he heard them, finally greeting them with a classic “Evening, ladies.” Silently, he dipped his head and continued on, although he flinched every time he stepped on his injured foot. 
“Where are you headed off?” Periwinkle was gazing at him intensely, her eyes like slabs of ice drilling into him. She wanted something, Cloud knew that much. 
“The dungeon.” He didn’t look back, although his step faltered as soon as Peri began staring at him, her dusty blue irises.
“Looking for Stowaways?” Cloud continued, although she was herself being dragged away, much to Hominy’s relief. 
“Uh, actually, there was a queen’s daughter who was sentenced here some time ago. Figured I’d check up on her,” said the guard. 
A silence settled over the hall, the distant clatter of dragons in nearby rooms fading away. “Well… have fun then.” Cloud rubbed her wings together and focused intensely on every detail of her scales, every crease in her wings. 
“Just doing my job,” he grunted in response.
He clattered down the echoing hall, his figure getting smaller but his noisy thump remaining, and Hominy whipped her head at the princesses. “What was that?” she asked with a mocking grin. 
Peri shrugged, already turning her back. “Does it matter?”
“Probably not.” An empty smile crossed Hominy’s face. “Come on, guys. If my sister finds out we’re late again for lunch I’ll be sorry.”
“Yeah,” mumbled Cloud, ever the only child. 
Cloud watched the guard for another second, as long as she could hold her neck there, until he was just another whitish blob in the hallways, more decoration than dragon. 
 
The knife scraped over the murmur of voices. No matter how loud Polar spoke, no matter how much further she leaned into the conversation, the grind of the dagger against the sharpening stone would not quiet. The silver edge glittered on whatever weak enchanted light floated into the dungeons and cast dim reflections along the dirty floors. 
“So you don’t have the key?” 
“No.” Polar set the dagger gingerly on the ground and glanced up at Snowshoe, her dark gaze shooting between the prison bars. “Why would I?”
“To let me go, maybe?” The princess forced a delicate grin and batted her eyelashes. 
Polar feigned a laugh. It was easy to forget that amidst unspoken rules never to be told and secrets and gossip that gnawed away at the palace, some of the more demanding royals were incredibly upfront. “You’re just gonna ask me straight like that and hope it works?”
Snowshoe cocked her head, the nose ring stabbed through her nostril wiggling. “That’s never not worked for me, missus guard.”
“Polar.” She jabbed her jewel-less snout forward. 
“I agree, we are polar opposites.”
“That’s my name.” Polar lifted the dagger from its place again and twirled it along her claw. She did it to look distracted, to find something to do with her talons, but often it had the impression on royals of her being tough, willing to fight. In a way she was, but she didn’t necessarily want them to know that. She was there to protect them, after all. Just these days, it seemed she had to keep reminding herself this. 
“Pretty common name, isn’t it?”
“I suppose. My parents were common people.”
“Commoners?” 
“Landowners.” The knife clattered to the ground and bounced on its wooden handle. “I don’t know, maybe that still counts as commoners. What does it matter?”
“Not much. Since they’re not getting into the palace.” Snowshoe, seated, gave a little jump of her haunches and twisted her tail. “Heh.”
“I am well aware, princess, that my parents are out of contact with me. No thanks to the letter and messenger system falling out of place.” Polar attempted to focus her gaze, exactly the way she trained, on the prisoner. But unlike with her usual posts, the dungeon was a foreign location. A part of her wanted to drop her armor and flutter around the palace and explore all the secret places and go on the hunt more- but she had to stay here. Look at Snowshoe. Look at Snowshoe. Don’t let your eyes wander from the prisoner. 
Still, she couldn’t help but let her eyes wander a little bit more, take in a little bit more of the surroundings only glimpsed on the way down. There were an awful lot of chains for likely very awful things coiled on the ground, draped and dripping over each other. There were bones- dragon bones, Polar wanted to think. But they looked an awful lot like fish bones, thin and cracked. The ratty fabrics on benches may not have ever been nooses, but blankets instead. 
Obviously, in the academies where she trained, the event of a treacherous royal was thoroughly looked into. It was there that she learned that the careful words and etiquette extended to the guards, too- you can’t say the wrong things, you can’t move an awkward way, you can’t listen for things you’re not supposed to hear. But a princess cast into the dungeons by her own mother took a very different shape in her mind than what was before her: a plump, spoiled dragoness getting little atonement for a meaningless crime. 
“Gosh. That must have been my mom’s fault, the messenger system,” she muttered. “Well, I’m sorry about that. Good thing you’re here now.” 
“Yeah.” She drew her talons along the links of the chain, picking at the rust and dirt built up over them. “Do you… like being here?”
“I don’t like being in this gross dungeon. It’s pretty boring- well, maybe that’s the point, but still.”
“I mean the rest of the palace.” Polar raised an eyebrow, but her head was still bent over the chains. She studied the neatly folded hands of the princess, and couldn’t help but think of her own, calloused and greyish. 
“Well, I’ve never experienced anything but this.” She looked up, as if she was thinking of something. Imagine that, a palace born princess thinking for once. 
“You know the palace isn’t some building tumbling through space. There’s a lot more to the kingdom- and the continent.” Polar’s face hardened. “Don’t you want to travel to the wide tundras and lakes, or thick taigas and their pine trees, or the beautiful glaciers by the sea?” She paced back and force, envisioning her favorite piece of art on the dismal grey stone walls. It was a small and subtle canvas, hung in some hallway, but it always mesmerized her. It showed the landscapes and textures of the ice kingdom, oversimplified but beautiful, in a way. She knew little about the kingdom from school, though. 
“I mean, if you’re referring to the other palaces, I’d like to see those.” The princess turned her nose up in the air. “Like the Mud Kingdom. I wanna know how they make it glamorous, even when it’s on a swamp.”
“Oh, I don’t know if they do.” Polar grinned. “The ice kingdom, it’s really something though. I didn’t train in a palace, actually. I trained in outdoor tundras and forests. My group of fellow students, we went all over. We didn’t stay hunched over a block of ice, our talons stained with ink, carving letters for hours on end. We ran and flew and swam and fought, and through that learned our history and present.”
Polar didn’t really know why she was saying this to the princess. Perhaps she was desperate for personal knowledge to be shared, and whimsical stories of her upbringing were the most harmless to address. Perhaps she wanted out, out of her own head. 
“Oh.” Snowshoe blinked, sticking her chin towards the light streaming down. Little bits of snow and dust and ice chips and paint and dead scales would fall through, and become bright and visible as they swirled in the column of light let in. It was the closest thing both of them had to a window, just the runoff from the palace floors. 
They sat like that, on different sides of the bars but still looking at each other, feeling surprisingly happy, relieved of boredom. They both painted pictures in their heads, that felt so real and absorbing, they didn’t see the flash of pale white atop the staircase, the limp in the step of the emerging dragon, his eyes as he recognized Polar, the shake of his tail as he scurried away, thinking to himself, My job is already done. 
close chapter
Chapter 6
Along the walls of Cloud’s tower were dozens of portraits of queens. Most were replicas-- the true originals, the primitive carvings and stains by prehistoric dragons of their rulers, those were in the queen’s quarters. But replicas of these, and some newer paintings lined the hallways, staring Cloud down every time she walked to school. Most looked the same. Most royal IceWings who make it to the throne do. The same look, the same high cheekbones and glittering, terrifyingly sharp horns and claws, the same small, dark eyes. Crystal herself only recently got a portrait painted-- “I’ve been far too busy,” she explained. But Cloud couldn’t picture Crystal’s portrait one day continuing the long line. She couldn’t fit in. She had wide, greenish-brown eyes and softer features, and her brows were always creased, not in the intense look of these dragons, but in a concerned sort of way. 
But beyond looks, there was a different reason for which Crystal broke rules. The dragons on these walls had dozens of children, the strongest of which always followed them in line. Crystal only had one daughter, born four years ago, and neglected ever since. Snowshoe was the only surviving relic of Crystal’s failed marriage, betrothed from birth. After Snowshoe had hatched, Crystal immediately sent away her husband to a far off palace, and gave her daughter to the hands of her relatives. It was the biggest scandal at the time. 
She ran her talons over the frames of the paintings now. The pigments and the wood of the frames were both imports, and she absentmindedly thought about what would happen now, with all trade cut off, running her fingers along the frame, when the painting tilted beneath her claws. 
She gasped, and quickly set about fixing it, when she spotted a sliver of something dark behind it. After checking to make sure nobody was looking, she pulled the painting from the wall again. A narrow passage, no wider than her neck, snaked through the ice wall and into darkness. Old building, she thought, fixing the frame in place. 
“You have these paintings in your family’s tower?” Cloud jumped, but it was only Peri, leaning against the wall on her wings. She would be hard to see with her pale pink scales and dusty violet wings, but the edges of her body were so sharp and her scales so rigid she made herself visible. Cloud, for just a second, pictured Peri’s face on the wall, but quickly shook it from her head. The two never talked about these sorts of things, but Cloud couldn’t help but wonder, if the dragonets’ rumors were true and Peri really was training to be queen. If she was, she didn’t seem eager.
Cloud never thought of herself on the wall. She knew she had no chance. 
“I suppose each tower has its own feature. We have all these paintings and memorabilia.”
“What’s the point? You’d never know any of these queens. They’ve been dead for at least a century.” Peri rolled her eyes. 
“Well, not a century.” Cloud steadied the painting with the gentlest movement of her fingers. It slid surprisingly easily. “Your family-- what do you get?”
Peri’s pale eyes glazed over for a moment. They were always so focused, very reptilian, but every so often they seemed to look like a reflection of themselves in a foggy mirror. Finally, she said, “We get a view.”
Without another word, she shoved Cloud aside with a flicker of her folded wing and stood in front of the painting. “Queen Glacier. Queen at the time of the SandWing Succession War. Died of some disease,” she read from the tiny text beneath the painting. Her eyes darted back and forth, and she suddenly gripped the sides of the frame and took it from the wall. Little chips of ice, almost like snowflakes, crumbled off with dust. 
“What are you doing?” Cloud cried, but she knew that when Periwinkle focused on something the way she did at that hole behind the painting, there was no stopping her. 
“I saw you playing with this earlier. It’s interesting, right?”
“It’s just some crack. The building is pretty weathered, right?” Cloud fiddled with the ground, but the floors were immaculate, and she almost wanted to break them just to prove her point. She didn’t really know why she cared so much about leaving the tunnel alone, but she didn’t like the way Periwinkle so forcefully inspected it. 
“My head could fit through this, if I had shorter horns,” Periwinkle said. It was true. Her horns fell in a stiff mane along her neck, each perfectly vertical and just barely striped a darker color. 
“So?” Cloud said. “Let’s… let’s go to the school library. We probably have some kind of project.” Cloud could spend hours in the library, but usually not reading. She didn’t have the attention span for books, especially the dry, encyclopedic books the palace had. No, she liked the library for the room itself. It was older than any other part of the palace that she was allowed into. The throne room and front gates were as old as IceWings as a species, but she couldn’t exactly barge into those. 
The room had all kinds of secrets. Little holes in the walls, old messages and notes scrawled in dust, some from claws dipped in ink probably decades older than Cloud or her parents. The bookshelves had graffiti of dragonets, probably her age, who had graduated from the palace school and left the castle, maybe even the kingdom, to find a job elsewhere. She liked to think about them, like old friends, friends who got out. 
“We always go to the library.” Peri stuck her hand through the whole, and although she grimaced as a shard of ice nicked her scales, she didn’t hit an end. “I’m sick of it.”
“I… I don’t know what to tell you.” Cloud fiddled with the frame of the painting, which was small enough to hold in her arms. “What else is there to do?”
“Go looking for Stowaways, probably.”
“Peri!” Cloud looked back and forth again. The tower was still empty. Her parents were at some kind of meeting or social event, as they always were. “We know that will just get us in trouble.”
“Cloud, weren’t you paying attention at the banquet the other night? Those guards said they’re really starting to crack down on the vermin.”
“Then why aren’t they all being held up on a stage and having each scale and feather pulled out one by one?” The imagery was quite gross, she thought to herself, but she heard it enough in school for it to feel natural.
“Because the guards are incompetent, and probably drunk out of their minds.” Peri pulled another chip from between her fingers. “I can’t feel an end to this stupid tunnel.”
“It’s not a tunnel, it’s just some crack,” Cloud said, “And shouldn’t we leave it to the guards?”
“Kid, the last time we left anything to any authorities the palace doors got locked in our faces and we got trapped inside with anarchy everywhere else.”
Peri’s head was now inside the hole, but Cloud thought she could hear her suck her teeth the moment she said it, and fidgeted in silence for a moment. That crossed some line. 
“Whatever,” Cloud finally muttered, stealing a line from her cousin. “I’m going to the library. Hominy says she found a good scroll for once, and she and her sisters and Prince Mink will be there.”
“Suit yourself. But I’m not going with you. I’m really fed up, you know, with all of this waiting around, and I’d really like for something to-- ow!” Peri drew her thumb to her mouth, a drop of her blood touching the ground. 
“Nothing is going to change, no matter how many times you slice your hand open on ice,” said Cloud, knowing how Peri’s sentence would end. “Come, before some guard sees you.”
“Really? Then why don’t you take a--” 
There was a split second of silence, and Cloud didn’t take the opportunity to get her word in. Peri must have seen, her heard, or felt something. Something that she found important. Not a lot of things shut Peri up. 
Then a loud clang, and the slithering sound of scales on ice followed from the tunnel. 
Cloud’s first instinct was fear, which as she felt it she found irrational. She just wanted to leave that hole in the wall now. 
Peri pulled out from the wall, seeming stunned too. But then her sharp face twisted into a smile. It made Cloud want to smile too-- the giddiness Peri showed was rare, on her, and anyone. “Well then.” She brushed her hands together and shook the dust from her wings. “How about we go on a little investigation?”
“This isn’t much easier for me than it is for you.” Cloud felt the words echo back and close in around her, hitting the walls less than an inch away from her. Turning around so that she could face Peri from within the tunnel had been the hardest part-- so far. 
“Come on. This is the only way we can get through.” Peri pulled off the necklaces and jewels she wore around her long neck and tossed them into the tunnel with Cloud. She must have still wanted to wear them on the hunt, even if it would be hard to climb with them. 
“What if someone sees us?” 
“Then we’ll tell them how we’re being such noble dragonets working to rid our palace of evil. Hold your wings out in front of you.”
“I can’t-- they’re all bent up behind me.”
“Well then I guess we have to use your arms.”
“This is ridiculous,” Cloud scoffed. Still, she held out her pale, bluish-scales talons and let Peri hold herself up on them. 
“Step back, hey!”
Cloud shimmied backwards through the tunnel, bits of ice poking into her legs at every step. The rim of the hole shattered slightly as Peri forced her way through, but still, the two were in. 
“Let’s go,” was all Peri said, adjusting her necklaces.
The tunnel widened as they pushed through, until they could almost fly through the caverns it formed. They did at points. Cloud hadn’t had a chance to fly in years. She did, of course, at school, over the rail guidelines laid out that snaked between the towers and over the courtyard. But that was only in school, to make sure their wings properly developed in spite of staying inside all day, and she never really flew with a direction in mind. 
Moonglobes floated through the tunnels, the light bouncing back and forth for a good while until the next one. The light was cold and watery, not anything like the sun that Cloud glimpsed through big windows. They were stolen, they must have been, by Stowaways, and by the claw marks and dust on them, probably at least a year ago. 
Periwinkle seemed on alert at all times, her ears swiveling and eyes searching every corner. “We could find one at any time,” she whispered, and it was the most excited she had ever sounded. 
Cloud couldn’t help but feel childish. Ever since the Stowaways were first discovered, and cemented themselves as a kind of folklore beast in the eyes of royal children, young dragonets would pretend to go “hunting” for them all the time. It was on these “hunts” with her classmates that Cloud first discovered how much she adored the palace, and all its unnoticed details. 
But they were older now, and although little had changed outside of their world, between the students, such activities were no longer pursued. 
Cloud was thinking about all of this as they clawed through the tunnels. Peri’s necklaces caught on the icicles lining every surface they walked on, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just scoffed and continued on her way. Perhaps it was because she had Cloud behind her, and could see nothing but the tunnel before her. Cloud didn’t have such a luxury-- the light from the hall behind her still bled into her vision, and she was constantly reminded of everything she left behind. 
She had responsibilities, and parents, but from the tunnels they all seemed small. 
“Wait,” Peri hissed, and she flicked her long, spiked tail. Cloud halted immediately, used to commands, and tried to peer over her cousin’s shoulder. The tunnel plunged down into a deep, black end. Stone beams poked through from behind the ice, and strange formations decorated the ceiling above her. What little light showed here was caught and distorted by these icicles, moving strangely over the dragon’s skin. 
“I can’t see a bottom to it,” muttered Peri, raising her wings above her head as far as they would fit. “I suppose we have to fly.”
Cloud sucked her teeth. The dragonets of the palace rarely flew. Why would they, when stairs and spires grew over the palace like a lattice? Of course, they learned to fly in school. But Cloud was always among the worst at it, and hated to practice. 
“Hey-- hold this.” Peri tossed something behind her. Cloud caught it, to find it was one of her long necklaces-- a thin silver chain with various jewels strung around it. She never noticed it before, but the one that always hung at the bottom was cut thin, and sharp. It was big enough to be a weapon, if Peri should ever need it. Cloud realized with a jolt that perhaps this was exactly why Peri wore it in with her. 
It suddenly felt very, very heavy in her hands. 
The shaft that the tunnel fell into was wide enough for Peri to fit through, wings extended enough to catch the air. She stared down it with an intensity to her pale eyes, and flexed her claws as she stepped to the very edge. “Follow as soon as I send you a signal that it’s safe.”
Cloud stepped back, fumbling with the chain. “Peri, wait!”
But the princess had already fallen over the side of the ledge, her tail trailing behind her. 
For the first time since she found the hole in the wall, she was alone, and felt the constraints of the wall tighter than ever. That vast, empty space behind her pressed against her back, but the slope of the pit in front of her was hardly better. 
She didn’t dare look down at where Peri was. The sound of her cousin’s wings flapping in the darkness, the air rushing between them, it was far too loud. 
There was a scraping, distinctly of claws on ice, and a thud, that Cloud felt in her feet more than she heard. 
What was the kind of signal that Peri meant? 
The vibrations ringing through the tunnel did not cease. Cloud froze-- instincts told her that the impact would be over by now. Peri should be safe. 
Slowly, she leaned over the edge, watching the line where the lighting fully blended into darkness, and the world became invisible. Wherever Peri was, Cloud could not see her. 
At this line, the last stretch of the tunnel still lit by Cloud’s world, she saw something strange in the walls of ice. Little cracks, almost like veins, or tree branches in storybooks, or spiderwebs, were growing into the wall. It was like the darkness was creeping up to Cloud, only in sharp, jittery lines that sliced through the blue. 
“Periwinkle?” she whispered. The cracks appeared elsewhere, and Cloud realized it wasn’t the ice, but the stone, that had been breaking up, and was sending the ice it supported shattering into fragments. There was the too-delicate plink of some shards falling to the ground concealed by the dark. 
And just as the first of the cracks scrolled up to where Cloud was on the edge, she heard Peri’s voice again. 
close chapter
Chapter 7
Effervescent had never heard a noise as loud as the thud of that dragon landing on the ground. The second loudest noise was the cracks immediately following it. 
	He wasn’t surprised by it. They were all expecting it, all waiting with their backs arched and wings bent forward, Kabibi with her teeth glimmering in the dark by the light of her eyes, and Ptarmigan in the front with his claws rapping the ground, and Loon beside him, her tail curled against her.
But when she landed down the shaft, Effer still jumped. 
The others were learning, it seemed, to follow Ptarmigan’s movements. The subtle flick of his wing told them to stay back, to hold their claws and teeth until they were told. Effer was happy to comply, but his breathing still felt the loudest in the room. 
Whoever their attacker was, she was smart. She hesitated upon landing, taking the time to righten herself. Effer could just see her through the cracks in the sliding glass panels that stood between her and them. For a guard, she moved awfully gracefully, and it soon was clear she had no armor. 
She blinked, running her talons along the great clefts in the wall, and seemed to mouth a word, a name. 
Ptarmigan watched her, eyes hungry. When the first of the ice shards from above landed along her back, and she shook her head, alarmed, he flicked his tail, and nodded. 
Effer didn’t appreciate the silence enough while it lasted, because the second it was over, he knew it would never truly return. Glass shattered as Ptarmigan rolled through the wall, and the ice from above heaved as the cracks climbed further.
She didn’t shriek, not in that high pitched, feminine way that so many royals did-- it was apparent now, by the jewelry running along her person and her manicured, empty hands. She called out a name, the same one she mouthed before Ptarmigan stuffed a rag into her pointy jaws, muffling her screams. 
In the small room of the shaft, away from the lair where the rest of the Stowaways stood, Ptar and the royal threw themselves against each other, sending the cracks in the ice up even further. Ptar flung the girl against the wall, and each time Effer prayed this was it, she would give up, but every time she reared her long, elegant head, covered with horns and spikes and glittering scales, and snapped back at him. She preferred to use her teeth, it seemed, curling the rest of her body behind her while she bit at Ptar and jabbed at him with her wings. She was good. Almost as good as him. 
Effer knew from that little nod moments before the battle that he ought to play some role in the fight, but the truth was he didn’t want anybody else in the shaft. Ptarmigan was more than capable, and Effer knew that with his awkward, bulky body, he would only make things worse. 
He held out his own wings now, looking back at the rest of the Stowaways. Loon was right near him, and in alarm he nudged her back, away from the fight and the glass shards. Kabibi watched intently, eyes fixed on the scene, claws flexing. Effer found it easier to face the crowd. 
The attacker’s talon suddenly swung out from the darkness, crashing into Ptar’s jaw. A spray of blood-- what did that mean? Who’s blood? A grunt, a heaving spit, it must have been Ptar, but there was the whip-snap of his tail swinging against her legs. Ptarmigan stumbled, and somehow Effer could tell he wasn’t bluffing. 
“Let me help him,” Kabibi hissed. The Stowaways had been concealed by the dark, but she had crepy forward. A drop of blood stained her lips. 
“No,” Effer blurted. “Stay back here. Don’t move until I say so.”
“He’s fumbling out there.”
Out there? “He’s doing fine, and if he really needs us, w-we can step in. I want all of you a safe distance away for now.”
“Ptar told us to stay back when we thought it was two toughguy guards. This is just some princess!” Kabibi begged, but Effer shook his head. 
`	There were a few gasps and whimpers from the crowd. Especially to the newer ones, the younger ones, the sensitive ones, it was upsetting to see their silent and proud leader like this, torn and bloody, forced to only watch this battle like it was sacred. 
Effer was used to it, of course, but he still would rather look away. 
The attacker was nearly on top of Ptarmigan, her shaky, yet strong wings pinning him down by the arms. Ptar let this happen a lot during his fights-- it made him seem small, and have him easy access to the stomach and neck. But he wasn’t fighting, wasn’t moving. Aside from a few obligatory thrashes of his tail, he stayed put. 
“Given up yet?” 
Blood from his nose now trickled down across his cheeks. All he did was nod. 
A small smile of pride crossed the attacker’s face. She must think he’s nodding to her. 
Effer knew better. 
Kabibi was the first to charge, flapping her wings and sounding a battle cry as she crossed the shattered door and tore into the scene. Unlike Ptar, she had the opportunity to watch the attacker first, learn her moves, work around them. 
But also unlike Ptar, she wasn’t very strong. 
The royal dragon threw her wings against the wall wherever Kabibi jumped, her jaws constantly snapping and razor-sharp horns filed to a point charging forward. Kabibi got in a few hits-- a bite to the chest, and later a slam of her tail against her side, but she was clearly battered. Ptarmigan tried to wrestle from out of her grasp, but there simply wasn’t room in the shaft, and he was awfully wounded. 
	This is all going wrong, Effer couldn’t help but think. It should have been an easy capture of a lazy, yet curious guard. They should have extracted all the information they wanted by now-- well, everything Ptar wanted.
It should be done. 
But the battle raged on. Blizzard eventually joined, and later Loon and Frostine took to throwing glass shards into the shaft. Effer refused to let them do any more.
The attacker’s eyes-- glowing, pale violet, snake thin pupils-- darted around the battlefield. Blood already dappled the walls, and the cracks were deeper, longer. The ceiling sighed as something far above was going wrong. 
Throwing her head back like one of the wolves on the moor of Effer’s home, she called the same name. 
“Cloud! Necklace!” 
There was a shrieking cry from the tunnel above, and for a minute the fighters paused. Then something-- an icicle, it sounded-- smashing against the ground. A dark shape descending upon them, the attacker flying upwards, shoving aside Stowaways with her great royal wings. 
Oh right. They could fly. 
Meeting her companion in the air, the attacker growled, “Stay up there. You’d get both of us killed in a second if you touch the bottom of this shaft.”
“But I can’t! It’s breaking! Peri, everything up there is cracking! The ceiling is gonna cave in!”
Ptarmigan drew back, a little closer to Effer, and gave a smug smile. This was the kind of royal he knew. The shrieking, nervous kind. 
Kabibi launched herself into the air, grasping in the darkness for the tail or the legs of the attacker. The companion-- Cloud-- yelled, and the attacker grabbed for her with outstretched arms, suddenly protective. Ptarmigan threw each wing against opposite walls of the shaft, staring upwards, his lips curled into a snarl. 
Effer, craning his neck, could just see the quickest trade between the attacker and her companion. It glinted in the faint light just long enough for all to make out the shape. A necklace. 
“Sentimental royals,” scoffed a dragon from behind. But Ptarmigan knew better. 
“Kabibi!” he bellowed, but before the word stopped echoing, there was the sickly sound of something sharp piercing flesh. 
The party descended, Kabibi beating her wings furiously, yet catching no air, hot, red SeaWing blood hitting the ground seconds before her. Ptarmigan managed to catch her, half with his wings, half with his arms, and threw her into the crowd, when the two royals hit the ground. 
`	The attacker stood nearest to them. She must have been aware of them now, the whole crowd of them. She didn’t look afraid, however-- nothing more than hatred was revealed by her face. 
She balanced on her wings and tail, gripping in her hands the object of the trade. A necklace, woven tightly around her neck, the crystal pendant on the end wielded like a blade. Red blood staining the corners. 
“You think you can hurt us with that little needle?” mocked Ptarmigan. He stood protectively in front of the group like he did before the fight, when the walls of the shaft were still blue and smooth of cracks except for the miniscule. 
“Don’t try me, vermin.”
Effer saw the companion behind her. She was crouched down, lowered wings curled over her body, letting her friend shield herself. But she made no attempt to conceal her face. Her head was shaky and her eyes were wide with fright, but still, she looked on at them, studied the faces of the crowd. Her gaze seemed to land on Effer, and he wondered if she was thinking about him. God, what must he think of him?
If all the attacker showed was hatred, then her companion seemed to let on a nudging curiosity. She couldn’t look away. 
And an instant after their eyes hit each other, it was war. 
Ptarmigan kicked against the ground and leaped, his torn wings catching the air and flying just above the reach of the crystal. He leaped in to tackle the royal, and they rolled into each other, teeth slashing and wings guarding all at once. Kabibi, seeking her revenge, it seemed, went for the companion, but not before she gestured some secret code to Frostine that Effer must have missed. Frostine flew, on silk wings, above the dragons, and blocked the shaft above where the royal stood. The chips of glass and icicles peeling from the walls, although untouched, could serve as an immediate weapon, and the royals must have known this. 
“Stay with me, Cloud,” the attacker commanded, and her friend complied. As more Stowaways leaped into the ring, leaving fewer behind to protect the weakest, Effer wondered when the fighters would come for her. 
Loon struggled against the guarding arms of an older dragon named Drop. Drop had known he was far too old for a fight like this, but it seemed Loon had no idea what could hurt her.
“Ptar wants me to fight!” she squealed, trying to duck under. “If he loses, I, I could never forgive myself.”
Effer hurried over to her. “It’s not safe. You have to stay back here with the rest of us.” He smiled softly, glad to have his attention turned to the kid. Loon acted like she hadn’t heard him. 
“You’d have a million claws and teeth go through your skin and out the other end if you step into that war zone,” Drop said matter of factly. “You’re little hero knows what he’s doing, alright?”
And he was right-- backed by the arms of his fellow Stowaways, Ptarmigan was holding his own. The Stowaways had become somewhat infamous for their lack of weaponry-- Ptar firmly believed that a dragon was a poor fighter if their god-given claws and teeth wouldn’t suffice. 
They had the two royals pressed against the side of the shaft, their reflections glinting on the ice in the pale light. The attacker’s strength was waning. 
Kabibi, in a swift, snakelike motion, made a lunge for the friend for the instant she stood unguarded. Effer felt a pang at the base of his chest at her cry. Never forget-- she is your enemy. 
Suddenly, something fell to Effer’s feet. It was the necklace-- long, on a thin silver chain, the crystal stained at the corners with blood. He carefully cupped it in his hands. He wasn’t sure why. 
“Get away from us!” Cloud shrieked. Ptarmigan stepped over the both of them. The attacker was sprawled on the ground, blood running from between her death and pooling on the ground. She watched, her gaze piercing as ever, but had stopped moving. 
Her friend, braced against the wall, took snaps at the looming Ptarmigan. Use your tail, Effer almost wished he could tell her. Your wings-- push against him with them. 
The strange thing was that up until the last moments of her consciousness, resistance blazed in her eyes. Effer hadn’t seen anything like the fierceness, the glow, she carried with her, in years. He turned to the Stowaways. Aside from their sadistic glee at Ptar, about to knock her lights out, their eyes seemed rather dead. 
He gulped, and a moment later, Ptar brought down his fist upon the princess. 
close chapter
Chapter 8
Why was her own mouth unbound, when Peri was shouting curses through a binding of cloth?
The two were imprisoned identically. Iron clips binding their wings. Cold shackles, the chains frozen stiff, clamped into the ice of the wall around their arms, into the floor around their legs. Neither had the strength to keep their heads up, and so they hunched down, the frozen metal pressing to their skin. 
They were the same. They were in the same amount of trouble. Their consequences should be the same. 
Except Cloud was the only one of them who could talk. 
Except she wasn’t, except she wouldn’t dare. 
The same dragons who had attacked them had followed them, to this other place. That was the worst part, to Cloud. In that shaft, she could feel the way home in her mind, could feel the path her feet would take should she back out. She knew the way, like she always did. 
But this was the first time she truly didn’t. She could be miles from that tunnel behind the painting, hours away from the safety of her room. 
For all they knew, they weren’t even in the palace anymore, and as wild as the thought came to her, it sunk in that it was truly possible. She might never find her way home, and the thought sent her heaving as hard as the shackles would let her. 
Peri sent her a glare. Speak up, she knew she was trying to say. 
They didn’t teach them many useful things in their academy. She wished badly they were taught how to fight. How to communicate in a battle. How to flee the Stowaways. But they did teach them very basic danger training. 
Of course, the “danger” they might be defending against was never described-- the queen forbade it. Cloud never really imagined it. But she could recall the steps, for what to do if placed in an “undesirable situation.”
Look around. Assess the physical. How are you restrained? What is the room, where are you? Who else is there?
	They were in a cave. Something about it felt… primitive, ancient. Of course the palace was carved out of the ice and stone it was built on, but surely it was refined, filed down by claws or dragon-made tools, designed to be flawless, and kept that way by its inhabitants. This cave, the slick ice walls were transparent and showed cracked stone behind them. Icicles dripped from the ceiling, and rose off the ground, and refracted dim white light in strange ways. Cloud couldn’t tell how, but the room was warmer than the rest of the palace.
The Stowaways, they were all there. That horrid, angry, seething mass of them, their snakelike backs rolling, wet with the mist in the air. 
Their leader paced in front of them. He had bandages, the same kind of rag across Peri’s mouth, over his wounds. Cloud felt a small, insignificant pride at them. For as hard as he had beat them, they-- or rather, Peri, had returned something. 
The rest of the Stowaways blurred together, crowding in the back. But sitting ever so separately from them was that SeaWing-- not the violet female one, the one Peri viciously stabbed, but the odd looking one standing away from the fight. Cloud’s eyes kept drawing back to him. 
Slowly, though, she brought herself back to Peri and the leader. Listen. Who is speaking? What are they telling you? Is it answering your prior questions?
Really, only the leader spoke, sitting politely in front of Peri. He was a large, muscular dragon, his sinewy feathered arms braced in front of him. His dusty grey-brown scales broke over a paler white stomach and chin. He had a strip of red above his eyelids. Was it just a marking, or was it some kind of warpaint?
Cloud would later learn that he was named Ptarmigan for his resemblance to the bird. She couldn’t know this then, of course, as she had never seen a bird. 
Their leader was quite charming, she couldn’t help but acknowledge. He spoke emphatically and convincingly. Every few words he cocked his head slightly to the side, and he often glanced to his Stowaways. A slight smile was always on his face, no matter how furious Peri showed herself to be. 
“You mustn't hold your prejudices too harsh, now,” he was saying as Cloud finally tuned in. “I’m as well aware as you are just how strongly we might have enforced them. But believe me when I say this-- we are not what you think.”
Whatever Peri said next died at the fabric over her mouth, but the meaning was clear enough. 
“I will say this again, royals: we will not let you go until we learn what we want. Until we learn how you found us, what your friends and family know about us, and perhaps what to do with you.” He raised an eyebrow. “Keep in mind, princess, our idea of ‘letting go’ very much includes death.”
Peri narrowed her eyes, and Cloud was surprised how much she could tell from this alone. If you want your answers, let me speak.
The leader must have understood. “Of course, we don't trust you to not start wreaking havoc and getting the both of you killed should be… unrestrained.”
“If I may, Ptarmigan,” interjected the female SeaWing, stepping forward. Cloud realized she was the first aside from him to speak. 
“Yes, Kabibi,” Ptarmigan said.
She looked the two down. “From what I saw in that tunnel, you’re more the brains of the operation, am I wrong?” She thrusted her smooth head in Peri’s direction. 
You’re not wrong, Cloud thought, but you didn’t have to say it.
Peri grimly nodded.
“Then who the hell are you?” Her green eyes locked on Cloud. 
She dropped her head. What to say?
“Speak, princess,” Ptarmigan snarled. 
“I--” She glanced back at Peri. Was she really nodding, or was that just a slight quiver to her head?
“I’m just her friend,” she whispered. “I just went along with her.”
Kabibi snorted. “Aren’t you afraid of missing out on your little academy or something?”
“She has a good point.” A slender dragoness piped up from the crowd. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
Peri squinted. Did she have some answer she was trying to communicate to Cloud? Or was she waiting for what happened next?
“I’m just… bored,” Cloud finally whimpered. “Oh, it really is, it really is so horribly boring in that castle all day; I couldn’t think of anything I would rather do.”
She wasn’t sure if this was her real, honest confession, or the kind of answer Peri would want. Strategic words and tone, carefully selected to change the way her enemy thought. 
Kabibi cackled. “You’re bored? This is just a game to you?” 
Cloud hung her head.
“Leave her alone-- you’re not getting anything good from her.” As the other SeaWing instructed this to Kabibi, his eyes passed Clou. She tried desperately to find some motives in his own. Nothing. 
“Let’s get to business,” Ptarmigan said, the smile fading from his face. Peri had her eyes locked on him the whole time. Cloud sometimes wondered if she practiced that intimidating glare. ”What are you doing here, how did you find us, and who knows?”
Peri attempted to say nothing this time, and neither did Cloud, although it seemed nobody was looking to her. 
“Come on, Ptar, rip that rag from her face!” piped up a small, girlish voice. “What’s she gotta say?”
It was some hybrid, undeniably IceWing but certainly of some other tribe, too. Cloud studied the girl. She looked awfully sweet, tucked behind the SeaWing’s legs, and yet she so gleeful encouraged their leader. 
“Loon, good things come to those with patience,” Ptarmigan said, not turning around. 
“But you’ll never find out anything unless you—“
“My objective, child, is not to receive a response.”
“Oh.”
Peri’s claws flexed against the shackles. Their posts seemed nearly welded into the ice wall, impossible as it was. They were frozen cold, so much so Cloud could hardly move her wrists. Ice in the palace had this ethereal, opaque quality too it, something kept up by sculptors for generations. What was here was hard, and raw, and impossible to break. 
But of course it couldn’t be, because how else could the posts at the end of their binding chains stick into the wall?
“You fought well,” Ptarmigan said after a silence. “Your friend, she was more the type of royal I expected.”
Cloud furrowed her brows. “Shrieking, incompetent, the type who sees herself on some moral high ground and yet can’t muster the courage to defend her companion,” he went on. His gaze narrowed in on Peri. “I was not expecting you.”
“With all due respect, you didn’t expect princesses at all.” The female SeaWing glanced to the other Stowaways, as if looking for support. A few subtly nodded. Peri gave Cloud a look, her jaw grinding furiously. 
“Kabibi, it is not your place to—“
“Ptar, she’s right. We thought we were getting guards, didn’t we?” The green SeaWing spoke, louder thanCloud had ever heard him. “This, this isn’t right…” he mumbled. 
For once, Ptarmigan turned his back to the princesses. “Maybe this wasn’t what we had initially expected, Effervescent—“ He sounded out all the syllables distinctly— “but we overpowered them, no?” He cocked his head. 
Cloud supposed the leader was delighted by her presence. She was how they saw them, she was who they laughed at. She was easy to defeat, and humiliated as they did it. But Periwinkle wasn’t. She had the blood, dried now, on her skin, to prove it. 
“No. What I expected, Effer, was a fighter.” Ptarmigan, horribly slowly, turned only his head to eye Peri. “And a fighter did come to us.”
“Monsters!” Peri whipped her head to the side, flinging away the rag. As she said it, she spat at them, her teeth glimmering with saliva like quartz.
Ptarmigan raised his wings, as if to fight, and the Stowaways started to murmur, to push each other aside. 
“You sick monsters, all of you! Taking pride in this work, living by no honor, killing us just to send some cruel message that will fall to deaf ears.” Her dozen glittering horns stabbed into the ice behind her. Cloud felt the vibrations drumming through her arms. 
“Be proud now, pretend you live with dignity, then see how well it goes rotting in some cave. Kill us, and then live with what you’ve done.”
Ptarmigan’s response was instant. A laugh. Then, “You think we would kill you? You really think we would kill you here, now? With those hundreds of guards surely on our trails?” He shook his head. “You, you know things. The fact that you’re with us in the first place proves to us you know enough to be of our use. And given your guaranteed knowledge in palace life, well—“ He grinned, as if he was thrilled. “It would be simply a colossal shame to think of disposing of you now.”
“Then what do you want?” Peri strained to keep her head up high, chin tilted upwards. 
“I suppose now is as good a time as any to ask you those questions,” Ptarmigan murmured. 
“As if we would answer.”
“Tell me, now, what led you to our lair?”
It was Peri’s turn to merely laugh. 
Ptarmigan made contact with the male SeaWing (Effervescent, he had called him). He stretched out his palm. “I know you have it,” he whispered. 
Effervescent shook his head. 
“Now.”
Very slowly, he overturned his clasped hands and dropped something into Ptarmigan’s. 
Quick as lightning, Ptarmigan swung around and threw the object at Peri, where it lodged into the ice millimeters away from her wing. 
She raised an eyebrow. The crystal necklace pierced through the ice like a bloodstain beneath this surface. 
“I thought,” she said dryly, “you don’t use weapons.”
“It’s not ours— perfectly useable,” said Ptarmigan, “and anyway, your knowledge of that alone tells use we deserve your answers.”
“You deserve nothing,” she seethed. 
“I won’t hesitate to actually aim next time.”
“Okay, let’s take a break,” Effervescent said, above the chatter of the crowd. There seemed to be a pride in Peri’s eyes— by uncovering her mouth, she had sent the room into a kind of chaos. ”Nobody is stabbing anybody, yet.” He grabbed Ptarmigan’s arm and pulling him away from Peri. 
“Are you insane?” Ptarmigan snarled. “Time is imminent— those guards that, as you so graciously pointed out, we really are expecting, could be here any minute! We have to learn what we can.”
“Nobody is getting in or out of here, Ptar,” Effer said, looking past Ptarmigan and to the crowd as if to assure them. “You know as well as they do that as long as the prisoners are here, they aren’t going anywhere. We need to decide our next move.”
He spoke quickly and haltingly, much unlike the smooth, insufferable charm of Ptarmigan. Cloud couldn’t help but wonder about their relationship, the hierarchy here, if any. She almost found it funny— for as much as the Stowaways despised royalty, this fight could have come from the queen’s chambers themselves. 
Effervescent, his wing gently draped over Ptarmigan, another over that hybrid girl, guided the dragons through a passageway on the far wall, and the rest of the Stowaways quickly filtered through. The last one made a point of sliding a panel of stone over the doorway. 
Even if it wasn’t locked, the Stowaways wouldn’t worry about being followed. 
When the room was empty except for the two of them, Peri belted out a string of curses to the floor, straining against her shackles. “Bloody pests. Thieves. Think they can run this palace, think they have any right to decide our morals, think they’re intelligent. Think they can silence my words. Hah!”
Cloud just sighed. Something deep within her told her that this wasn’t how the rest of her life would go. At least, she hoped not. She hoped and prayed that a hundred years from now, her brittle skeleton would not be rotting her, the bones of her arm still strung through the metal shackles. 
But her head was foggy, and her muscles unimaginably tired, and she couldn’t ever picture herself leaving. 
“Cloud, are your shackles any different from mine?” Peri asked sharply, bracing her neck against the wall to try and see them through the ice. 
“I don’t suppose. P-perhaps yours are tied stronger?”
“Nonsense. I’m hardly surprised they have a competent way of trapping us at all. They couldn’t even bind my mouth properly.”
“Do you think anybody will come rescue us?” Cloud wondered aloud. Of course there were guards stationed all around the palace. But everybody said they were incompetent, and besides, if they weren’t in the palace at all…
“We won’t need to be rescued if we can get it done ourselves,” Peri said, the chains clattering back against the wall. It quivered. Cloud could have sworn the cracks shook a little. 
The necklace was still stuck in the wall. The long silver chain dangled down, cracks webbing out from the spot in the wall where the pendant lodged. “Can you reach it?” Peri asked, her voice strained from tilting her head to see it. 
“The necklace?” Cloud played dumb. 
“Yes. Can you grab it?”
“Peri…”
“You’re shorter than me. You can grab it with your teeth--”
“I’m not some animal!” Cloud cried. Truthfully, the idea of being successful at their escape terrified her. At least in the chains, nobody expected anything of them. At least then they couldn’t get in much more trouble. 
“Do you want to get out or not?” And Peri said it in her power-voice, the voice she must have practiced in front of the mirror everyday, the voice her mother engrained into her, the voice she thought a queen ought to have. 
And although she didn’t speak in it much, when she did, it was impossible not to obey. Cloud grasped the chain between her teeth and pulled it out from the ice. 
She held out her arm as wide as she could with the shackle around her wrist, and Cloud weakly tossed it with a twitch of her neck. In one fluid motion, Peri caught it and took it to the shackles on her opposite wrist. 
“They’re just simple cuffs. A crystal this fine should be able to work between the grooves and--” She trailed off, sucking her teeth. She was stretched awkwardly to reach the rusty shackles, but she seemed to be in no pain. 
“Peri, where did you get that necklace?”
Without looking up, she said, “My mother. Gave it to me a few years ago. I don’t really love it, I don’t really like any jewelry--” Some kind of grinding sound-- “but the pendant is sharp enough to be useful. Too bad it isn’t more narrow.”
“You don’t seriously think you can free yourself with that, do you?”
“They made the mistake of giving it to me.” 
But as time went on, and the grinding and scraping grew louder and angrier, Cloud was beginning to lose hope. Peri got foolish ideas like this in her head often. Cloud couldn’t help but think them finding the Stowaways at all was dumb luck. And them getting out would be even luckier. 
She found herself thinking about the SeaWing-- Effervescent, or just “Effer.” He wasn’t wholly SeaWing, some kind of hybrid, as evidenced by the fine IceWing-like spikes on his back, and the heavy SandWing barb swinging on the end of his tail. Was it as poisonous as a SandWing’s? 
“Goddammit!” Peri shouted, followed by the light, delicate clatter of the chain on the ground. She slammed her talons into the wall. “Not like I could have broke that cuff anyway.”
The necklace seemed impossibly heavy once more as it hit the ground and remained there. 
“Periwinkle…” Cloud offered, but didn’t know what more to say. 
Peri’s head hang limply between her wings, but she drove her fist back against the wall. Cloud winced as ice fragments broke away. The ice here wasn’t quite as cold as in the palace, and it shattered so easily and noisily.
Peri suddenly pulled her head up. Her perfect crown of horns struck the ice, and the cracks stretched, connecting and joining and deepening into the ice. 
Cloud grimaced. Surely, this was not Peri’s plan. 
But her cousin shrugged at her, as if to say, What do we have to lose?
	And she drove the side of her wing into the wall. 
Again, and again, the back of her neck, the ends of her heels, her whole body, she threw herself against the wall until her shoulders were bruised and the clatter was too loud to bare. Her ears twitched at some tiny movement from a chamber across the door.
“Hurry!” Cloud urged. 
With a final slam of her wing, the cracks in the wall crawled up to the ends of the chains and the posts of both chains sprang free. Peri crashed against the floor, her weight no longer supported by her arms, the shackles still on her wrists. In one fluid motion, she spun around to crash her tail into the wal, the spines grazing Cloud’s arms. With a flutter of her wings and a delicate yelp, Cloud, too, was free, sprawled on the floor, the chains leading to nothing dragging behind her.
Peri sat up, her ears twitching. There was a faint scrambling on the other side of the door. With a flash, she snapped the shackles off her wrists. Cloud looked at her own helplessly-- she didn’t have those easy, needle-like claws-- until Peri clawed them away. 
Shadows danced behind the panel of the doorway. Cloud watched the necklace a few feet behind them.
Peri kicked away the chains. “Run.”
Before Cloud could ask where, Peri tore off in the direction of that weak, bluish light. Cloud behind her, they rounded a corner, where a darker hallway loomed in front of them, lit only by a thin, long window carved into the wall. They raced down it, wings folded behind them for speed. Cloud couldn’t help but follow what the Stowaways must be doing at this very moment-- perhaps Ptarmigan was shouting furiously, Effervescent trying to calm him down. Maybe the grubby claws of those strange children now held the necklace, fascinated, or disgusted, she couldn’t know. 
“Dead end,” Peri gasped, as they skidded to a stop. The floor here was slippery, the ice pristine, not filed down by generations of claws. An ice wall identical to the one they broke free of ended the tunnel. 
Something was thrown to the ground in the old room. Someone was yelling, running now. 
Cloud’s eyes flickered above her, and she instinctively touched her hand to Peri’s shoulder. “Look. It goes up.”
Crossed with stone beams and wooden planks was a darkened shaft above their heads. 
A wild smile formed on Peri’s face. “Well I’ll be damned.”
She beat her wings against the ground and propelled herself into the air, pushing at the sides of the shaft as she made her way up. Her feet struck against icicles dripping from overhangs. “Watch it!” Cloud cried, blocking her face. She was slower than Peri as she made her way up, using her arms more than her wings. How Peri could fly so well would always remain a mystery to her. 
Peri scrambled upwards, her eyes to the ceiling. It was darker, here, but there was another light from above. Cloud forced herself to believe this wasn’t some cruel maze, that the light was sunlight. 
Peri’s horns drove into the stone beam, and it broke in two like lighting. Cloud just dodged it, pulling herself to Peri’s level as she caught her breath. The stone shards hit the ground a few moments later. A second after, Cloud caught a slithering movement below her from the corner of her eye. “Come on!”
Peri hoisted herself up with her arms, straining her neck away from the fastly approaching ceiling. There was an opening in one wall of the shaft, the ice around it seeming freshly broken. Cloud strained to see what was on the other side. “Where does it go?”
“More tunnels. Caves. Windows.” Cloud could just see Peri’s eyes, flashing back and forth, making a decision. She flew through the opening, her back legs kicking behind her. Cloud followed, squinting against the spray of dust.
They found themselves on a thin stone beam overlooking a hallway lined with stalagmites and crossing with thin, shaky stairways. Cloud wavered, looking down at it, at the crossroads beneath her. 
Assess your options. Where can you move? Where is safest?
They could go down to the hallway benath them, moving either forward or backwards. Cloud had no clue which way led to the Stowaways, and which to the palace. Or-- they could take one of the stairways that descended deep into the wall, much like the tunnel behind the painting that she despised so. Of course-- there was always some light coming from above them, but Cloud didn’t dare try and go into the open.
Peri paced along the stone beam, her horns burshing the ceiling. “Where do we go?” It was the worst thing she could have said. 
“I don’t know!” Cloud snapped. “I have no clue where we are!” She pawed helplessly at the ground. 
Peri snarled. “We just need to get out of this cave. That’s all.”
“But if we go out into the open, we could get shot down by some rogue down there and never be found.”
Peri shook her head, although she must have known some way. “There’s got to be a way, Cloud. If the Stowaways could get from the palace to here, then so can we.”
“We have a bloodthirsty army of palace peasants behind us!”
Peri opened her mouth as if to speak, and then put her face into her hands. “Speak f the devil.”
It took Cloud a moment to understand her. 
Slithering. Uneven footsteps pounding all around them, bouncing and echoing off from the grimy walls. 
Cloud squeezed her eyes shut. This was not where she wanted to die she decided, in this cavern, with only Peri by her side and so much left untouched. This was not where she wanted them to find their bodies, if they even could. She didn’t want to become some kind of cautionary tale for dragonets to come. 
A Stowaway broke away from one of the tunnels with a sharp turn, and into the hallway below them. His rubbery tail slid behind him and scraped painfully against the ground. Effervescent. The SeaWing. 
Cloud gaped at him from the bridge. He stared back at them, frozen, like those clunky webbed feet finally melted into the floor. Peri stepped forward as far as the beam allowed her, claws flexing, her teeth bared. She said nothing, only breathed through flaring nostrils. 
Cloud couldn’t bring herself to look like this, couldn’t find the courage in her to try and scare the Stowaway away. 
There was a desperation in his eyes, soft and subtle, but there nonetheless, as if pleading something to them. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t Cloud be the one on her knees, begging through sobs for him to let her go?
Cloud squeezed her eyes shut. Why wasn’t he moving? Why wasn’t he flying up there right now to knock their lights out? Why weren’t their bodies already being dragged behind him? 
He stared at the floor, and sighed. Cloud’s shoulders drooped. 
He suddenly turned up to face them. He looked Cloud directly in the eye, and she stared back. His eyes were a light, clear, amber color, or perhaps it was more of a gold. Either way, it was a color Cloud didn’t see much of in the palace. 
“Listen. You’re in a cave complex just underneath the palace, but it’s built into the same mountain. The bridge continues into the far wall. Take the tunnel through there and you should be able to access a port that goes outside,” Effer said. He glanced over his shoulder. 
“From there, if you stay in the shadows, you can crawl back to the palace and enter through the nearest guard tower-- it’s always empty.” 
Peri leaned back, scoffing. “It’s a trap,” she finally said. “There’s more of them waiting for us out there. We’ll get ambushed-- if we live, we’ll be even harder to find. Don’t fall for it.”
“Peri, wait--” Cloud touched her arm.
Effer sighed, staring to the ground. “Look, all of us are back there, still looking for you. I told them I didn’t think you came this way, but I’d check to make sure.” He looked back at Cloud, suddenly. His eyes looked very, very sad. “If I wanted them to capture you, they would.”
“Why are you doing this?” Cloud whispered. Effer paused, and for a moment he seemed to have not heard her, because he didn’t answer. 
“Because,” he finally said, “because I don’t want you to get hurt. You weren’t supposed to be here.”
Peri’s gaze softened, and she lowered her wings. Effer glanced at Cloud one last time, before turning to the floor, shuffling his own oversized wings.
“Do you trust him?” Peri’s eyes flickered to Cloud.
“Well,” Cloud said softly, “what choice do we have?”
Peri sighed. “Whatever it takes.”
The light from the far window shone on them, weak and blue. 
Effer smiled, faintly, at Cloud. She found herself smiling back, unable to tell if it was real or not. The swelling in her heart, the pale fluttering feeling, felt real. 
Peri grabbed Cloud’s arm, pulling her towards the window that was only a frayed slit in the far wall. Cloud followed, her feet skidding on the stone beam, but at the last second, she turned to look once more at Effer. He was watching them leave, and at a swarm of footsteps behind him, shouted, “They didn’t come this way!” Peri watched until the ice and stone obscured all of him and there was nothing to see but Peri and the sky. 
The cold wind hit against Cloud’s face as they stepped into the open air. It blew all around her, lifting the faint feathers on her wings, drying her eyes, sending a tingling down her spine and pricking her scales. 
There were too many clouds masking the sun to see well. Cloud could tell they were in shadow. The slopes and snow beneath them all glowed a dull bluish-violet, a darker gray streaking where the snow failed to cover. 
They traversed the wall alongside the cave, which they could see now was built into the mountain just underneath the palace. Cloud and Peri both grinned at seeing their home as they looked up. The palace, sturdy and strong, its tall spires marking it in the fog. It looked so welcoming, so familiar, from the outside. 
They didn’t dare fly, for fear of the rogues and soldiers of other tribes supposedly infesting the land. They stuck to the shadows, snaking along the snow, tracing old bridges where they could. Cloud at first didn’t understand why there were so many ladders like these, but then she remembered all those peculiar children in the crowd of Stowaways, and decided to stop thinking about it. 
They stopped to catch their breath at one point, where a cliff jutted over the landscape, and the palace was a short ways above them. Their wings and tail dropped over the sides, the fog so thick they couldn’t see the ends. 
“Can I tell you something?” Cloud said between gasps.
Peri nodded.
“I’ve never been outside before.”
“Most haven’t.” Peri looked into the landscape, as if she was expecting to see something. Maybe she was waiting for the Stowaways to come running behind them. Cloud wasn’t-- somehow, she felt protected. She had a deep feeling that with Effer’s protection, they would make it to the palace safely. 
But for now they rested, as restless as Cloud was to make it home. “Really?” she asked Peri. 
“Most haven’t been outside. Most your age.”
There it was again. Your age. Peri acted so much like her nineteen years really mattered that Cloud started to believe they did. 
“Can I tell you something?” Peri asked. Cloud turned to look at her, but she was still watching the horizon. 
“Of course.”
“I have.”
close chapter
Chapter 9
“Loon, don’t touch that!” Effer hurried to pull the dragonet back beside him. “You could get cut.”
“We live in a palace made of ice, and you think she doesn’t know that touching broken ice will cut her?” Kabibi kicked away the chains circling her feet.
“I wasn’t gonna touch it!” Loon cried. “I just wanted to look.”
“Shh.” Effer guided her away from the scene. 
Ptarmigan leaned his head against the wall, his back rising and falling with his breath, his arms shaking, the broken ice of the wall strewn about him. He had shards sticking from his talons from where he slammed his fist into the empty shackles, and he gripped the now-broken chains tightly. 
“How,” he heaved, for possibly the third time. “How did they get away?”
There was silence for a moment. Effer left his wing on Loon’s back, trying in vain to comfort her. The truth was that Ptar’s pain was her pain, his anger her anger. When Ptarmigan was the leader of the room, acting as such, Effer might as well have been invisible 
“Well,” Frostine offered, “we shan’t let it happen again.”
“We don’t know that it ever will happen again.” Ptarmigan stepped away from the wall, from the empty shackles, from the necklace that they couldn’t seem to leave behind. “Those girls are probably under lock-and-key by their parents, the precious little monsters. They wouldn’t dare come back here, or even so much as look in a tunnel ever again.”
“That is, if they didn’t get shot to their death on the way home and died a snowy ditch five miles from here,” Drop added. “Regardless, that was probably the last we ever saw of those princesses.”
Surrounded by the frustration of the Stowaways, Effer found himself filled with an immeasurable sadness. Was that waning image through the window the last he would ever see of Cloud?
How could he be so disappointed at this, and yet feel a burning shame at being the one responsible for Loon’s shaking in anger, Ptarmigan’s slamming his fist to the wall?
He glanced around him. He wondered what the dragons standing beside him would do should he suddenly confess. Drop, he wouldn’t dare fight, but his cutting words would hurt more than his claws. Frostine, Loon, Kabibi, the look in their eyes would be worse. 
But it was Ptarmigan. It was Ptarmigan, staring at the floor, feeling the indignity of the loss for himself, a trickle of blood running on his arm from where the glass cut him. He would do his worst. 
Effer didn’t want to think about either of the worlds he was a part of. 
“They won’t run to their little friends and tell them about their adventure, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Blizzard offered. “And if we need to send some choice messages to enforce this, we will.”
“We won’t need to,” Effer hurried to say. “They’ll keep quiet.”
“If for no other reason than to save themselves from trouble. You know how much Crystal cares about keeping her daughters in line.” 
“They aren’t her daughters,” Frostine said softly. “They would have had first-circle necklaces if they did, and, and some kind of special crown.”
“What makes you so sure?” Drop cocked his head. 
“No, she’s right. The queen only has one daughter, that idiot Snotshoe--”
“Snowshoe,” Effer corrected. 
“Whatever,” said Kabibi. 
Ptarmigan dropped the chains he held in both arms, the clatter ringing through the crowd. “This isn’t over. This won’t be over until everything…” He pulled away from the wall, his eyes glazing over the Stowaways. “This isn’t over. We will not stop fighting.”
“We can’t!” Loon placed her small hand on Ptar’s shoulder, picking over the glass to get to him. “We’ll find a way!”
Ptarmigan smiled, just a little bit. 
“Ptar,” Blizzard cut in, “I can only assume this means we won’t be working with your guard friend anymore.”
He shook his head solemnly. “No. I know he told his idiot coworkers. I watched him-- invited me to, in fact, so I knew he was trustworthy. He had no chance to secretly tip them off.”
Effer didn’t know how Ptar could have been sure of this, but for some reason he didn’t doubt that the princesses found the place on their own. 
“Then where do we go from here?” Blizzard sighed. 
It was in moments like this that Effer dreaded being the second-in-command, because now, all eyes in the room fell on him. He forced himself to shrug and half-smile-- as if he wasn’t already ashamed, he couldn’t even answer the questions of his allies. 
“Princesses would have been even better than guards,” Ptar mused, ignoring the question. “Not only are they far, far less physically trained, but they probably know more about their precious queen, and they are much more highly valued than a few lazy guards. Soldiers like them are expendable-- from the spy I knew that much very well. But princes and princesses are priceless. Who wouldn’t go looking for them, negotiate for them?”
Say that again, Effer thought. 
“But of course they escaped. Of course they found some way out of here. Of course.” Ptarmigan stepped over to the necklace, coiled up on the floor, and lifted it up, the chain dripping down like ice water. Blood was still clinging to the sides of the crystal. “How useless,” Ptar mused. “A dangerous weapon, likely never used before-- meant only for some pointless decoration that could eventually strangle one to death.” He let it clatter to the floor, the still-wet blood splattering around it.
Ptarmigan lowered his head. “We won’t let them get away. Not again. We won’t let them get away now. We won’t ever let them escape from us, from the system that made us. And I trust each and every one of you shall ensure this.”
Loon grinned, nodding her head with every word. 
Ptarmigan glanced around the room. Effer knew what was coming before Ptar even opened his mouth.
“For years, those royals let us fight amongst ourselves, in the anarchy and violence of the outside world. They figured we could all kill each other, leaving them in this little paradise on the mountain.”
He picked his way between the chains as he spoke, the metal rattling with the force of his words. “We have taken the fight to them. We’ve made it so our cries cannot be ignored, that our shouts or an answer won’t be into the void, but instead into the coddled ears of the queen.”
Kabibi smirked. Blizzard crossed his arms.
“Now, we’re not hiding. Now, through this princesses, we shall win, honorably and fairly. We will let them face the hell that’s been built up inside us from all our years out there.
“We’re not just Stowaways anymore. We’re taking over.”
Ptarmigan beamed as the Stowaways around him shouted and cheered. 
Between the beating wings and pumping fists, all Effer could see was the necklace. 
Curled on the floor, between the scuffed chains, kicked and battered by feet. He stepped over to where it was, casting smiles on his left and right when he thought he should. But no matter how others punched his shoulders, returned his smiles, even the kids, he couldn’t help but feel like he was underwater, in the cold, icy ocean, and the surface was miles, miles above him. 
He lifted the necklace, not displaying it like a slain animal like Ptar, but cupping it in his hands. Making sure nobody else was looking, he slipped it into his satchel, slipping between the maps and scrolls and stolen objects. 
In a rush, he felt like he had made it to the surface, like all the dark water fell past him at once. The cheering came to his ears, Ptarmigan’s satisfied smile to his sight. 
And all at once, he was a part of the Stowaways once more.
close chapter
Chapter 10
“Girls! What the hell are you doing down there?”
They heard the shout moments before Cloud could get the question out. 
Slowly, they turned their heads to the sky. 
On the mountainside above them stood a guard, clad in thick metal armor and wielding a spear at his side. The wind was picking up, whipping his tail through the snow, blowing the clouds of his breath away. 
“Don’t just stand there!” he barked, his teeth glimmering from the shadow of his helmet. “Get inside, right this instant, or you deserve whatever stupid death befalls you.”
Peri began scrambling up the side of the mountain, her arms straining to pull herself up as quickly as possible, her eyes squinting through the snow. Cloud hurried after her, following her path in the ledges, her head bent low to avoid the glare of the guard. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her up on the last step. 
Cloud glanced at Peri, who stared solemnly ahead as they marched behind the guard. He led them through a swinging window in the side of the tower, at the top of a rickety staircase as rusty as the chains that held them. 
The warmth, the sweet smell of the palace instantly comforted Cloud as she stepped through after Peri and the guard. But a few moments later, as he led them past the wall and into a darker room, with only a wide, round table, and the arching ceiling, she felt her heart sink in her chest. What would their punishment be? What would they tell this guard-- how could they even describe what they saw, when Cloud could barely understand it? 
How could Cloud explain Effervescent, letting them go?
The guards sat on the far end of the table. Peri placed herself opposite him, and Cloud quickly made it to her side. 
“Do you have any idea the danger that you placed yourselves in?” The guard’s voice was gruff, like his throat was old and sore. Peri flicked her ears, looking bored. Like she had heard this before, knew what was coming, and was tired of it. 
With no response, the guard continued. “You would be dead before you hit the ground if one of those rogues got to you. You’re lucky I found you before the most pathetic end imaginable befell you children.”
“Actually,” said Peri dryly, “we were looking for you.”
“Oh?” Under his helmet, he raised an eyebrow. 
“Or any guard. Anybody useful, really.” She shrugged. 
“We--” Cloud found herself stuttering. “We saw something, and, and--”
“Stowaways,” Peri explained. “We found them. We found their base.”
The guard leaned back, dying light striking through the window off his helmet and catching the snowflakes still scraping off of it. He smirked a little. “Tell me then, what you think you saw.”
“It wasn’t what I thought I saw. We did see this, and sir, frankly, your attitude towards this--”
“Just tell me,” he snarled. 
So they did, or rather, Periwinkle did, for Cloud found herself far too frantic to do anything but nod her head. Periwinkle started with the tunnel behind the painting and ended with their breaking the chains. Cloud waited uncomfortably for the moment Peri explained Effervescent-- that he let them escape at all, as unbelievable as it was-- but it never came. Peri left it out. According to her, once they freed themselves from the wall and took off through the cave system, that was it. Homeward bound.
Cloud stared at the floor, studying the end of the guard’s spear. He didn’t talk, or even move-- with his helmet on, Cloud was not even fully sure he wasn’t asleep. As Peri spoke, Cloud squirmed, unable to shake the memory of the SeaWing, of his warm copper eyes like foreign coins. It wasn’t lying, leaving him out of their story, right? It wasn’t wrong of Peri to ignore him, knowing that perhaps the guard wouldn’t believe them. Cloud wasn’t even sure she believed it herself.
“That’s what happened-- to us-- but I picked up on a lot listening to their conversations while they had us captured. It’s important information, sir, something I really think could aid you guards in-- sir, are you listening?”
The guard nodded very slowly. “Interesting story,” was all he said, and for a minute, there was silence.
“So?” asked Peri. “Can this help you?”
Cloud caught Peri’s voice wavering, she herself feeling something sinking in her chest. Why was the guard so coy? Shouldn’t, despite all that happened to them, this be good for the tribe?
Cloud suddenly got this awful feeling-- like things would never be the same, like this was the end of something. 
“Listen,” said the guard, again slowly. He tapped his hands on the desk, the skin obscured by thick metal plates. He muttered, seemingly to himself, “how do I explain this?”
A jolt of realization hit Cloud-- he was the guard they had passed earlier, with Hominy. That itself seemed far too distant already-- where even was Hominy? Had she any idea what her classmates had been through? Or was her mind still filled with school and a hundred other princesses and Prince Mink, and her sister? If that was true-- and it seemed impossible not to be-- Cloud was furiously jealous of Hominy. 
“The truth is,” the guard drawled, “what you witnessed, kids, is part of a very long story. And I’m sure you both would prioritize being safe over being trapped in whatever web you stumbled into. A long story, yes...” 
Peri leaned forward on her arms. “We have all day, Eider.”
Cloud and Eider furrowed their brows at the same time, but the guard moved on. “Please. You ought to get back to class.”
Cloud was about ready to do exactly that, but Peri said, “Of course not.” 
Cloud waited for the rest of the speech, but it never came. It seemed enough for Eider. 
He sighed. “Listen,” he began, “that tunnel-- it was a trap, and indeed it worked. But it was intended for a guard, not for any royals. I don’t think they ever expected two princesses to be the ones to stumble down it-- certainly they were waiting for an ambitious dragon of my status to follow the tunnel with the intention of tracking Stowaways, and being ambushed. That was their goal.”
“Certainly.”
“But somehow, you were the ones to find it, and you were the ones hanging up on that wall, and amazingly, you managed to escape.” He chuckled. “Boy, they must be worked up about that. They underestimated you, I’m sure of that.”
Cloud shuddered. She wanted to scream, but we didn’t escape, we couldn't make it out on our own! We would still be there if, if he hadn’t…
	Peri kicked her under the table. “Indeed.”
“So that was it?” Cloud asked tentatively. “We fell into someone else’s trap?”
Eider clicked his tongue. “Oh no, of course not. There’s…” His eyes flickered to the side for a moment. “You must understand-- for the Stowaways to execute a trap like this, they needed information. Knowledge of our orders when confronted with a tunnel like that, how many of us would be there, who would be patrolling that wing, even. And what they wanted from the guards was probably what they wanted from you.” 
Peri’s eyes widened in realization. “Information.”
“But to know what they did-- how do I put this?” He took a deep breath, Cloud feeling at once the formality and command from when he found them melting away. “The Stowaways had a spy. Among the guards.”
“A spy?” Peri frowned-- Cloud knew her enough to know this wasn’t the answer she was expecting. “As in, a Stowaway infiltrated the guards?”
“Not exactly. An established guard began working with the Stowaways. Feeding them information, perhaps, or offering them protection, or…” He trailed off. 
Cloud’s spine prickled with shock. The guards-- how could they, of all dragons? Beacons of stability, power, and moral righteousness, she was taught, dependable, but hardly companions for conversation. 
It occurred to her this might very well have been one of the first times she had ever spoken to a guard at all. 
“How could they?” Peri demanded, echoing Cloud’s thoughts. “Those guards swear an oath to do nothing but protect their kingdom, and their queen. To work with those that captured us, it’s, it’s--”
Eider sighed, chuckling slightly. “I’ve told you before and I will tell you again, there is a lot you don’t understand. There are many reasons a guard would betray his own rank.”
“But what could the Stowaways offer him in return?” Peri threw her head back, jaw clenched. “I-- we-- saw their lair. They have no material possessions.”
“That, I do not know,” Eider answered, clasping his hands behind his neck, his eyes pointed at the table. 
Cloud couldn’t help but notice the frustration in his voice, the exhaustion in his eyes. He acted as if the light coming from the window was far too bright, the girl's voices too loud. Cloud softly folded her wings behind her. She was many things, but she would never take up too much space.
“Perhaps,” he offered, exasperated, “perhaps the guards have failed him, and the Stowaways offer him what the queen never will. Or perhaps he misses some family, and the Stowaways, odd as they are, are the closest thing to it. I don’t know!”
Cloud stood up straighter. She and Peri exchanged a glance, not unlike when Peri’s mouth was bound, or all those times at dinner parties, when the queen drew on and on. Cloud suddenly felt very, very relieved to be like this with Peri. At least someone in the room seemed reasonable. 
“How are you so sure there even is a spy?” Peri asked carefully.
“The Stowaways never mentioned it… but that doesn’t mean-- it’s not as if--” Cloud added, grinding her teeth with each misstep.
“Who’s your friend here?” Eider stuck his tail at Cloud, his eyes locked on Peri. Cloud flushed with embarrassment-- how many words had she even said the whole meeting?
Peri held her neck very upright when she said, “Cloud. My sister.”
“Sister, eh?” Eider raised an eyebrow again. He leaned his head forward, his voice low, when he said, “I may not know much, but I know for certain that Princess Periwinkle is an only child.”
Peri only seethed back at him. 
Cloud watched the two in profile, trying to decipher the strange, almost warning-like expression crossing her sister’s face. Sister? Friend? No-- cousin. Why didn’t she just say cousin?
“Regardless,” murmured Peri, finally folding her hands and tucking her chin. “Answer my question-- how are you so sure that this spy even exists? That the Stowaways didn’t, say, eavesdrop, or steal documents.”
Eider shook his head, helmet tipped lower over his head. Wherever Cloud was, Peri was ahead of her. “Because,” Peri seemed to finish for him, “because--”
“Because I’m that spy. Genius.” Eider threw up his hands, shaking his head in defeat. He had almost this sad smile, the way Cloud noticed her parents sometimes looked when more bad news circulated the palace. Eider’s voice was very quiet now; he whispered, “smart kid.”
“You,” Peri breathed, her eyes narrowed. Cloud and Eider both leaned back a little bit as she stood up. “You traitor.”
“It’s not how you think,” Eider said. “Allow me to be extremely clear, princess-- you don’t know the full story here.” Everything he said before this was with a tired drawl-- this was stated rather sharply, every word emphasized.
Peri scoffed. “I know betraying the guards is wrong. I know working with a group like them, that steals and kidnaps, that held us prisoner, violates your oath. I knew you swore on your heart to defend your kingdom and your queen, and, and the damage to be done by trying to help those is absolutely--”
“Shut up.” Cloud could see under the table Eider’s claws wrap tighter around the spear. “Enough, princess.”
Peri sat down slowly, her eyebrows raised, her jaw fixed slightly open. Cloud dared nudge her leg under the table. “Remember?” she whispered. “Remember the one who let us go?”
She didn’t know why she told this to her-- years later, she wouldn’t know. But somehow, watching Peri’s expression softed, Eider’s too, she didn’t regret it. 
“Why?” was all Peri finally said to the silent guard, his weathered talons clasped before him. 
He laughed. “That-- that I cannot say, for I’m afraid I don’t really know.” He cocked his head. “The Royal Guard has not treated me well these past few years of my life. And when I was in the army, a real proper soldier, even before I was discharged, it was not what I had thought it to be.” He flexed his wounded foot. 
Peri watched intently. “And what do the Stowaways offer you?”
“Many things. Perhaps you might understand if you got acquainted with them better.”
Startled, Cloud was the first to ask, “Are-- sir, are you joking?”
“Not if you don’t want me to be.” 
Cloud could tell this was a phrase he said a lot. 
She and Peri met eyes for a moment. “You’re suggesting--”
“Some kind of meeting with them. I will guard, obviously, should violence occur.”
“And why on earth might we want to do that?” 
“Because,” Eider said plainly, like it was a fact everyone knew, “you and them-- your goals may align, in places. You could be surprised.”
“Goals? What goals could they have aside from keeping themselves alive?”
“Come now, Peri. You know very well that they don’t just want you to tell them where to steal the freshest fish.”
Cloud didn’t understand. 
Peri stood up, abruptly, and they realized the sky through the weather-cracked window behind them was growing dark. But the gong symbolizing nighttime hadn’t yet rung-- clouds must have passed over the sun, casting the entire west side of the palace in shadow. 
“I think it’s about time Cloud and I go,” said Peri, straightening her earrings. “Regardless, we have matters to attend to beyond this, and our parents should be expecting us.”
She’s pretending it’s getting late, occured to Cloud. But surely Eider must have remembered the gong-- after all, she had seen dragons in armor like his banging it at times.
“Oh,” Eider said.
“We-- I would like time to think about this.” Peri got up, moving to stand behind Cloud. “Just trust us, sir. We will be back here.”
Cloud hurried out of her chair, blinking to see through the sudden dark. It should have bothered her that Peri was deciding this for them, but at the same time all she could find herself wanting to do was lie on her bed and think, think about everything that had happened, alone in silence.
“I trust that.” Eider then did something strange-- he took off his helmet, revealing the mane of thin spines along his neck. His eyes were pale and sunken in.
Peri dipped her head slightly, as did Cloud. Peri gently brushed her wing to hers and guided her towards the doorway, their steps in sync, until, just like that, they were out of the room and into the hallway.
close chapter
Chapter 11
The palace took on a kind of impossible role when the weather was bad outside, and that was a protector, a sort of guardian over all the inhabitants. Cloud never much thought about weather, the sky being something only glimpsed through windows.
But something shifted in Cloud. Now, she could only think of the Stowaways-- were they still in that lair? Would it be safe from the snow, if that was to come? And it then occurred to her that these were exactly the questions they Stowaways weren’t asking-- they sought shelter in the palace. And whatever protection Cloud received from the elements, they had too. 
The two princesses walked in silence for a while through the halls, hardly willing to sit still again after their encounter with the guard. Neither of them lived in this part of the palace; most of it was the guard’s barracks. “Do you think Eider was stationed over there so he doesn’t have to walk too far through the palace from his quarters? With his foot and all?” she asked absentmindedly.
“No, because I see him all the time in my tower. The guards probably rotate through the palace all the time.” Peri shook her head. “I don’t think there’s that many. You probably assume there’s more because they all appear the same in their armor.” She jumped up onto a banister, gripping the little figurehead for support. She swung herself around to face Cloud, walking up the stairs. “I’m sure they would like us to believe there are millions of diligent soldiers protecting the queen, but I doubt it. At least--” She leaped off the banister at the top of the stairs, ahead of Cloud-- “there’s a lot less than I remember when I was younger.”
“That’s sad.” 
Cloud knew they were both waiting for the other to be the first one to say something-- something that meant anything, at least. Cloud would be perfectly happy for a while if all they talked about were guard stations, but she could tell from the way Peri moved, climbing up banisters and picking at curtains, that this was on her mind, and would not give in any time soon. 
“How much of what he’s saying do you think is total lies?” she asked, drumming her fingers along a windowsill. “He is most certainly bending the truth in our parts, but we first have to recognize what can be ruled out completely.”
“I don’t know,” Cloud mumbled, watching the window. She could see the vague shape of a guard flying past-- or maybe it was just a nearer bird. No, a guard-- a bird would probably be shot down this close, if it didn’t already just fly off on its own. 
	“Well, I’m positive he is working with the Stowaways. And maybe he would guard us should we encounter them again. But the motives-- so coy! What do the Stowaways offer him that royalty won’t?”
Cloud tried to focus, truly, but she couldn’t bring herself to engage with Peri’s questions. Not for other things on her mind, but the exhaustion catching up with her. Still, she kept pace with Peri’s quickening footsteps, eager to get to her home tower. 
Peri’s eyes flickered to Cloud. “You’re thinking about that SeaWing, aren’t you? About how he let you go?”
“Both of us,” Cloud said with a sigh. “He told both of us the way out. And he was right.”
“Please-- he said it to you. He said he didn’t want you hurt.”
“That’s not the point,” she replied, although she couldn’t help but think about it. She couldn’t remember the last time someone paid attention to her first, when she was with Peri. 
“I think we should find them again,” Periwinkle said suddenly. Cloud whipped her head up to face her, but Peri was dead serious. “I think we should go back to their lair under the mountain and demand some kind of agreement. I want to know what they know, and what they’re trying to figure out. I-- we have to learn what they’re trying to accomplish.”
Cloud bit her lip. They had arrived out on an indoor balcony looking over a wide open room, now empty. It might have once been an old ballroom, overshadowed by a newer one, or maybe it served some special purpose for a queen who died a long time ago. Nobody ever really came here, Cloud had noticed, even among her classmates living in this wing. The stone beams arching overhead were severely cracked all over, and the paneling of the wall seemed ready to fly off. It seemed nobody had ever gotten around to repairing it.
“Don’t you?” Peri stood on the railing of the balcony, made of the same old, rickety gray metal of the staircase they climbed to get back into the palace. It rattled under her as she spoke. 
“Don’t I what?” Cloud stared down at the floor below them from between the railing posts. There was some pattern to the big tiles, but it wasn’t very precise. A few stuffed animals on stone pedestals stood against the wall, although their fur was matted all over. Cloud noticed when those taxidermied animals reached a certain age in their display, they no longer looked fierce or regal and instead just seemed sad. Oddly, it made her think harder of when they were alive, even though they could have been a hundred years from it. 
Peri opened her mouth to answer, then closed it and shook her head. Cloud sometimes wished she had those mind reading abilities she heard the NightWings had-- then she wouldn’t need to translate Peri’s words and movements so often. 
“All our lives,” Peri began, spreading her wings off the balcony, “all our lives we’ve been told the same thing. The same vapid, empty, meaningless message, about changing the world, saving our kingdom, doing whatever we need to do to end the war that goes on outside.” 
Cloud stepped to the side to make room for Peri’s wing, but soon found the words directed at her. “You’re sick of it, aren’t you? Being guilted for the mistakes of a queen twenty-five years ago that you’re just supposed to solve, on a whim?”
“It’s impossible, I suppose,” Cloud muttered. But I hear it so many times, why even think about it?
	“I’m so sick of constantly being told to do something, and hearing nothing more,” Periwinkle went on. “That’s why this matters. Because if Eider is telling even a little bit of the truth-- then we finally, truly could. We could do something to fix the world, even a little bit.”
“But we don’t know anything!” Cloud cried. “We know nothing about the truth of Eider’s words. And we don’t know what he gets out of the Stowaways, or why he’s working with them, and not the guards. We don’t know if they’re our enemies or not! Peri, they kidnapped us. We only got out because of just that one.”
“That’s exactly what we have to find out!” Peri beat her tail against the posts. “That’s why we need to know more, why we can’t just drop out now.”
“But what could we even get from this? How could putting ourselves straight in harm’s way do anything for the good of our kingdom?” 
Peri stared at her for a moment. “Is that not what the soldiers do, every single day, without the privilege of choice, or protection? Isn’t it?”
Cloud shook her head. “The Stowaways aren’t the invaders we’re defending against. Most of them are IceWings. And most of them are really, really desperate, because of all those soldiers, and they all know this territory well. They’re not easy-to-think about bad-guys.”
“Is that why you’re so scared of them?” Peri seemed to laugh when she said it. “They’re challenging your moral compass too greatly?”
“No!” Cloud protested. “It’s just-- we don’t even know what Eider meant when he said ‘our goals align.’ What does that even mean? What do they really want?”
Peri still kept that incredulous half-smile on her face as she stared at Cloud. “You don’t get it, do you?”
Cloud raised an eyebrow, feeling her face getting hot. She realized it already was. 
“No,” said Peri, “you don’t get it at all. You don’t understand what he, what they meant by it at all.”
“Stop playing games!” Cloud nearly blinked back tears. “Say what you mean. What do they want? What do you want?”
“I want--” And Peri leaned back her head, closing her eyes a bit, the corner of her mouth twitching. “I want to be queen. That’s what I want. And that’s what the Stowaways want too.”
Cloud stepped back, shaking her head. Everybody in the palace knew to some degree Peri was training to be queen. It was obvious in her strength and poise alone. But Cloud never really was sure if it was what Peri wanted, or if it was just another job thrust upon her. 
“Why do you think the Stowaways would want you as queen?” she finally said. It sounded wrong to even say-- such topics were usually rather impolite. 
“Well,” Peri shrugged, “they hate Crystal as much as I do. As much as we all do. They think she’s incompetent and useless-- they know, firsthand, the damage that she’s doing. They want a new queen. They have to, or else what would they be fighting for?”
“Maybe they’re not fighting for anything at all. Maybe they just want to survive.” Cloud looked sheepishly at the ground, feeling silly. That couldn’t be true, she knew. Everybody was fighting, all of the time.
“Eider told us. He was very clear, actually-- they don’t just want to know how to survive. They have goals, Cloud-- real ones, that I could help them with.”
“And what-- what if it’s dangerous?” Cloud bit her lip. “What if someone gets hurt in that fight?”
“Come on, Cloud, be realistic. Of course someone will get hurt. Someone always does, no matter what you do.”
“I don’t know, Peri. I really don’t know. I mean, we’re not even finished with school yet. You saw how Eider first reacted to us; we’re barely old enough to make our own decisions.”
“So?” Peri roared, her voice suddenly loud, filling up the whole hallway. “I have been proven time and time again that leaving matters up to the elders has failed me. My parents, the soldiers, my-- well, certainly Queen Crystal! They left this world a mess and told us we were the future of it. I want to act on that future, instead of just waiting around for it like all the other royal kids.”
She turned to Cloud, her gaze cold. “If you don’t want to, that’s fine. If you just want to walk away now and pretend this never happened and shelter yourself upstairs between your tower and your academy, I really can’t stop you. Go home, throw yourself into your schoolwork, and forget all about what you saw and what you heard. But you won’t stop me.”
“I wasn’t trying to--”
“Well, good, then. Because I am not letting this opportunity get away from me. I’m not going to sit idly any longer and watch as everything falls apart in five years. I won’t let myself see that happen, not if I can help it. And this may very well be the first chance in our lives to do so.”
She shook out her wings, smoothing down her necklaces, and turned, as if to walk away. 
“Please,” Cloud called to her, her voice nearly breaking. “Think about what you’re doing, about the danger you could be in.” 
Peri didn’t look back at her, but Cloud could feel the iciness in your voice. “If everybody in the world did all they could to avoid danger,” she said, her voice low, “we would have all died a thousand years ago.”
She stormed out of the room, into the darkening passageways beyond. 
Cloud knew enough to not shout after her. 
But she didn’t know what to do other than hang her head over the railing of the balcony and stare at the tiles on the floor. 
She couldn’t go home. Not only because the way home was surely the same direction Peri would be in (although that was a big factor), but because she couldn’t bear to just give in like that. It would be succumbing to all that Peri had said, words that Cloud didn’t want to think about at the moment. And besides-- what if her parents asked her about where she had been? How would she explain it to them-- and how would she lie? Ironically, that’s one of the things Peri is the best at.
	She couldn’t go to school-- it must be closed, and if it wasn’t, it was far easier to skip the entire day than it was to try to form some excuse upon return. 
As strange as it was, her clearest thought as to what she wanted was to go outside again. She had thought it unpleasant at the time, but in that moment, all she wanted to do was feel cold, fresh air in her lungs, and see the sky dwarfing her from above. 
She looked up towards the ceiling, which, in most parts of the palace, especially this, was rather unsightly, crossed with stone beams and wooden rafters and positively cluttered with rats. 
Cloud delicately beat her wings against the ground, pushing off the banister so as to lift into the air, and flew through the room speckled with dirt up to the window. The dragonets practiced flying a few times at school when she was younger, but drifting around the palace like this to get a better look at things was probably the only thing keeping her wings from atrophying into a useless cloak. She landed on a ridge a bit away from the windows, set into the part of the wall that curved just before it met the ceiling. She clutched a rafter a few feet above her-- especially in older parts of the building like this, stone was at risk of crumbling at any moment. 
She stared through the tiny window, barely bigger than the tunnel behind the paintings. Running her fingers softly along the frame, she felt the cracks, the wetness of the clouds fogging up on the inner side. The water, now running in little rivulets at the heat of her talons, was cold, with that same crisp brightness to it as the air outside. The clouds were shadowy and heavy with rain, moving sluggishly against the paler backdrop of the fog. 
And then, as she was curled up on the old stone beam, a pale figure high into the air, drawn to the weak light in the room, she pressed her fingers harder against the window, until her knuckles curled back white. This, like a lot of things she did, was just to see what would happen. 
She felt something sliding at the base of the window, and realized the glass panel had moved. Tiny metal clasps held it in place against the post dividing the two panels. They were rusty, but she carefully stuck her nail under them and pried them free. Then, using the back of her hand, she rubbed the windowsill as well as she could, until the rest of the panel could swing free, the hinge on one side creaking awfully. 
Again her lungs were hit with the cold gust of air, bursting into the room and sending the dust particles scattering. She freed the other side of the window, grimacing in the coldness of it all, the drops of water spraying at her face. She gripped the sides of the window frame, stretching out her wings to catch the wind. She looked down, and instantly regretted it. The almost organic shape of the curving roof stretching down below her seemed to end sharply, dissolved into the fog. 
She hurriedly turned to face the palace and, step by step along the slippery surface, pulled herself up the roof, grabbing the window overhang for support, and made it up to the ledge guarding the flat surface of the roof above this hallway. Taking a deep breath, she jacked her legs over the wall, gripping the freezing material with her bare hands, and stumbled onto the other side. 
She caught her breath for a moment, turning back around to face the sky. She did it. She was on the roof. 
The hallway below her, being in such an underused part of the palace, had few guards, and for a while she swore she was alone on the rooftop. It was a bare, expansive surface, dipping down on the sides into slopes shingled like scales, or poking up in prickly towers. Below her, the rooftops of lower buildings crested just above the swath of fog, guards on some, but more of them empty, discrete ladders and staircases propped between them all.
At that moment, she hated Periwinkle, hated her so much. How dare she leave me behind like this? Give up on everything I have devoted to her as a friend, in exchange for some thin hope of ambition? How can she do that, put her own life on the line as such, knowing-- she felt a surprising sense of shame at this-- knowing she’s my only true friend. 
	These were the thoughts for a rooftop, nothing she dared think at home, or even at school, no matter how much the other girls would love to see someone stand up to Periwinkle. It occured to Cloud nobody ever truly had-- to the others, she was a cold, glaring mystery, shrouded in an impossibly sad backstory and ambitions she held close to her heart. Cloud firmly believed her cousin meant more than that. And now, she felt all the more stupid for it. 
Cloud couldn’t remember a time in which so many royals weren’t all packed together, sharing towers and classrooms and dining halls. They were all easy distractions from everything crawling around them, under them. Think, she commanded herself. What scandalous thing has Hominy committed? But she couldn’t even remember. Perhaps she was a bad friend, to Hominy, skipping lunch with her so often, but what was there to speak of? Cloud didn’t even care about Baroness Vanilla. What power did she have, anymore? The wardens would never chain a princess to wall (although they might ask just as piercing questions). 
Then Cloud ran out of concrete things to think about, so she just leaned over the edge of the wall, her gaze clouded and unfocused, and let her thoughts turn into frustrated scribbles. 
And then she saw him. 
He stood on a balcony circling a tower a little bit below her and off to the side, only revealed as the fog dissolved around him. His back was to her-- he was leaning over the railing, his arms bent over the side. Effervescent. Of the Stowaways.
Without even meaning too, she found herself drifting down the slope of the roof again, holding onto the wood surrounding the window for support. Even though she thought she had perfected moving silently on unorthodox surfaces, he turned to face her. Wide eyed shock (That’s how I must have looked when I glimpsed him, she realized) gave way to a friendly, warm smile.
“Hey,” he said, and Cloud could tell he recognized her instantly. 
“Hi,” she whispered. She hoped her voice wasn’t lost on the winds.
Effer leaped up onto the slope of the roof in one great, sending the fine layer of snow cascading down. Without even meaning too, she stretched out her hand for support, and he pulled himself up on it, until they were level. He seemed to pause for a moment, before sitting beside her on the overhang of the window she had come out of. He leaned easily against the slanted wall behind them, his legs dangling over the edge. Cloud sat “properly,” tail curled around pressed together feet, as well as she could on the thin space. 
Her head pounded in her chest. What was she doing? Sitting on the side of a roof with practically a stranger, with her face to the open sky, where anybody could see her. No, she corrected herself. If Effer can be here, then it must be out of sight. He would know. 
She decided to ask him. “Do the guards watch this spot at all?”
“No,” he answered. “It’s a blind spot, I guess. But it hardly counts, as nobody ever really comes by here anyways, except the guards. I think their barracks are somewhere under us.”
“That’s… true, actually,” Cloud said. Periwinkle must have been right.
He glanced over at her, then back at the sky. He seemed to watch it the same way Peri watched other dragons. Looking for some hidden meaning Cloud could never see. 
The sun was bright, the white light leaking through the cracks in the heavy, dark grey clouds swinging around it. Below them was the fine, misty layer of fog, stretching on forever, broken only by the shadows of nearby towers. 
“I know it’s silly,” Effer said, “but sometimes, I look through a window, or I get out here on the roof, and I pretend I can see all the way through the fog, to the rest of the IceWing kingdom. In pretty much every direction except south I can imagine it.”
Cloud raised an eyebrow. “What… what can you even see through it? It’s just fog, fog all the way across.”
“What?” he asked incredulously. “No it isn’t. There’s so much beyond all of it, it’s just obscured by the clouds.”
“Yes, or at least, that’s what they tell us at school,” Cloud said slowly. “This same bleakness, for miles in all directions.” She realized with a shock that this was another lie, if this Stowaway was to be believed. How has Peri not uncovered this one yet?
“Then they’re lying to you, down there in the palace.” He shrugged. “I’ve been through so much of the kingdom, most of it from the northern coast down to here. There’s so much more than gray clouds.”
“Like what?” She couldn’t picture it. 
“Tons. The fog wasn’t always here, you know. I think all the war and all the soldiers flying in have made it worse-- they forget about avalanches and whatnot.”
“Maybe,” muttered Cloud. It felt impossible, but Effer said it so casually. She had been lied to. The kingdom wasn’t all what they could see from their tiny windows, and it hadn’t been like that all the time, either. 
She glanced over Effer, realizing he was probably around her age. If he had lived through days with clearer skies, then so had she. Had she just never noticed the clouds growing darker and thicker all this time? 
“What did you see?” she dared herself to ask, before she could stop herself. “What’s the rest of the kingdom like?”
She expected the worst. A, “what, they’ve really never taught you this stuff?” or, worse, “how can you not know this?” But Effer seemed aware of it all already. “Well,” he began, “the kingdom-- it’s not all the same. I’ve seen glaciers, and plains, forests, and mountains. If the sky was just a little bit clearer today--” he squinted into the horizon-- “you might be able to see the edge of the mountains, actually.”
“I mean,” Cloud said, “I suppose I’ve seen one mountain. A tiny sliver of the one underneath us, when I was climbing back up it.”
He chuckled. “Fair, fair.”
“Where are you from?” Cloud admitted to herself that she had wondered about it from the moment she saw him. He had the green scales and fins of a SeaWing, but she had seen enough illustrations to figure he must have been some kind of hybrid. He had pale blue spines on his back, almost like an IceWing
“Well,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “I’m from the northern coast, that’s where I was born. Though that’s probably not the answer you were looking for, was it?”
She shuffled her feet closer to her. “Well, I suppose…”
“It’s okay,” he said with a grin. “The other Stowaways ask me all the time. I’m weird to them too, don’t worry.”
She returned the smile, and remembered what she had told Peri earlier, about how most of the Stowaways were IceWings like them. “I just mean-- well, who were you parents?”
“Oh. That’s the one I don’t know. Never did. They abandoned me as an egg up on that coast. I don’t know if they died, or I was stolen, or they just didn’t want me. Either way, I don’t suppose I’ll see them again. Not that I ever did.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t help but furrow her brow in concern. She didn’t know anybody that didn’t know their parents. Even the others at the academy from the farthest stretches of the continent, with the rest of their family far abroad, still knew who their parents were. 
“It’s not sad. Don’t worry,” he quickly added. “I can’t miss them if I never knew them. And I was picked up by the fisherman up on the coast probably, like, hours after they left anyways. They treated me well, probably were going to train me to work with them someday.” He stretched out his arms, flashing his dark green claws in the sun, a clear webbing stretching between them. “They knew full well I’m some kinda SeaWing-hybrid. But I swim well, better than them. That was certainly useful.”
Cloud nodded, listening intently, forcing herself to not giggle at the realization that the trails of water leading out of the courtyard fountains were probably from him. “What happened to those fishermen?”
“Oh. The soldiers-- SkyWings, right? or was it NightWings-- we were hit pretty hard. Most of the IceWings around there either were killed, like most of our soldiers, or they just fled. I had too as well, it’s not as if I had a choice in it. 
“That’s awful!” Cloud cried, throwing her hands up over her face. 
“It’s… it was at the time, but it’s not like anybody was very surprised when it happened. We knew the soldiers would be arriving sometime. It’s not like we were up there all isolated. Everybody talked about the war all the time.”
“I’m so sorry.” Cloud had never even seen a battle, let alone know anyone who was caught in a raid. It shouldn’t have shocked her the way it did, she knew-- of course the Stowaways would be those battered by the outdoors, their old homes destroyed.
“It’s not like the war took everything from me. Some places I moved away from after that were just because of weather, or overcrowding, or dragons were just particularly nasty.” He shrugged. “I traversed pretty much the whole kingdom that way. Been everywhere from the icebergs up north to the cold taiga forests on the west coast, to even some of the mountains we’re in now. The only consistency is that everything up here seems to be freezing cold.”
“Sounds about right,” she said, watching a deposit of snow on a distant mountain slide down from what she was pretty sure was a spear, likely from their own guards. “Where were you just before you, well, got here?”
“Ah. I was on the moor, around the foothills of this mountain. It’s so wonderful down there, just open grassy hills and shrubland. Believe it or not, I lived with a pack of wolves for a few months.”
“Shut up, you did not!” She raised an eyebrow at him. “That only happens in stories.”
“That’s about the reaction the rest of ‘em have, you know.” His eyes glittered, while it took her a moment to realize he was referring to the rest of the Stowaways. “But it’s true. I hunted with them a lot-- they have to work together with everything, and if you pull your weight on the hunt and at the base, they wouldn’t dare hurt you. Granted, you can’t talk to them, but they seem to know I’m not gonna hurt them either.”
“What does one even do with a pack of wolves?” she asked incredulously. She was about to try and make a joke here, but realized she didn’t know enough about wolves to do so. Baroness Vanilla used to have a tiny little white dog, she recalled. 
“Well, we spent a lot of time hunting. Deer and birds and such that lived on the foothills with us. And at their little makeshift camp I would usually watch the pups in the springtime. Their parents could be mean, but boy were the babies cute.”
“And then what happened?” Cloud asked. 
“What do you mean?”
She realized if Peri were here, she would probably say something cynical-- What, and then did more soldiers come and make furs out of all the wolves, and kill all the puppies? “Like, what happened to the pack? Why’d you leave?”
“The wolves? Oh, nothing happened to them,” he said, shrugging again. “I just left for the palace. They’re probably still down there.”
“But… why?” Cloud asked, too fascinated to avoid asking. 
“I guess I just got lonely.”
“Oh.”
She leaned more against the window, letting the wet glass press into her back. She couldn’t shake the feeling they were being watched. Wasn’t she always, in the palace? She reminded herself again that if Effer could be here, so could she. She had never gotten in trouble for going outdoors before, until Eider shouted at her and Peri when he found them. 
Her heart sank as she realized he could never think the same way. If he was caught by a guard, he could be sent to the dungeons, or kicked out of the palace, or worse, and the palace would just be one more home in a long list of them in his life that he was forced out of. And as Cloud watched him, watched him seem calm, so much more so than in the lair, she felt the sudden, urgent feeling that she couldn’t let that happen. 
A shadow fell over them, taking the shine out of their eyes. 
Cloud whipped her head around a moment after Effer did, looking up to the very top of the roof, where she stood moments ago. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust through the fog enough to see who it was, a moment in which her veins pulsed in her neck. 
It was Periwinkle, looking, potentially for the first time in her life, embarrassed. 
Cloud unthinkingly hurried up to her feet facing the wall, and scaled it once more, the snow slipping down underneath her claws. Peri stuck out her arm, Cloud holding onto it for the last step, until they stood side by side on the rooftop. Cloud glanced back at Effer, dipped her head a tiny bit, and watched as he scurried down some lower trellis. 
Peri stared at her for a while, and Cloud knew for certain this wasn’t the look she wore when she was pausing for effect-- she really, truly didn’t know what to say. But she wasn’t mad, not anymore, and that alone soothed the fluttering in Cloud’s chest. 
“Let’s get to the dining hall,” Peri offered. “It’s actually getting late now.” She flicked her tail to the sky. Effer took one glance at it, nodded, and disappeared over the ledge of the balcony. 
“Sure,” said Cloud, smiling a little. I guess no matter how much she wants to rebel against the palace, we still have to eat somewhere. 
She followed Peri to a nearby tower breaking out of the rooftop, to her surprise. Peri flew to the top and landed on the lookout with hardly any noise, and disappeared into the stairwell, Cloud a few paces behind her. This must have been how Peri got onto the rooftop. 
“Are there no guards on this post or something?” Cloud asked, louder than she meant. The immediate echo that was always present in the palace quickly bounded back into her ears, and she slipped her voice to a softer pitch. 
“None have a shift here right now. It’s not a great vantage point anyways, for hunting, or for patrolling.”
The tower stairwell emptied into the rafters, and Peri dropped from the last step, grabbing a beam with her arms, and swung from that onto the ground-- a moment after she landed, the beam snapped in her hands. Cloud jolted back.
Peri squinted at the wooden shards for a moment. “Don’t do that,” she said dryly, watching Cloud carefully as she picked her way to the floor while clutching the wall. 
Cloud flashed a small smile as she made her way to Peri’s side. A kind of truce, in Peri’s language. 
The dinner gong pounded from beneath their feet, the all-too-familiar sound ricocheting across the walls and flinging open the doors of many nearby chambers. 
“Look,” said Cloud, catching up with Peri, who was picking up her pace to avoid the crowds, “I’m sorry for what I said earlier. About, about not wanting you… going where you are.”
Peri nodded, her eyes straight forward and her head surprisingly high. “I understand, Cloud, how you feel.”
It doesn’t quite sound like she means it. “I was scared, Peri. I’m scared of everything changing, I’m scared of giving up the tiny life I’ve built here. I’m scared of someone getting hurt-- I mean, I still am.”
“And rightfully so. Sharp objects ruled those last two encounters with the other side, haven’t they?”
“Right,” said Cloud slowly. “Your necklace, and, um…”
“Eider’s spear.”
“Ah.”
Cloud caught Peri gently touching the little spot on her collarbone where the pendant would have fallen. It comforted Cloud a tiny bit to think about Peri, this infallible, mysterious, queenly dragon, scrambling to explain to her parents where her mother’s necklace went. 
“But I get it now, Peri. I get what you were trying to say,” Cloud said. She hadn’t rehearsed this in her head in the slightest. “This isn’t a battle we’re just joining now. I suppose we’re crossing a threshold of some kind, but no part of this war is one we choose to enter. It’s one we’ve been fighting since the moment we were born.”
Peri swiveled around to face Cloud. 
“And it’s the fight of everybody in this palace, and Eider, and Queen Crystal, and all those Stowaways, too.” Images flashed through her mind-- not of Effer, but of his fisherman, of those soldiers, who might not even have wanted to do what they did that night. It’s their fight too.
“We owe it to everybody who’s at least tried on our behalf to try too. I know this much, but beyond that, I don’t very much know what ‘trying’ entails. I think that’s what you know, Peri. And I-- I want to help with it. I want to try too.”
Much to her surprise, Peri broke into a wide grin, where her pointed, immaculate teeth caught fluttering light for just a second. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”
“Really?” Cloud asked incredulously. 
“I can’t explain why I want to fight-- whatever form it takes-- but I feel like I have to. If I’ve been blessed with those skills, I should use them for something, right?”
“Right,” Cloud whispered, her heart pounding in her chest. 
As they entered the royal dining hall, long chandelier shadows broke across their faces, and they soon pulled into the crowds of other princesses their age, their conversation blurring into the ever-present hum. 
“Well,” said Peri, nearly breathlessly, ignoring the same friendly faces that Cloud politely nodded at, “you’re good at writing letters, aren’t you?”
“Well, I suppose so,” said Cloud, raising an eyebrow. “Whoever would I write them too? Actually-- at school there used to be a program where students would find a dragon, always some noble or diplomat IceWing, in some other part of the continent, that didn’t end up stuck here when the doors shut. But I never got to it, I think they closed it when I reached the year where we did it. I think they just ran out of suitable pen pals for us, and the existing ones were too sick of us.”
“Sounds about right,” said Peri with a chuckle. She glanced left and right, the same distant smile still on her face, before being down and lowering her voice. “Listen-- I don’t want any more physical encounters with them. It’s too risky-- I mean, even if Eider explains to them that we’re, I don’t know, good to work with, who’s to say they won’t just kidnap us again, worse this time? We ought to write letters.”
Cloud lowered her eyebrows. “Letters? And send them where, down a dumbwaiter?”
“Sure.”
“There’s no guarantee they would ever see them. I mean, there’s a lot, but not that many. What if a guard gets to them before they do?” It was so strange planning a scenario in which the Stowaways were desired and guards not so. 
“Then we use the one guard we know we can trust. He could send them for us, or alert them or something.”
“We don’t know we trust him!” Cloud side-eyed the guards lining the doorways in rows. 
“He doesn’t have dining hall duty, don’t freak out. Please, Cloud-- there must be some way to communicate with the Stowaways.”
And then, like a wood block print, he fell into her mind’s eye. Effer. And along with his image came his words, of how he always liked to sit out on the rooftop where he could, in the blind spot of the guards. 
“What?” asked Peri.
Cloud gulped. “I know someone.”
close chapter
Chapter 12
Anybody who must sit still, in the same place, silently, for many hours a day is rather good at keeping themselves occupied with only their mind. This was something both Eider and the Stowaways had in common-- being stationary and quiet. Of course, Eider had the privilege of not exactly fearing for his life every time he did sit still at a post, unlike the Stowaways. If he so desired, he could sigh, or tap the base of his spear against the floor, or walk in little circles, or even have a small conversation, and not be so punished for it (not that he ever did these things). And his posts were usually near windows, or busy hallways, or looking out over the kingdom from a tower, and never in a cramped, dark hiding space. Then again, none of the Stowaways had a missing foot as far as he knew, and all of the Stowaways could trust each other. 
It had taken Eider a while to realize that to the rest of the guards, he was the one not to be trusted; the traitor. His entire career in the palace, he had thought of them as his enemies. But now, if they knew his motives, wouldn’t they be just as fearful of him? Or would they only scoff and laugh, finding him weak rather than threatening?
These were the kinds of internal dialogues that keep one entertained while he stands still in front of a sliding panel, behind which is an entire dungeon full of conspiring dragons. 
Unlike most of his shifts, here, he was both waiting, and guarding. He sat perfectly still, with his head straight forward, wondering if every distant set of footsteps belonged to the two he was waiting for. He didn’t have to worry about being given false hope, as this part of the palace was often overlooked. Fortunately, due to this part of the palace being often overlooked, he did not have to worry about being given false hope. Nobody came walking by him in the time he was waiting.
Rather, someone came running towards him, clutching something against her chest in dust-covered hands, out of breath and looking very frightened. 
Eider was so stunned at the sudden appearance of the dragonet he didn’t even command her to “halt” or ask what was going on. She just skittered to a stop on the slippery floors, and stared at him with huge, pale brown eyes. 
“May I help you?” he asked sternly. 
“Oh,” she giggled, as if she hadn’t even seen him. “Um, pay me no mind. I’ve just been-- on my way-- my father, you know my father, Himalaya, he…”
The whole dragonet was actually covered in dust, and had no jewelry with her, except for two unpolished bracelets she gripped in her hands. She was unmistakably unroyal. 
“Himalaya?” Eider said, and she gave him a nervous-head tilt. He knew Himalaya. He was the queen’s prime butler, the most loyal of her servants. Somehow, he had a portion of control over the other servants and chefs, and was rather high-ranking among them. How, Eider had no idea-- the servants and the guards, at least to each other, were entirely different classes. They may both reside in the palace without royal blood, but they certainly did not overlap. It was only a select few of each group-- Himalaya, for example, that were common names. 
“Yes, he’s my f-father,” the dragonet stammered. She couldn’t have been any older than the youngest of the Stowaways. Eider had no idea Himalaya had a daughter. 
“Where are you going?” he asked. “The throne room is on the other side of the palace, if you’re looking for him.” Even the most cynical of guards were usually happy to help a lost child. 
She bit her lip, her grip on the bracelets tightening as she seemed to fumble with what to say. She definitely had no intention of wearing them, it seemed. 
“It’s okay, Eos. Eider’s with us.”
Eider and the dragonet both jumped to attention. From a gap between the ceiling and arching walls, Frostine had popped out, leaning her arms against a light fixture as she looked down on the two. 
“Hey Frostine,” the dragonet said, grinning sheepishly. She stuck out the jewelry cupped in her arms. “I got the Diplomacy bracelets. If you want to, you know…”
“Wow!” Frostine jumped out from the gap and scampered down to the floor, gingerly touching the gold bangles. “I thought there were three, though.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t find the third one. I don’t know where it would be, however. It must have gotten lost when similar gifts got moved with it. Or someone else has it.”
“I’d love to know who, then,” said Frostine, tracing the surface with one claw. “They deserve to be together.”
“Yeah! And we’d take better care of them than whoever left them in the storage room to collect dust.”
Eider watched, fascinated. They spoke so easily, so quickly. 
The dragonet, whose name must have been Eos, suddenly turned to him. “Frostine,” she said warily, “You said he’s with you?”
Frostine smiled. “He’s a guard, but he’s working with us. He’ll protect from the others. And he won’t tell, don’t worry.”
“I would never,” he said, smiling himself. That isn’t quite how I would describe my job. Although-- pretty close. 
Frostine’s eyes darted back and forth. “They aren’t here yet, are they?”
He shook his head. “Still waiting. I’ll bring them down as soon as they arrive. You must go back there now, I don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”
“Wait,” said Eos. “Who’s coming?”
“The princesses,” Frostine whispered, grabbing Eos’s arm and pulling her up the wall. “Remember? The ones I told you about?”
“Oh!” said Eos. A moment later, they were through the tunnels, their voices disappearing through the hallway, but surely lively as ever behind. 
He always wondered what it must be like for dragonets as young as them. They had never seen a time of peace, the almost mythical serenity of the kingdom Eider knew of when he was barely their age, but they didn’t know war, either-- they never remembered a time when battles, blazing and shining and fought with passion and valiance, touched these soils. All they knew was this sickly decay of the tribe, where soldiers and rogues from other tribes, relics of bygone days, rummaged through the kingdom, and all peasants were left stranded outside of closed doors. 
Except for them.
He had spent a lot of time thinking about the Stowaways. He was fascinated by their concept from the moment he first heard about-- fellow guards whispering suspicions about dragons in the palace that were surely not royals, and surely not guards. And for many of those first months, nobody believed them. The “palace peasants” were mere cryptids, ghosts in the shadows that always seemed to habitually stick to old and creepy hallways. Until, over time, they materialized, and began tripping up guards, leaving them knocked sideways in crawlspaces, escaping their grasp as they stole fish from the courtyard. 
Eider somehow always knew that the kids the guards threw into the dungeons were never the ones doing the damage. But to look Ptar in the eyes had felt strange, after all that time of wondering about him. Here was the dragon that crawled in the rafters and left guards bloody and frustrated, it seemed. Here was the mastermind, the eyes peeking through the ceiling. But he was charming, friendly, almost. He got along well with his cohorts. He was more than willing to make agreements with Eider. 
And those two kids, one of which was probably in the dungeons at some point or another, manhandled by Eider’s colleagues. Excited about old bracelets, fascinated by history and wanting nothing more than to dream about things bigger than themselves. 
Eider never cared much for history. Perhaps years of war jaded him, or he was simply disinterested in the images of queens plastering every surface of the palace. But after seeing those bracelets finally held in living talons, for the first time, he felt a tiny bit disappointed at so many artifacts having been shoved away into storage, in piles where they were safe enough to be unguarded, but dusty enough to be unrecognizable. Perhaps this disappointment is how those girls feel all the time. 
Everybody was sad about something regarding the state of the palace, it seemed. 
He heard Periwinkle and Cloud approaching before he saw them. He could tell they moved so shyly, so cautiously. Didn’t they know that only made their presence more obvious?
When he saw them, clear in the bright glow of the hallway, he soon turned around back to attention. He had become familiar with the art of pretending to be doing nothing wrong, and hesitation might ruin the illusion. It was safer to be operating under the assumption that ears might be all around them, or that eyes might catch slivers of the scene. It was safer to give outsiders fewer puzzle pieces to fit together if they got suspicious. 
Eider nodded as the two approached, and with no words, led them to the entrance. It was among the more simple of the palace’s secret passageways-- one built into its construction. 
Running his nails along the thin paper layered against the wall, he uncovered the sliding panel and stepped aside so they could enter. Periwinkle stared forward flatly, while Cloud glanced behind them. Eider quickly slides the panel back into place, plunging them into darkness, and pushing the princesses forward. 
“I’ve never found a place like this before,” Cloud admitted quietly. 
“Really?” said Peri. 
“I didn’t want to mess up the walls too obviously. This tunnel is well hidden.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Eider said matter-of-factly. 
It was true. Many, if not most of the guards were familiar with the palace’s hidden passageways or shortcuts, although they were probably far from as observant as Cloud was. Yet Eider hardly knew where they were going as they descended the dusty, frigid staircase, first into darkness, and then into the artificial, cold light of moon globes. 
The stairway ended abruptly, opening into a dim, bluish hall. There were several feet of wall between the last step and the floor, and as Eider jumped down, the clank of his armor rang through the room, alerting the other Stowaways. 
“Where are we?” Cloud asked breathlessly. She did not move far from the base of the stairs, but gazed around the room, shaking her head in disbelief. “I… had no idea there was this kind of space.”
“I told you it was catacombs, remember?” Effervescent had run up to greet the three, and after a quick nod at Effer, turned to face Cloud directly. “I told you, the meeting would be at the catacombs.”
In the center of the hallway, like a tall island standing out of the ocean, was the enormous tomb. The ice that made up its center, supported by stone beams, seemed to glow from the light seeping through it. Against the brightness of the ice stood the silhouettes of artifacts, and skulls, and coffins, suspended in the ice like a great fish tank. 
None of the palace was modern. All of it was built in times of greater grandeur, much of it in eras of dramatic and tacky architecture. But some of it, some far-between, increasingly rarer parts, were so old nobody was quite sure why they were there, some even if they existed. 
Ptarmigan stood a ways apart from the others, facing the ice tanks but inspecting his talons. While Cloud and Peri hung near the wall, Eider stepped over to Ptar, half-balancing his weight on his spear. 
“I thought you wouldn’t let them out of your sight.” Ptar’s tone first seemed unnervingly grim, but when he glanced at Eider there was a twinkle of excitement in his eyes. From the few times before the meeting that Eider had stopped by, the Stowaways seemed in deep anticipation for the meeting between the groups, many of them crowding around Effer as he drafted the secret notes to Cloud. Eider had not spoken to the princesses since the night they fled from the Stowaways, but it was clear in the plans that he would be present-- the only armed dragon there. 
“I’m not expecting things to break into a bloodbath so soon. And they’re plenty capable on their own anyways.” Eider tossed his head behind him, in the direction of the royal cousins. “They’re just chatting with your deputy.”
Ptar nodded silently. He seemed to open his mouth to say something, but quickly shut it. 
“Second-in-command. Effer. Whatever,” Eider corrected himself, realizing his mistake. 
“So nobody saw you on your way in, no?”
“Of course not,” muttered Eider. “I’ve hardly interacted with any other guards all day. And even if they noticed my absence…”
“They wouldn’t stand a chance at finding this place,” Ptar finished with a smile. 
Eider was going to mention that it was unlikely the guards would care about his absence, but Ptar’s narrative would probably inspire more confidence.
Eider found himself glancing at the princesses, who seemed to be warily studying the cases of artifacts. A few yards behind them, the kids with the bracelets from before were pointing at something, the pale white light bouncing off their scales. 
“Look,” said Eider, turning back to Ptarmigan, “I hope you know, I’m just here as a mediator of a kind. I’ll keep watch for any other guards-- I know their stupid signals-- and escort the princesses back to their towers if necessary.”
“Yes, we’ll know if things go badly if you have to use that spear. Or if we find that Periwinkle brought that necklace.”
Eider squinted at Ptarmigan. “To be fair to them, you did hold them imprisoned the last time you interacted.”
“Are you saying I should just be glad they’re here at all? And not running to your boss or something?”
“Peri and Cloud wanted to do this-- Cloud was the one that left a message for your friend. They could have walked away, but they see what I see-- that a meeting like this would be useful. For all of us.” He shook his head. “Periwinkle especially was keen on my offer of a truce like this.” Eider straightened the spear he braced himself against, turning to find a spot where he could see more of the room.
“If that’s what you believe, Eider, I will take your word for it.” Ptar turned, standing up from his haunches and quickly scanning the room. “The others seem to have taken a liking to them,” he murmured.
Eider followed his gaze, to where, lined up along the frozen tanks, Eos and Frostine had started talking to Cloud and Peri. Effer still stood in between them-- rather, on the side of Cloud and Peri facing the others-- but they hardly seemed hesitant about talking. Cloud, Peri, and Effer were listening intently to Frostine as she spoke, while Eos added something every so often.
“Where did you find the bracelets?” he overheard Cloud asking Frostine, with a gentle tilt of her head.
“Actually, Eos found them.” Frostine passed the one she was holding in and out of her fingers. Cloud nodded intently.
“I mean, I’ve found some scattered artifacts in the storage places where my dad can go,” said Eos. Her snout was nearly pressed up against the wall. “I’ve never seen this many in one place, though.”
Peri watched the suspended artifacts solemnly. Bracelets, earrings, even a permafrost mink, seemed to swim in the solid ice case. Eider didn’t know what they were looking at-- he found that the frozen skull, the centerpiece of the ice tanks, with a brittle crown stacked atop it, to be the true attention-grabber of the catacombs.
As Periwinkle swept her head to look over the artifacts, she caught Eider’s eye, and stepped over to him, casting one final glance at her cousin and the Stowaways.
“I’m ashamed to admit it, but I never knew of these catacombs,” she told him.
“Good. That’s why we’re here,” Eider said dryly. “If a couple of Stowaways get caught gathering, guards might try and take them, but they’ll most likely escape, and their identities forgotten. It wouldn’t change much about the state of affairs at the moment. But if you and Cloud are caught in a meeting like this, or planning it, or coming and going from it, it could mean the end of everything. I hope you appreciate this fact, Periwinkle.”
If she was annoyed by this reminder, she didn’t show it, nodding her head smoothly. “Half of my life is already spent curating my image to the other royals. We’ll be careful.”
“Your cousin needs a better system of communication with Effervescent. Little notes placed, where was it, in the library crawlspace? Complain about anti-intellectualism all you want, there’s still dragons around here who read, so be more careful than you already are.”
Ptarmigan appeared behind Eider, a fact Eider knew from Peri’s eyes suddenly widening. “Come on, the notes were plenty secure. And Effer kept his vague enough so that if they really were found, they could be mistaken for the old mischief of some schoolboy.”
“Still, we’ll take care with the messages should we exchange them again,” replied Peri, seemingly more directed at Eider than Ptar.
“‘Should.’ Clever word usage, princess,” Ptarmigan snarked, lashing his tail.
“What? Nothing is decided yet.” The three watched Cloud and Effer exchange glances a few yards away. Either they’re bad eavesdroppers, or the three of us are all too used to being listened in on, Eider thought to himself.
“Perhaps we should get to deciding, then,” Ptar mused.
Peri nodded, then turned to Eider expectantly. Ptar, Cloud, and Effer did the same.
“I’ve told you both this separately before, but I might as well do so again with you two together,” Eider said, frustrated. “Your goals are similar, aligned in many ways, in fact. I’ve known Peri and her family for nearly her whole life. And my alliance with the Stowaways is new, but it’s fairly obvious what they want.”
Peri was silent-- perhaps this was all obvious to her, and she was just waiting for Ptar.
“I’ll tell you what we want-- we want to survive.” Ptar said these words darkly, through gritted fangs. “We, all of us, have grown furious with the royals. Many of us have different stories, different starting points, but we all ended up together the same way. We were driven here not out of our own malice, but necessity, and want to make it clear to the queen that we won’t be ignored.” Effer approached Ptar from behind, Frostine and Eos trailing behind. Ptar continued, “Ask any of us and they feel that same rage, for you royals. For what you did to the world.”
Peri nodded, her motions soft. “I hate the royals too,” she said. “I want to do what they didn’t, and I’m all the more furious with them for every time they block that.”
“We aren’t happy with the queen’s actions either,” muttered Cloud in agreement.
“From the bits I’ve overheard, nobody is,” said Ptar. “Every royal hates every other royal for some reason or another. Am I wrong?”
“No, and you know that’s rhetorical,” Peri sighed. “And if you know that, you must know everybody hates the queen.”
“So tell me why you are different.” Ptar straightened his posture. “You aren’t stupid, it seems, but I’m sure there are others. The old king doesn’t seem like such a half-wit.”
“What are you even asking-- why we’re not apathetic?” Peri asked incredulously. Eider noticed Kabibi and Blizzard drifting into the small ring forming around the two conversing dragons.
“Why are you here?” Ptarmigan asked plainly. “Why come back? Why have your friend and Effer trade secret notes, why get escorted by a guard underneath the palace to talk?”
Peri sucked her teeth. “Because I care, and I understand the hardships you all have had to endure, and I want to find a way to end it as queen. It’s not complicated.”
Ptar raised his head up slowly, keeping his gaze fixed on Peri-- they were about the same height. A look of dawning realization seemed to come over him. “So you want to be queen. You want to overthrow Crystal.”
“I didn’t say overthrow.”
“Come on. She wouldn’t hand the crown to you-- if she did, we wouldn’t be here.”
“That’s… way ahead of now though, right?” Cloud asked. “If I may,” she quickly added.
“Fair,” muttered Ptar. He glanced over at Cloud. “Periwinkle is the ambitious young princess, I suppose. Who are you?”
Cloud seemed almost taken aback. Effer raised an eyebrow.
“What are you talking about?” Peri demanded, her lip curling. “She’s my cousin, and we’re working together.”
“Of course, but… why?” Ptar shrugged, a cheerful slyness falling into his voice. Eider had never seen him act like this-- he grilled him about an alliance as much as he had these princesses, but he seemed so calculated, serious, professional then.
“I--” Cloud stammered.
“You didn’t seem so quiet when you were talking with the others a minute ago. What, you grew fond of us and decided to take time out of your busy day to show up?”
“Ptar, they were just talking,” Kabibi said, rolling her eyes a second after she seemed to glance at Eos and Frostine. She doesn’t want Ptar going after them, Eider realized. Kabibi continued, “I wouldn’t expect you to be an expert in casual conversation. You were just sulking in the corner with Eider until now.”
Under his helmet, Eider smirked. The younger Stowaways never bothered him-- even if they were disrespectful, it was certainly funnier than the royals.
Peri jumped on this. “Please, is your argument that we dare to speak to each other?” She shook her head. “Of course you’re just finding things to pick on.”
Ptar raised his wings slightly, as if in surrender. “Alright, alright. My point is--” He turned to face Cloud directly, a move that seemed to make her shrink back a tiny bit. “You don’t have some political gain here, right? You’re just… tagging along?”
Cloud frowned. “I… I want to be here for the same reasons as Peri. I care about you guys. I want to help.”
Peri nodded, her eyes sharp. Eider wondered if this was a topic that had come up between the two before.
“And she can. Trust me,” Effer suddenly interjected. He had been nearly quiet the whole time until now. “Cloud knows a lot about the palace. How to move around, how it works, where to hide. Actually, she was the one who found the tunnel behind the painting, right?”
Cloud appeared to flush at Effer’s sudden argument in her favor. “Yes, kind of. I-- I have the palace memorized. I can pick locks. I can get in where you all probably can’t.”
“That’s a bold assertion.” Ptar raised a brow. “We’ve been living near-undetected for a year, and we can’t exactly saunter down the hallways.”
“Exactly,” Eider pointed out. “Cloud can get in where you can’t, probably without being noticed-- er, no offense.” He glanced at Ptar. “And you aren’t undetected. You’re just fast-moving enough to avoid being broken up entirely.”
“I could help-- that is, if the situation ever called for it,” Cloud quickly added. 
She seems uncomfortable, Eider thought, but I suppose she wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t determined.
	Ptar nodded, apparently convinced, perhaps by Eider. “Good to know, then.”
As if finished with an interview, he turned back to Peri. “So what do you want to do now? Spike the queen’s salmon dinner? Break into her room and smother her with a polar fur? An old-fashioned stabbing from behind?”
Peri’s jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”
He shrugged. “I assumed this was the intended plan. Assassinate Crystal-- we probably have more than enough methods-- you take the throne, with or without the other royals knowing-- I don’t see you caring too much-- and we figure out how to mend the kingdom.”
Peri stared incredulously at Cloud, who was similarly gaping. “What-- of course, on our very first meeting, we are not planning on taking the life of the queen. You’re being absurd-- and you know it, don’t you?” She stepped closer to him, her head straight forward as if she was going to bite him. “What kind of game are you playing? Threatening to kill the queen if I don’t do what you want?”
He smirked. “I’m simply asking what you want to do.”
“I can’t believe this,” Peri snarled. “I wanted for this to be a proper discussion, making real plans, but you’re just playing mind games. Being purposefully hyperbolic.”
Eider lowered his head slightly, wondering if he should cut in. The truth was that an assasination plan probably was what the Stowaways wanted. He hadn’t gotten so much from Ptarmigan directly, but his various questions on how heavily the queen was guarded, and if she still feared an attempt on her life as much as she had all those years ago, and other such questions, were not exactly subtle.
Eider also knew that it was not as easy as Ptarmigan described. The whole reason Crystal had closed the palace doors was precisely because she heard of the SkyWing’s attempts to reach the palace and kill her. The IceWings were weak at the time-- not in their long-held decay as they were now, but freshly so. It was when the old queen had suddenly been killed, and perhaps the SkyWings sought to take advantage of the fearful young leader as quickly as possible. 
Bloating the guards, reinforcing the palace barriers, and locking themselves inside had been her last true command. It was twenty years ago.
“What is your ideal plan, then?” Ptarmigan asked. “If a mere assassination is out of the question to you, then what exactly do you want?”
“Ideally?” Peri asked. “Ideally, she steps down. It’s well known through gossip-- she hates being queen. Never wanted to be. The only reason she hasn’t given up yet is probably because of her father, and that she knows her daughter would be even worse.”
“Snowshoe is an idiot,” Ptarmigan agreed. A few other Stowaways nodded, and Cloud snickered.
“If Cloud and I could figure out exactly how, perhaps we could approach her. Make an offer to take her place, and keep her safe as long as she steps down.”
Cloud nodded. “She might very well do it.”
Ptarmigan glanced At Eider, but he turned his head, unwilling to give anything away.
Cloud and Periwinkle’s plan wasn’t entirely off the table, but he couldn’t help but wonder if they had too great confidence in it. The transfer of the crown was not as simple as nicely asking.
“Perhaps we are thinking too far ahead, Ptar said. “There is still the risk of your discovery among the royals. That would be far worse than any of us, worse even than Eider’s discovery.”
Eider nodded. “If my superiors, or someone closer to Queen Crystal, realized my involvement, it would occur to them how powerful you-- we-- were. It could be the end of the group if they cracked down hard enough. For the princesses…” He shook his head. “They might be exiled, us all executed.”
“Indeed.” Peri’s face showed no concern, if she had any.
“Unless, well…” Ptar put his talon to his head and flicked his jaw. “You both know all of that, and are in some scheme to surface our activities to the queen, using your own status. Worm inside, and destroy us from there.”
The cold calmness behind Peri’s eyes disappeared, her entire face seeming to change form as her mouth curled into a snarl. “Excuse me?” she demanded, bringing her wings forward.
“For all I know, that might very well be your plan. What’s plain is that we don’t know, and we can’t know, at this point.”
“What’s your problem?” Peri snarled, moving closer to him, stepping to his side when she stood firmly. “Why do you keep doing this? Keep implying we would ever want to conspire against you all, challenging our every move, refuse to listen to us? Why keep playing these games?”
“We do want to help you,” Cloud added, pleading in her voice.
“And I want to keep my people safe. If there is a chance you could hurt us, I want to make it very clear I will not accept it.” A few lone murmurs of agreement rose from the Stowaways, but Eider caught many checking each other’s expressions.
“Ptar--” Effer sighed, glancing at the other Stowaways. “We’re talking in circles here.”
Eider narrowed his eyes. Ptar stepped past Peri in the opposite direction, like the two were circling each other like hawks.
“We don’t have to help you. If you refuse to listen to us, continue these threats and baseless proclamations of ‘hurt,’ we can walk out.” Peri’s tail struck the stone floor.
Ptar rolled his eyes. “That’s what I fear-- you walk out, and return to your cozy, jewel-encrusted beds, and tell all your friends and family about us, and pretend to be shocked when you hear at your academy that we were all thrown into the freezing snow.” His voice raised as he spoke, his claws leaving tiny white lines in the floor where he pulled at the ground. “I won’t let you. I’ve left guards unconscious in a crawl space, their mouths gaping when their coworkers finally drag them out of there. I, all of us, will never let you walk if you threaten what little we have.”
“I won’t!” Peri stepped back from him, spreading her wings as if to clear a circle around her. She positioned herself with her back to the ice tanks. Eider recognized that move from soldiers he trained alongside-- it was best to leave one’s back closed off to avoid an attack from behind. “All I intend to say is that I hope you realize how difficult you’re making this alliance. We can never help you if you keep insisting that we’re somehow traitors. If I wanted you gone, I had plenty of time to rat you out. But I didn’t. Because I don’t want to.”
“Wow, you’re so kind,” Ptar spat. “Didn’t even destroy our lives, even when you hold it in your hands, and know our location, and appearances, and names. How grateful we are for that non-action!” He stuck his snout inches from Peri’s head, his teeth snapping wildly with every word.
“How dare you attack us!” Peri shouted back.
Eider began to stand up, quickly glancing at Cloud, who hadn’t moved from where she once stood beside Peri. She opened her mouth as if to call her cousin back, but her voice was drowned out.
At that moment, there was another shout, more fearful, the sound of shattering ice, and a collision to the floor.
close chapter
Chapter 13
Cloud only let herself blink for a moment, and then immediately ran across the floor to where her cousin lay.
“Peri!” she cried. The other Stowaways were still shouting, gasping, the sound of fracturing ice echoing around the room.
Peri had fallen into the tank, lying on her back, her head lowered to her chest as she struggled to sit up. Cloud grabbed her arms and tried to heave her up. Eider clamped the handle of his spear in his mouth and took the other arm.
Peri stumbled as she stood up, Cloud and Eider hesitantly letting go of her arms, stepping over the shards of ice and hissing with pain. Dust clouded the already stiff room.
Cloud beat her wings, half to clear the air and half out of instinct. “Are you okay--” She stopped, seeing Peri nodding, her head still lowered.
The princess stepped back to face Ptar. “What did you do.” Her words were tinged with a snarl, a kind of wild anger Cloud never saw.
The leader stepped back, closer to the other Stowaways.
“What did you do?” she demanded again. Her eyes fell on Eider. “What was that?He pushed me into the ice, and you don’t even notice?”
“Of course I didn’t!” Ptar said, through an incredulous laugh. “You tripped.”
“Because you pushed me!”
“Slow down,” instructed Eider.
“I didn’t push you. You were the one nearly walking over me, and didn’t seem to get the message to take a step back.”
Peri opened her mouth to speak, but before she did, Cloud watched in horror as the princess pulled a small shard of glass from the back of her arm. Drops of blood spilled through the air, shining in the darkness.
Cloud stepped closer to help her, but found her talons empty as Peri simply shook her arm and sweeped the ice with the spiked edge of her tail. She seemed more furious than pained, as though the idea of Ptarmigan pushing her was a thousand times worse than a cut.
The other Stowaways whispered among themselves, shooting Ptar glances that Cloud couldn’t figure out.
“Say you didn’t mean to push me; you still turned this fight physical,” Peri snarled. “I was promised a more diplomatic discussion than this! And yet, you ignore that, defaulting to battle!”
“Eider, tell her I never shoved her!” Ptar cried.
Eider glared at the two, grimacing. Ptar cocked his head slightly but said nothing further. Eider closed his eyes for a moment, and then said, “Peri, are you badly injured?”
“I’m fine,” she responded, shaking the cut arm. Cloud could see drops of blood still falling, and tried to meet her cousin’s eyes. Her mind was already racing ahead. What if the blood trailed when they returned to the ground floor, and a guard was able to track the Stowaways? Or worse, what if the cut got infected, and the doctor asked too many questions?
Eider was the one to glance at Cloud in response. “Well-- you’re still bleeding,” he told Peri.
“Perhaps you should leave,” said Ptar coldly.
“The medical center isn’t far from here,” Cloud added, feeling guilty for agreeing with Ptar but too overcome with worry.
“No. I’m not going to the medic, that’s ridiculous,” Peri scoffed. “It’s not a deep wound.”
“Really?” said Eider. “I got excited for a moment. Thought I might have another amputee friend.”
He said it so dryly it took all the others a moment to realize he was joking.
Peri smirked, saying, “I’m afraid not.”
“We don’t want your blood here,” Kabibi said flatly. “If you’re injured, leave.”
Peri turned to face her lightning-fast. “And why is that?” she snarled. “This was your leader’s fault. Unless he feels guilty?”
The room suddenly shook with a clashing sound that sent vibrations through the floor and walls, and the shattered materials on the floor clinked together. “Enough,” Eider commanded, striking his spear against the ground. All heads turned to face him, Peri’s and Ptar’s frozen in open-mouthed retorts.
“Continue this fight if you want, but like Effervescent said--” he nodded at the SeaWing-- “you will talk in circles.”
Cloud didn’t know where to stand as Peri pulled away from Ptar. He retreated to the Stowaways, muttering amongst themselves. Frostine and Eos were staring at the fragmented pile where the artifacts had once been suspended.
“It’s broken,” Frostine whispered, nudging her friend.
The tank Peri had crashed into was one of the smaller, column-like structures surrounding the room. The bottom stone pedestal still stood, but the pillar of ice stretching to the ceiling was shattered, the jewels spilled out from it. They looked so sad on the dusty floor, as if it really was a fish tank and the fish were all gasping for air on land now.
“The bleeding will stop soon,” Peri said, holding her talon to her arm. Cloud nodded, trusting that the injury could remain a secret for now.
“The whole thing is broken?” Eider asked as he picked his way over.
“Yes, this whole section,” muttered Frostine.
“Well, I’m sorry,” said Peri sarcastically.
“Nobody blamed you for breaking it,” Eider said flatly, reaching down to pick up a piece with his good talon but seemingly thinking better of it.
“There goes our cover,” muttered a tall IceWing Cloud didn’t recognize. He stood with an imposing height over the others, his long horns stretching into the darkness.
“How so?” asked the youngest one-- Loon. “It’s just this weird tomb. You said nobody ever goes here.” She looked at Ptar.
“Someone might eventually,” the first IceWing reasoned, before Ptar could say anything.
“We were supposed to be quiet,” said Eider. “If any guard heard the crash and went to investigate, they may piece together that we were here.” As if he was acting as a role model to the rest of the group, he spoke more quietly.
“Then you get them off our trail. That’s your job, isn’t it?” another Stowaway said.
Cloud stared at the collapsed tank, feeling uncomfortable. The scuffed textures of the metal were apparent now that there was no foggy ice in front of them. How long had those artifacts been frozen in there? A spearhead, a crown crossed with chains, what she feared was a tooth. Suspended in ice in some ancient practice, for some ancient queen, whose bones were probably nearby.
Several of the other Stowaways moved closer to the broken ice, many of them cringing as they stared at it.
“This is bad,” Effer muttered, his voice a near whisper.
As the tall IceWing turned too look down at the pile, which the Stowaways were centering around, a resigned look came over his face. Fear shown in the others, and Cloud tried to force herself to remember how loud the crash had been.
“We’re going to be found,” the IceWing whispered. “This stupid crash is going to get their attention, and we won’t have scattered far enough by the time they start hunting.”
“Shut up, Blizzard,” Kabibi seethed.
Frostine began to circle around the room, at the other, longer tanks. Cloud thought she was only being frantic at first, but noticed her stopping at various points on the other tanks,glancing back at the shattered pile on the floor.
“Do you think we could somehow repair... it?” Cloud asked, throwing Frostine a quick glance before inspecting the shattered case again.
“Of course we can’t repair ancient artifacts,” Blizzard scoffed. “Not unless we got the help of whoever has that official job. And I seriously doubt that!”
Cloud reached out to pick up the spearhead, but quickly pulled back, afraid of damaging them more and remembering Peri’s cut. The spearhead itself wasn’t damaged, however-- at least not with damages it didn’t have before. “No, Frostine may be right,” Cloud said softly. She lifted her head. “I don’t think the actual artifacts were damaged.”
Effer hurried closer, inspecting the rubble across from Cloud. “If we can reconstruct this tank-thing, we might be able to cover our tracks pretty well.”
Cloud nodded at him. “Perhaps I could find some ancient records explaining how they put this together.”
“Perhaps you could, but none of us have even attempted the library, and we certainly aren’t starting now, after there was an extremely obvious shattering noise,” Ptar scoffed, lashing his tail.
Peri raised her eyebrows, but before she could speak, Effer turned to the leader. “Duh. They leave to find something to repair this, to go where we couldn’t. We stay down here.”
“Well,” said Cloud, glancing at Effer, “we may have to replace some of the support structures. And there’s nowhere we could buy materials like this, at least without being suspicious.”
“Oh, that’s easy.” Effer shrugged. “The rafters are coming apart in some places above the outer hallways. We could lift from there-- it would just take some time for us to transport it down to here again, since there aren’t any passageways down here. But Frostine and Lace know that area well.”
Cloud grinned. “So then we can split up. And, and, Peri and I could go where only we could sneak in, and find instructions or other resources we need.” She turned to Effer. “And meet you all back here.”
Ptar shook his head. “It would take too long. Some of the stowaways can follow you in hiding, and you tell them what we need. They can get around the palace quicker than you two.” He side-eyed Peri. “No offense intended.”
“None taken.”
Cloud wandered through the library like it was any ordinary day, except this time she carried with her both the nervous feeling of doing something that would get her in trouble, and the feeling of being watched. She fought to keep herself from staring up at the gaping rafters, searching for a sign of the Stowaways. When she and Peri had set off, Ptarmigan was still deciding who would follow Cloud and Peri through the crawlspace, and now, having reached the room distant from the bunker, they didn’t know who to look for. The thought kept drifting into Cloud’s head of a green flash of Effer, just the same as when they were exchanging the notes to arrange the meeting.
“You lead the way,” Peri said quietly. “I don’t know where I would look for this.” Peri glanced around the room. Cloud side-eyed her, suddenly wondering how her cousin seemed to know everything she did about history and politics without knowing the library well.
“It’s probably in the resource section, I doubt it would be with other history books.”
They made their way under the high ceilings, Cloud leading and Peri occasionally stopping to pull a scroll from the wall, read the title, and put it back, shaking her head. The library had the same high windows and curling beams as many other rooms, but bookshelves created tight, makeshift hallways throughout the room. All shelves they passed were mostly full, but the room felt sparse in places, as bookcases had been removed over the years.
“Our best bet is in the reference section,” said Cloud, glancing around for which direction to head in. Peri nodded, quickly turning to follow her, their talons swift on the hard floors.
“What are you girls doing?”
Cloud’s heart stopped with her stride, as all of a sudden her feeling of having a mission, or purpose, dissolved. She glanced over her shoulder meekly as Peri dipped her head in a bow. “Greetings, Baroness Vanilla,” she said, and Cloud quickly echoed her.
Their grandmother, who functioned more as the warden of her younger relatives, smiled slightly.
“We were sent by our teacher to fetch a scroll she wanted to use for instruction,” Cloud said after a pause. “Me and some friends,” she added, upon realization that she and Peri had never attended the same class.
“I ran into her and thought I should try and help her find it,” Peri said. She smiled and added, “It’s awfully nice to run into you as well, Grandmother.”
Cloud smiled alongside her. “Though, I shouldn’t spend too much time chatting, I ought to meet up with the others soon. Perhaps they’ll... have a better idea.”
“I see.” Vanilla stepped past them, looking over her grandchildren with a sharp eye that bothered Cloud. Her eyes were pale purple, like Peri’s, she realized, but either yellowed with age, or cast yellow from her foggy glasses. “You’re right to focus on your schooling, Cloud. With your haste, I expect you to be back in your classroom in a precious five minutes, right?”
Cloud tried to offer a polite chuckle, admittedly confused by the statement. “Certainly.”
As their grandmother strode off, Peri scoffed nearly silently, and muttered, “She didn’t even try to wish you good luck on your imaginary assignment. Just gave you a time limit for some reason.”
“Ugh, she might still hear you,” Cloud warned, as they continued walking. She found herself staring at the floor for most of it, hoping Periwinkle would be eyeing the shelves on the off chance the book they needed was in their current section of war memoirs. She was familiar with skipping class, wandering where she knew she shouldn’t, and forgetting to practice her studies, but she so rarely lied directly like that, let alone in front of Peri. It made her uncomfortable, and that very fact bothered her-- it was Baroness Vanilla. She knew full well that Peri hated her, and probably her other cousins did too. Why did she still feel, not guilt, but an offness about lying?
“That was a good save, though,” said Peri, making Cloud glance up. “She was probably just staring you down because she does that all the time. She’d have no reason to suspect us.”
Cloud smiled and nodded, genuinely this time.
They were looking over a ledge in the corner, atop which many scrolls, books, and papers had been scattered. It was Cloud who noticed the diagrams, confusing at first, but after a second of excited reading, apparent to be what they were looking for.
“This one--” Cloud said through a gasp, pushing it over to Peri. The page showed a sketch of what looked at first like a large ice cube, atop a stone stand. Dotted outlines formed the shape of a fish.
“It’s called a frozen aquarium,” said Peri, flipping the paper over to see if there was anything on the back. “I don’t think anybody keeps these anymore. They’re for displaying a dead fish that's preserved in ice.”
“Well, however they get the ice to stay like that, is probably the same as, um, what we need.”
“That sounds correct.”
Cloud mumbled in agreement, suddenly looking back out over the library. It was quiet, and although it was hard to find such a worn down part of the palace to be warm and comforting, the thought of returning to the catacombs felt strange. Once again, Cloud and Periwinkle had left the underground dungeons of the Stowaways for their normal palace world. Except it wasn’t really the same this time-- their promise to bring the instructions back hung over them, and the Stowaways themselves were surely waiting on them in the rafters, or crawl spaces, or wherever they went. They were in a kind of bubble, walking around on the surface of the palace, pretending to be studying, when the intensity of their task still weighed on them.
It reminded Cloud to ask, “How’s your wound?”
Peri blinked. “It’s fine, I think.” She quickly twisted her long neck to see the back of her elbow. As she stood up from the stone desk and began to neatly stack the pages, she said, “If anybody asks, I’ll explain it as I stumbled into the wall during fight training.”
Cloud glanced around the room once more, not sure what she was expecting to see. If the Stowaways were here, they wouldn’t be in a position where she could see them like any royal could.
“We should keep walking,” she said softly, moving to scoop up an unused scroll.
A tiny piece of paper, like the corner of a page ripped off hastily, was sitting atop the scroll, in between the two rolls, with a flash of ink on it. She forced herself to move slowly, calmly, as she picked it up, read the scrawled writing on it, and faced it to Peri.
Meet under skylight staircase.
	Peri nodded with the coolness of Cloud telling her when her class ended.
Cloud nodded back as they headed towards their destination, just south of the library and in a part of the castle that used to only be silent during the work day, and was now silent all the time. She nearly bounded behind Peri, her heart racing. This was it, this was that return into the underworld they had just walked out of.
Here was another staircase that split into several and overlapped under others, winding between the towers like a robe in a tube. Peri halted for a moment as the staircase came into view. 
“In between those overlapping banisters?” she whispered.
All of the glass panels between the stone lattices were dusty and fogged up, except for one remarkably clear corner, and it was through this she threw a fragment of ice lying on the ground.
She heard a scrambling of claws, and a green talon shot through the gap. She grinned.
“Hand me the scrolls,” said Effervescent
At this point, Peri was standing beside Cloud, and said in a low voice, “We found a lot we could try and look at.” She shifted her own stack in her arms.
There was a snarl from Kabibi, who barked, “You heard the man, hand ‘em over!”
“Not necessary, Kabibi,” Effer said. Cloud gulped as she dropped the scrolls into his hands. It suddenly occurred to her (far later than it likely occurred to Peri) that Effer’s talons were vulnerable here-- he trusted them to give him what they needed, and to not stab him suddenly. Not that Cloud wanted to hurt him. It just suddenly felt strange, picturing Effer twisting around to scold Kabibi, not even looking at what he was reaching for, like her exhausted teacher.
There was a pause as Effer swiftly flipped through the papers.
“Peri has more,” Cloud quickly explained. “We thought it best to get too much rather than too little.”
“To be honest, I don’t know what half of these are even talking about,” said Effer, laughing. “Perhaps it’s also best for you to filter through these with us-- none of us Stowaways can get scrolls like these.”
There was a rustle of parchment on Kabibi’s end, as she said, “I mean, that one’s just a code for royal buildings. I bet you and I could figure these out.”
“Eh, they might as well help.”
“Um, we really don’t want to raise suspicion again or run into another royal,” said Cloud, glancing at Peri. “We hoped to rejoin the Stowaways as soon as possible.” She forced herself to ignore the weight the statement carried.
“Oh, that’s no problem,” said Effer cheerfully. “I can lift you up here.”
“Really?”
“Peri, stand watch on ground level. Cloud, I can pull you up since you can’t really climb in this part. Fold in your wings.”
She did, stepping directly under the skylight, confused. She watched from below as Effer reached across one column of glass panels, pulled something in the lattice, and lifted an entire length of the skylight free. He passed the three still-connected panels to Kabibi, who laid them gently on the ground.
“Come on,” he said softly, reaching both of his arms down again. Cloud took a depth breath, pulled her wings and tail tighter to her body, and sat on her haunches, feeling his talons grab her wrists. She shivered, even though he somehow wasn’t cold, and kicked against the ground.
She braced her wings against the sides of the gap and with a final heave, Effer pulled her to sit beside him.
She caught her breath for a moment before trying to right herself. The three dragons were on a ring of stone surrounding the skylight. The walls circled around them, but instead of ending in a ceiling, more and more skylights layered above them, until Cloud could just see the blurry sky through the glass of the final one.
Effer was watching her, seemingly concerned for a moment. “Thanks,” she whispered, flapping her wings to shake off the dust. A moment later it was Peri’s turn, and although Effer still helped pull her up, Cloud could tell she was more confident in climbing up.
The skylight was wide, but the ledge surrounding it was thin, and between every dragon there were scrolls and papers dropped aside. Cloud noticed some kind of shiny sheet sticking out of the lattice of the discarded panels, and imagined a key-like contraption the Stowaways had fashioned.
Effer had rolled open the scroll. Peri lay on the other side of the sheet he had out, and the ledge was so thin Cloud had no choice but to squeeze next to Effer as they studied the instructions.
He drew his claw along the paper. “Ooh, pictures.” 
Cloud squinted. “This just shows where the stone pieces slide together to make that kind of frame thing around it.”	
“It must be pretty strong, since all the ice probably weighs down on it,” Kabibi said from across the room. “A lot of underwater SeaWing structures have to be made so they don’t, you know, collapse in on themselves.”
Cloud nodded. “If I remember correctly, just one of the top horizontal beams was crushed. We probably just have to replace it, but this shows us we can just slide a new one in. Er, slide in whatever we can find.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Effer looked up from the page and smiled at her. His smile was a little bit lopsided. “We live in crushed stone beams, like, all the time. We could find something that could work.”
She returned the smile, although she only did so when her eyes were back on the instructions. “The primary subject is how we are supposed to fit the ice in. My first thought is just to carve a block of ice from somewhere, but of course that can’t be it, since those artifacts were suspended in it.”
“I see.”
After many minutes of awkward crawling around the ledge and leaping across the skylight, only their shadows visible to any onlookers, Cloud struck gold.
“It is an aquarium.” She faced the ink illustrations to the three others. “Either this is how palace workers built those however-many-years ago, or it’s how archivists reconstructed them. They built a glass tank, with glass panels that attached to slits. They filled it with water, in which they suspended the artifacts--” She circled her talons around the sketches of bracelets and a dagger (oddly, no skull) “--and used frostbreath to turn the water solid. Then they just peeled away the glass.”
“Yes!” cried Effer, flapping his wings in excitement. “You figured it out!”
“Oh, well…” Cloud shyly set down the scroll. “I just stumbled across the right instructions. I hardly even bothered reading it, I just looked at the pictures.”
“Pfft, that’s what I always do anyways.” Kabibi rolled a scroll closed with a flourish.
“What now?” asked Peri, sitting up straighter. As she did so, a more slanted light struck her head, and Cloud became all too aware of the passage of time.
She glanced around the ledge, thinking of what a strange place it was, how she wished she found it, yet at the time time, what would she do in a place like this? She took solace in her explorations of her palace home-- it was how they had encountered the Stowaways, after all, but she never did anything in the small hideouts she found except sit.
She watched Kabibi lay on her stomach, flicking old parchments across each other, giggling as she grasped to pick one up before it slipped below them, and became aware of what she always knew-- that she was lonely, that she didn’t have friends to share a space like this with.
Then, she watched as Effer gingerly peered over the glass skylight, tilting his head carefully to try and make out any passerby below, the way his shoulders were still tense even when Peri told him they hadn’t seen many dragons nearby and they were in the clear.
Necessity had driven the Stowaways to find hideouts like these, not boredom or wistfulness like Cloud. She must never forget that.
Although the slanted light turned redder, and then darker, and the dinner gong rang, and the life of the palace, which had been Cloud’s life too, continued into the evening, she was unaware of all that. She, Peri, Effer, and Kabibi made their way back to the lair, where piece by piece, they and the rest of the Stowaways reconstructed the aquarium. Ptar supplied the replacement stone, a dragoness called Lace set out to find pieces of glass. Effer knew the nearest fountain to bring water from, and as he left, he smiled at Cloud and laughed at the absurdity of their situation. She shrugged back, finding herself lost in the mechanical processes, but distracted for the moment by his grin.
Eider spent most of the time standing watch by the entrance, particularly as more royals moved through the halls and more guards began to prowl, but very occasionally he stepped down, his brief appearances marked by his uneven footsteps. He joked he wanted to be a commander and give more instructions, and yet found none to give. Ptarmigan directed the Stowaways moving about the palace, but strangely enough, many referred to Cloud when it came to building-- after all, she was the one with the instructions.
Her satisfaction was amplified with every object passed between talons, the look of relief on every Stowaway seeing the repaired structures, every figure moving in and out of the lair with excitement.
She wasn’t sure of the time, but she did know that exhaustion lurked beneath her concentration when Effer returned with the carefully balanced pail of water. Other Stowaways cleared around him as he walked through the catacombs, some pretending to make him spill the water and others muttering “finally.”
He stood across from her, on the other side of the newly built tank, and whispered a greeting as other Stowaways began to crowd around. He poured in the water slowly, the artifacts inside gradually being submerged and a few lighter ones floating against the sides of the glass. Cloud held her breath as Blizzard placed the final ice panel atop the tank.
The mismatched cluster of dragons broke out in cheers and heavy sighs. Ptar lowered his head and muttered, “Thank god it looks decent.”
Cloud lowered her head to look through the ice and water, feeling an unexpected giddiness at what they had put together. Between the artifacts, she watched as Effer flung the empty bucket onto the ground and raced across, suddenly throwing his arms and wings around her neck.
“We really did it!” he cried, pulling away from her.
“Yeah,” she responded breathlessly, or at least she thought it was breathlessly. He darted away a moment later, as Kabibi nearly slammed the bucket on his head, and Cloud continued on admiring the tank with the others, as the warmth of his arms melded with the easy feeling in her chest.
It wasn’t until she was filing behind Peri, out the same way they came in, that she noticed the scratch on her arm, and even remembered what had broken the tank in the first place. Perhaps the Stowaway’s fear had been for nothing, and the broken tanks would never be seen, and their work would go forgotten. But for some reason, that thought didn’t so much bother her.
close chapter
Chapter 14
“Why don’t we eat together like this all the time?” Loon was leaning forward on her stomach, delicately twisting glazed berries of the stem with her blue claws. “This is fun, like a party.”
“This is a party,” said Frostine, rolling her eyes. “What do you think a party is, if not all of us getting together to eat?”
“That’s a good point.”
The smell of cold stone in the dungeon had just managed to be overpowered by the feast, but Effervescent knew that not only would the dryness of the castle world stay with him, the ceilings above them were too thick for their gathering to be noticed by the guards. Besides, the dungeon was below the courtyard anyways, according to blueprints Ptar had drawn, so there was little risk of them being noticed by outsiders-- except the one guard and two royals alongside them.
“Loon, if we remained together such as now every single night, we would be in danger,” Ptarmigan said. “Remember? Every time we move, we leave a trail, and our job is to make that trail so small it would be impossible for even a sober guard to crack down on us. We all move into the dungeon at once, while carrying food, having just been stolen, so we leave a larger trail than usual.” He carefully set the shank of his dinner down. “And we’re all in this dungeon together-- that in itself is risky-- it makes it easier to pick us off if disaster strikes. Of course, just this ceiling alone could collapse and bring about the end of the Stowaways.”
Effer remembered Ptar carefully planning how he would explain safety to the youngest of the Stowaways, but he couldn’t see how his explanation was any less blunt for the dragonets than how he always spoke. But Loon simply nodded furiously and fidgeted with the stems.
The food was arranged on various pieces of parchment and leather about the floor, sometimes the satchel it was brought in. Dragons crowded around it, filling up the dungeon hallways and cells. No Stowaway ever spoke loudly, and every individual voice was a part of a quiet conversation, but the whole room had a certain hum to it. Effer so rarely heard this hum clearly, all around him anymore, so used to the conversations muffled by walls and voices drifting through the palace floors.
“Does the food shortage ever show?” Blizzard was reclining against the far wall, and had suddenly stepped closer to Cloud, where she sat near Peri.
“Hm?” she asked.
“Our thievery of the courtyard marketplace. Do you royals complain about it?”
“Oh, no,” she said softly, glancing at the young tuna in her talons. “I think the royals don’t spend much time thinking about how the food is retrieved, or they’re just amazed we have enough to eat at all. I mean, all the old folks reminisce about whatever they used to be able to get through trading, but I’ve never heard a dragon say there’s less food in the courtyard than usual.”
Blizzard nodded. “I suppose that’s the one area you aren’t especially better off than us.”
“They do have a chef,” said Lace.
Peri scoffed. “There’s not much they can do. Our kingdom is no great exporter of culinary arts. Perhaps the queen herself gets a sprig of some dead leaves on her salmon.”
Ptar raised his eyebrows. “Is she always better fed than the rest of you royals?”
“Oh. Probably. If she doesn’t make sure of it, her father or one of her guards does.”
Eider groaned at the word “guards,” in a show of emotion Effer had never seen from him before.
Cloud suddenly blinked, shaking her head as she said “I’m sorry to interrupt the conversation, but--” she looked at Lace “-- what is that?”
Effer couldn’t stifle his smile as Lace squinted, then, in a moment of realization, lifted her wing to show the mink held in a small fabric pouch underneath it.
Ptar chuckled. “It’s her pet, apparently. Brought it in with her, and wouldn’t stay without it.”
Lace tossed her head to the side. “She’s very quiet. She’s very good at sensing food. She eats our rodent competitors.” She cast a glance at Ptar before sitting back down. “Won’t bother anybody.” 
Effer watched as Cloud gently reached out a talon, wanting to sit closer, tell her it wouldn’t hurt her, but fearing he would come across as invasive, and so he just smiled slightly when she glanced at him.
Ptar was pacing around the room, a fact Effer didn’t notice until he felt a shadow over him blocking the dim light. “Where are you going?”
“Oh.” Ptar seemed to recover from his distant look. “I forgot. Just paranoid, I guess.”
Effer nodded.
He had noticed a shift in his mood, one he wondered if his fellow Stowaways were experiencing-- he felt less afraid. Since Eider’s partnership with the group, and especially since Cloud and Peri had grown comfortable enough to join them for a meal in the dungeon, he found himself less wary, less on edge. For the majority of his time in the palace, he lived in the shadows of guards and royals, in a fear that was at first consuming and dizzying, and later mellowed into a dull threat always looming over him.
But the Stowaways were not alone underneath the palace anymore; they had branches extending beyond their reach, into the world of the surface. They were flimsy branches, one of them missing a foot-- or not, Effer thought, thinking of the scrolls Cloud found, her intelligence, her swiftness.
A rush of affection for the dragons sprawled out before him washed past him.
As the early night stretched on into early morning, the group gathered closer to the freshly lit fire; some more aloof Stowaways dropped off for their respective corners of the palace. Lingon, the food manager, insisted each of them leave with as big a talonful of food as they dared carry.
Cloud carefully pulled the skin off her freshly grilled fish, glancing at Peri to see if she had started hers.
“Always eaten your fish raw?” asked Lingon. They were a tall and wide IceWing, freckled with layers of pale brown scales, who tended to smell like grilling in the dungeons. Effer wasn’t sure what was being grilled in their persistent scent, but it was always recognizable.
“Yeah,” said Cloud, before taking a bite. “I’ve barely seen fire before this.”
“How do you royals eat?” Ptar asked, tilting his head. “Where, and when?” Effer was surprised he joined the conversation after all.
“There’s a strict dinner and breakfast hour; we always go to the main dining hall for that,” said Cloud.
Peri added, “That’s what that gong is for.”
Ptar nodded. “With your friends?”
“With our class. It’s grouped by age in years of ten. I would never see my parents during mealtimes unless I sought them out,” Peri explained.
“So…” Loon slapped her tail against the floor. “Do you eat with your friends?”
Frostine elbowed her, but Cloud just smiled slightly. “If you’re asking whether there’s anybody missing us, or anybody to run our mouths off too, there isn’t. I eat with Peri, or alone.”
“Oh.” Loon sat back on her haunches. “Every time I see the cafeteria, it seems so loud, and lively.”
Something in Cloud’s expression softened, a kind of recognition in her face that Effer knew well. “You aren’t missing anything,” the princess finally said. “Don’t worry.”
Kabibi threw fishbones into the fire. “I miss the cafeteria at the school in the SeaWing kingdom.”
Frostine rolled her eyes. “Not as though you bring it up in every conversation.”
Kabibi twisted her mouth. “If you were there, you would be talking about it all the time too. This guy Hadal, he refused to stop playing pranks on the teachers. He would have gotten kicked out of there if he wasn’t so funny.”
“Oh, you’ve mentioned him before.” Loon leaned forward on her chest. Cloud and Peri pricked their ears.
“Yeah.” Kabibi grinned. “When we were on tour north of here, he took all the weapons and pretended to--” She stopped suddenly, her face falling. “Wait.” She looked back at the ground for a moment. “That wasn’t Hadal. That was just someone in my troop. Who reminded me of him. Kind of.” She bit her lip. “I got the memories confused.”
“Your troop?” Cloud blurted.
Effer waited for Kabibi to snap, but instead she just said softly, “Yeah. There were other soldiers in my troop, and they were not the nicest. One guy kind of reminded me of Hadal. I guess I kind of acted like he was, sometimes, to make me feel better. Even though I had never met him before.”
Peri’s eyes were locked on Kabibi, her mouth open, as if she was planning what to say.
“And I haven’t seen him since. Or Hadal, but my not-seeing-him has gone on for longer. Same as Deepwater, and Selkie.”
Effer glanced at Cloud and Peri, as one of the wooden planks began to crumble under the fire. He knew, in that moment, that Cloud and Peri had suddenly discovered what the Stowaways shared.
Kabibi was even younger than Effer or Cloud. She had been a soldier, deployed across a continent. She hadn’t seen her family in over a year.
And every memory she recalled, every funny story, every traded piece of knowledge, was forever cast in shadow by those simple, terrible facts.
And she was not special, not some idol of tragedy to be revered for her unique sadness; that was the worst of it, as it had slowly dawned on Effer. The Stowaways were abandoned, scattered, nearly murdered, nearly become one of the many casualties and deaths strewn across the kingdom. They were lucky to survive to this point, but none of them were without terrible memories of those who hadn’t.
Peri didn’t voice any of this, but Effer knew she understood it from her next question. “Who is Selkie?”
“Don’t start her on this,” groaned Frostine, but with a grin still in her eyes.
Kabibi bit her lip for a moment, and Effer was surprised to find little trace of a smile on her face.
“I think we’re going to get married soon, when I get home,” was all she said, as if she forgot the question.
“Selkie is her girlfriend. I’m surprised you’ve gone this long without ever hearing of her.” Loon sprawled forward, her blue nails almost reaching the fire. Her face was broken into a smile, but the sudden shifting of the others’ expressions made it seem forced, in a way.
“Yeah,” said Kabibi softly. “I mean, only if she wants to, but I know I would like to. I don’t care about reporting back to the general or whatever, I would just circle wherever I think she is until I find her.”
Effer watched her, unsure of what to say, feeling as though he had forgotten that such a plan was even an option. Maybe it wasn’t, and Kabibi was only entertaining herself.
“What’s Selkie like?” asked Cloud.
Kabibi did finally smile. “She’s amazing. She’s really smart, but not conceited about it, not like most of the others. Back home, I mean. She could tell you anything you ever wanted to know about some old play. I hate old plays but she’s so excited about them, and so cute when she gets excited about then.” She spoke so softly, her voice rising with every word.
“You were…” Cloud hesitated, glancing at Effer. “You were drafted, right?”
“I was,” Kabibi said, matter-of-factly.
Cloud didn’t have the aggressively sympathetic glare Effer feared she would, but instead had this dim glaze over her eyes. Peri did too, and he wondered if the other Stowaways similarly recognized it immediately, as the blank look of someone who has heard too many sad stories.
Kabibi sat directly facing the fire, her eyes narrowed, and with a curl to her lip, said, “I was told I should be satisfied, happy, even, to leave everyone I love behind and fight in the war. Even though the war ended years ago, and all we did out there was the tactical equivalent of smacking our enemies with sticks, until we were left to wander this idiotic plane.”
“Do you think you could ever go home again?” Peri asked, rather bluntly. No assurance that Kabibi would indeed see her family again, only the plain question.
“I suppose.” Kabibi curled her wings in. “Like, in the distant and far future, at least I’d hope I would. But I can’t imagine any way out.” She glanced up at Peri with tired eyes. “Can you?”
Peri sat there for a long time, looking past Kabibi into the blotchy shadows.
“What are you thinking about?” Ptar broke the silence. “That was something of a rhetorical question, princess.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
He didn’t appear amused. “Does it not?” He straightened his neck, as if to stretch above the other Stowaways-- Blizzard, the only one taller than him, was sprawled out on his side with his eyes closed.
Peri said, “The one thing we have in common. It’s the fact that for one reason or another, we are bound here. And why are we working together, if not to find a way out?”
“I’m surprised by your honesty,” said Ptar. “Which is to say, I’m surprised you admit that’s why we work with you. Not out of specific attachment to your character, but because we trust you to help us. Help us find our way out.”
And Effer watched Ptar, as he always did, the most present thought in his mind being what the other Stowaways would think of it, constructing their whispered criticisms in his head, but now, he found himself in their position, looking at Cloud and feeling rather hurt.
Peri said, “Of course.”
“Good.” Ptar nodded, and Effer knew he was trying to sound genuine.
Kabibi narrowed her eyes.
There was no fresh snow in the courtyard, although the washed-out flags whipped in the wind as though they wished for it. There was something quaint about the sight of Ptarmigan in the darkened courtyard, sliding behind crates and lining a satchel with whatever food he grabbed. It was how they met. It was still what they survived off of, no matter how their alliance had grown in the years since.
Effer hung behind him, waiting for the signal to flank the other side of the courtyard, but Ptarmigan moved deliberately plainly, expressionless.
They were behind a stall surrounded by nearly empty, soggy crates. Ptarmigan flicked through the sheets of cool paper while Effer checked beneath the cloths hung up on the post. Ptarmigan liked to mention how their shared sweep through the courtyard was the most efficient, and Effer liked to never admit that Blizzard could carry the most.
“Why do we need both?” Ptarmigan said quietly.
Effer felt himself jump, from first the speech itself, and then the gravely tone in Ptarmigan’s throat.
“Both of what?” he asked, in his whisper that was too scratchy and loud.
“Both of the princesses.”
Effer stammered, incredulous.
“Periwinkle is smart. More self aware than I’ve known any of them to be. And she pays attention to the world around her, and has access to more than what Eider might receive. And, more importantly, we-- well, I-- trust she sympathizes with us.”
Effer knew that sympathise was not the word that Ptarmigan intended.
“And what of Cloud? What, practically, can she truly offer us that one of our own members couldn’t supply? What separates her from the shallow princesses and daughters of nobles we all denigrate freely?”
“Oh, stop!” Effer cried, until the flags and fabric awnings flapping around them were all they could hear. “Why-- why are you like this, Ptarmigan?” And, not willing to give him a chance to respond, he said, “She’s good with, with the locks. She knows her way around the castle as good as any of us, in parts we can’t go. She’s a good listener--” He cocked his head. “You don’t care, really, about any of that though, do you? You just want to pick a fight?”
“You sound like one of the children. Writing scriptures of my shortcomings as a leader,” Ptarmigan said darkly.
“I am only seventeen,” he reminded, in a tone he hoped was the right amount of gentle and self-deprecating. Ptar had always been better at selecting his words.
“Don’t sell yourself short. You understand the workings of this group, and our own survival, better than most of them. So many of the younger ones see this as a temporary hideout of sorts, a quiet refuge from the real battle. You and I know different.”
Ptarmigan pulled the cloth lining from one of the crates, holding it up to the moonlight and letting it billow out for a moment, like the flags a hundred meters up. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“With Cloud.” He seemed to think there was nothing else to say.
“Is that what this is about?” Effer demanded, his voice nearly breaking its whisper. “That’s what all of this, this interrogation is? Who you think is going to have a courtyard wedding? You’re so--” He fought a smile. “You’re so childish, sometimes.”
Ptarmigan shook his head. “I know many of our ranks have fanciful wanderings, but I didn’t think you would be the one to fall for a royal girl.”
“I don’t-- I don’t know what to say.”
Maybe it was true. Effervescent didn’t know. He was more concerned with the sting in Ptarmigan’s voice, and allowed himself to narrow in on that.	
“I suppose I don’t either.” Ptarmigan craned his neck up to the sky. “If I warn you, of how obviously you could be hurt, how we could be hurt, you will only fall further, viewing yourself and her as tragic star-crossed lovers, and I as only a force conspiring to tear you apart.” He then said, in a lower vice. “And maybe there’s nothing I could tell you that you won’t groan at and tell me you already knew.”
Effer smiled painfully.
“Do they think I’m heartless?” Ptarmigan asked suddenly, and Effer was surprised by how earnest his voice was. “They like you, Effer.”
“There isn’t a ‘they,’ Ptar,” Effer said. “We’re allies. Family.”
“All well and good,” said Ptar. “But that amicable friendship is only partially on your end. It’s how they-- the others-- see you. They don’t see me like that; I don’t delude myself into thinking they do.”
“You just need to get on their level. Connect with them more, individually, not as a ‘them.’”
“And of course I know that.” Ptar lowered his head, and a darkness crept into his voice. The center light post grew brighter, but it did not make a dent in the thick night around them. “Of course, Effer. I know that if I wish to connect with them, I should… connect with them.
“But how am I meant to do so?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said they’re like family, Effer. You say, always, that they’re as much of a family as you could ever hope for. But you see, the trouble is, unlike you, I already had one. They’re dead. Do you understand?”
Effer began to say, now in a whisper, “What do you mean?” but decided he resented the way Ptar acted like he was talking to a child too much to continue.
“They all died, and all at once, and  if I want to lead adequately, and earn the trust of those I work to serve, I have to pretend that they’re my family too, and pretend they won’t all die at once as well. And for our Stowaways, it was not a nightmarish hypothetical turned reality. It’s very, very, likely, especially if your new love interest decides one day that we shouldn’t exist.”
He stood up straighter, but kept his head pointed at the ground. “Feel lucky, Effervescent. Feel lucky that you’ve already been so pathetically beaten down by every force of the world that you can be so fraternal, romantic, even, to those you barely know, blithely accepting whatever may come to them, to you.”
He stalked away, still holding the tension in his shoulders as he crept along the sides of the crates, reminding Effer to tuck himself lower to the ground. Even in cold bitterness, they must still, always, be on the lookout.
close chapter
Chapter 15
“He is very busy, I’m afraid,” said someone the princesses recognized to be not a royal like them, but someone important, her voice demure but dry.
“That’s quite a shame,” said Periwinkle deliberately, shifting her weight, hoping her impatience would be evident. “Do you know when he will return?”
“I can send someone to summon you,” said the woman, who Cloud figured to be a kind of chamberlain. There was a practiced curt way of speaking that all the castle servants had. Cloud had long thought she noticed it, but it wasn’t until Eos had confirmed her suspicions that she heard it so readily.
“I suppose we could wait,” said Peri dryly, and glanced at Cloud.
“Right,” said the older servant, trotting off behind them.
They waited a moment, Cloud hoping her fear would only come across as annoyance. She didn’t like lying to this woman.
***
“Personally, I think this is a painfully small step given how long we have been living here for, but now I’m beginning to fear that you too think this is too much, too soon.” Ptar sat back against the brick stone wall, untangling a weathered rope as he did so.
“Not at all,” said Peri. Eider clutched his spear tighter.
“Good. You two should understand, you would have the hardest job here.”
“We understand.”
It was only the four of them. The top-secret nature sent a ripple through Cloud.
“What happens if we fail?” she asked.
“Ever the pessimist,” said Ptar. “You don’t; that’s what happens.”
***
There was a solid iron grate guarding the stairway that matched the increasingly dark and industrial feeling of this tower. The whole palace was usually bathed in a pale glow bouncing off the pale walls, but as they hurried up the stairs, Cloud and Peri quickly found themselves in darkness. It was narrow, sharply winding, and steep. Cloud wondered how a man in his seventies ascended and descended this tower seemingly every morning.
“When do you think she’ll be back?” she asked, trying to keep her voice down despite the climb.
“If she ever comes back, and sees us gone, she’ll assume we ditched. Like every other lazy and forgetful member of our family.”
“Mm.”
“And we know for certain, when she said he was busy-- we know that just means he left, and is asleep, or sick, or whatever he does for hours at a time.”
“I know,” Cloud said, both relieved and frustrated that Peri kept trying to assure her.
They entered into a small, narrow hallway at the top of the rounded tower. It was an oddly diminutive room for a former king; Cloud thought it might be a servant’s quarters if it weren’t for the thin rim of window pane against the far wall revealing the drastic height.
Cloud was struck with the sudden feeling of being incredibly alone, on a far outreach of the already isolated castle. If she looked through the walls, as she often imagined herself to, there would be nothing but blank sky. The weight of the castle above her was gone, with only the weathered gable roof, devoid of life save for rats.
“The room at the end must be a closet, right?” said Peri, studying the wide, iron-latched doors in the middle of the hallway. There were old carvings into the metal that bloomed out from the handles, depicting vaguely twisting and angry shapes.
The two princesses quietly nodded at each other before each taking a latch and pressing down on it hard. Cloud was surprised to see it click open in seconds-- surprised that a man like Prince Tern would leave the doors of his chamber unlocked.
“He must have left in a hurry,” muttered Peri, speaking over the creak of the metal against the floor.
“Eider said he planned something to get him to make an appearance.”
If Prince Tern left with his mind in disarray, his room didn’t show it. It was not neat, but had a sense of age to its mess, as though nothing in it was touched in years, but it had been very used at some point. It reminded Cloud of a home left in a disaster, like she and Cloud were returning to this place after some terrible event scattered those who lived here, and they picked through the remains. There were uneven tracks through the dust in the floor, and what items were arranged on the desk were hideous, if upright. It was emblematic of the old-money, tasteless wealth on display Cloud had grown up breathing.
“The former king is permitted to keep his room in a worse state than mine,” Peri said dryly, and Cloud rolled her eyes.
“Nobody ever goes here,” said Cloud. She was familiar with the rush that came from stepping into the kind of no-man’s-land, but she could not stop playing out the imagined conversations, scrambled explanations of what she was doing. They would have no excuse. They would be eviscerated by the old king.
As her eyes met the massive painting on the wall opposite the bed, she found herself quickly averting her eyes, as though she was afraid of becoming lost in it. It wasn’t, of course, a good painting-- it was a sloppy and dingy depiction of a war, with little sense of balance or composition, but something about its mood offset Cloud. She understood why Tern had garnered the reputation he had, if he woke up to a painting like this every day.
Peri froze for a moment, staring at it with squinted and sharp eyes. She lingered in front of it for a moment too long, while Cloud busied herself with inspecting the room. “I hate this painting,” she finally said.
Below a low window, opposite the door, were the bronze racks displaying spears and swords, positioned parallel to the floor and with the small amount of light in the room shining down to gleam against their hilts.
Of course, there were weapons everywhere-- some old trident, stood vertically beside the bed, framed displays mounted on the ceilings, more shelves along the other ceilings-- but these were the smallest, the most prominently displayed, and the ones Cloud intrinsically understood to be important.
“They’re from the most recent war,” she explained quickly, calling Peri to her side.
“Wouldn’t he want to hide them away?”
“You’d think he’d hate to wake up every morning to reminders of how his wife died. But I suppose these were his own weapons, ones he carried in victory.” She glanced over at Peri. “They tend not to talk about military equipment from the wars or battles they lost.”
Peri pursed her lips. “Right.”
“So.”
They each took two. Cloud drew a scimitar and bloodied, glittering spear, while Peri took a longsword and prized dagger. They each raised their wings above their head, slid the weapon into the silk cloak draped around their back, the blade end facing their tails, and adjusted, until from every angle except behind, their cargo was imperceptible.
Ptar had so obviously loved the idea, as Cloud was beginning to understand how much he cared for simple aesthetics. Their impractical, overpriced royal garb would help them disguise what they stole. Obvious, yes, but it was her idea, and nobody had any other idea as to how they could transport the weapons.
They didn’t linger.
***
“Then what?”
“You return to your rooms. Act as though nothing happened. Continue your normal lives, do whatever the hell it is you princesses do all day. Don’t do anything,” Ptar said, as though he was about to elaborate on what “anything” meant, but suddenly stopped.
“They probably shouldn’t meet up with the Stowaways for a good few days,” said Eider. “Neither of you can draw attention to the other.”
Cloud and Peri nodded, though not without Peri glancing at Cloud and a slight smile forming on the side of her mouth facing her.
***
Cloud was alone, again, sitting up in her bed with scrolls in front of her, hyper-aware of how much she hoped to look like an ordinary school girl, studying patiently for her classes. On top of the scrolls were the two weapons. She had hoped that, like a queen seen without her veil and jewels, the swords would lose their luster and intimidation away from Tern’s military room, but instead, they felt heavier and more deadly against the soft fur sheets, and she realized for the first time that they were real, proper, weapons, not just arbitrarily worshiped art or gold.
The thought occurred to her fully realized startlingly late-- did the Stowaways truly intend to use these swords?
Not wanting to see them any more, she rolled up the paper gently around the sheathed swords, hoping the inevitable creases would look natural, by a careless and bored princess. She hated feeling so acutely aware of herself, forced to see how she must appear from the lense of her parents, her grandmother, the guards, anybody who may suspect her.
She thought of Peri, sitting in her own chambers across the palace, disguising her own swords however she planned. She thought of Ptarmigan, wherever he was, only a vague commanding force. She thought of Effervescent.
She went to sleep.
She was vaguely aware of movement and moving metal, as she always was, but it wasn’t until she heard voices close enough she bolted awake, with the anxiety of feeling she had been missing something.
Baroness Vanilla was halfway through the carved doorway, two guards flanking her. They were glancing with each other, not at either royal. Cloud didn’t recognize them.
“What’s going on?” And then, as if she didn’t want to hear the explanation she already anticipated, she gathered the scrolls in her bed into the basket beside her bed, and smoothed the fur blanket. “I’m so sorry grandmother, my chambers are such a mess--”
“It’s quite alright,” the Baroness said plainly. “I need to question you on crucial, palace-wide matters.” The guards shifted, and Cloud avoided looking any of them directly in the eye, and began to hate herself for doing so.
“Four of Our Highness Prince Tern’s priceless military swords have gone conspicuously missing.”
Cloud let the words bore into her head, and found her gaze dropping to the floor in what she hoped appeared as shock. “That’s terrible,” she cried. “Have… have they found any leads?”
“The queen will be more formally handling this soon. Awfully insistent that my brother only misplaced them, as if he could do such a thing.”
“Is there anything I could do for His Highness?” Cloud liked the words she chose, but not the quivering voice she spoke them with. She hadn’t expected this conversation so soon. But of course, this was the kind of unfair threat that the Stowaways contended with every day, and to more deadly stakes. She had been sleeping peacefully, in her own bed, after all.
“Cloud,” said the Baroness in a slow, disciplinary voice. “I know you skipped class yesterday. I saw you scampering up your tower. I’m well aware of this habit of yours already, so do not argue with me on this front.”
Cloud looked at the floor.
“It was shortly after a window of time when my brother was away from his room.” Cloud despised the methodical way she listed her words, as if she was incapable of drawing her own conclusions.
“Please, your highness,” one of the guards whispered. “Her Majesty does need to see you, and soon.”
Cloud pounced on the trail of his sentence, asking, “Whatever could you mean?” in a similarly staccato voice. She toyed with her choking necklace vapidly.
“A quick search,” was all she said, and the guards paused for a moment before following her into the entire room, and Cloud stood up, as best as she could manage, watching them tear through her bed, her drawers, the painted flower pot long devoid of flowers.
Humiliatingly soon, the Baroness herself tore open the scroll, and the sword clattered to the ground an inch from Cloud’s talons.
The perpetual sense of falling in Cloud’s chest moved sideways, as the Baroness clutched Cloud’s forearm and pulled her into the hallway, the guards flanking around her, and they began to march across the hallway, Cloud’s feet shuffling and staggering out of sync with the others.
“Please,” she rasped, her voice still slow, as if it was stuck, “Please, it’s not mine-- I mean, I didn’t take it, I don’t understand how…”
“Be quiet,” instructed the Baroness. More terrible than the blaring commands delivered to those like a child much younger, was the fact that Cloud obliged.
She kept walking, half being dragged, as her grandmother intermittently yanked on her again and knocked her out of step.
She only broke her silence when she saw familiar windows between the curling horns of the guards. “Where are we going?” she gasped.
None of them answered.
Cloud hated knowing the palace well enough for her dread to compound with every step, as she knew where the Baroness was leading them.
She knocked firmly on the stone and wood doors, inlaid with Peri’s family crest, before swinging it open anyways.
Cloud had rarely, if ever, been to Peri’s room, and it was as though her brain broke from its panic for a moment to recognize how strange it was to see Peri like this, through the eyes of her grandmother, caught off guard. Periwinkle was closer to a picture-perfect schoolgirl, sat upright at her writing desk, but there was a slouch in her posture, quickly straightened, that Cloud had never noticed before. In the span of a few seconds, her gaze darkened as she recognized Cloud.
“What is going on?” she asked, with a slight tilt of her head. The motion shook free the image of her dead stare at Cloud, but it was still burned in her brain. She fought back tears.
The Baroness thrust her arm holding the sword forward, and Peri flinched. One of the guards palmed off the other into the Baroness’s open hand. “These swords, priceless artifacts belonging to my brother, were found hidden in Cloud’s room.”
Peri opened, and then closed her mouth, eyes fixed on the blade. Say something, Cloud wished to scream.
“There must be some mistake,” said Periwinkle. “Why would Princess Cloud steal a weapon such as that?”
“Why indeed.” Cloud could only see the back of their grandmother’s head. Peri had not moved. “She is certainly about to face proper discipline, and she will have every chance to explain herself then.”
Peri went silent, again. Her blank expression was the most terrifying thing Cloud could imagine.
“Why are you here?” she finally said.
“Because,” said Vanilla, breath hot and fast, “Because I know Cloud is guilty. And I know, and you know, too, that Cloud is too stupid to have conducted a scheme like this on her own.”
Cloud would have looked to the hallway, or the floor, if she didn’t believe it would compound her embarrassment. She was a little girl gripped by the arm by her grandmother, but she would not stare pensively at her feet when scolded, as if folding into the image she hated of herself, fulfilled now more than ever.
She stared blankly ahead and let Peri’s scowl and pointed responses wash past her.
“Please,” said one of the guards finally, to Baroness Vanilla. “This is absurd.”
“I cannot believe you would accuse me of this, on such flimsy grounds, with so much confidence, when you yourself are such a liar. Why would her Majesty ever believe you? Why would your brother take you seriously? Don’t you think he wants the real truth about what happened, not your personal biases?” The world fell freely from Peri’s throat.
“Let’s get this one to the waiting chamber. We’re already late.” The other guard glanced sideways to the Baroness, who began to draw her own eyes away from Peri. She hadn’t looked at Cloud the entire time. She stepped backwards.
Peri was breathing heavily, staring the pack down, and Cloud forced herself to remain silent and still. She glanced at Peri for a moment, as if to assure her, and to seek assurance for herself.
“Baroness,” added Peri suddenly, and Cloud’s heart sank. Please, no. “I find it frankly shameful that you would talk about your own granddaughter in such an insulting way.”
“Search her room. Make it quick.”
It was painfully slow and arduous, and it ended with the Baroness desperately pulling string and a jagged wooden sheath off of a prop sword. Cloud felt a pang of satisfaction at Peri’s cleverness in the hiding spot, soured with the shared humiliation that it wasn’t enough, and perhaps never would be.
Eyes wide under the helmet, as though he had not expected to have to do such a thing, the guard seized Peri’s arm and pulled her into the hallway.
(maybe put something else here)
Night still fell, despite everything. Cloud had let herself become blank and unresponsive, fulfilling her role of the dumb, greedy princess. She had been doing so for the last several hours. She did not much feel like pulling out from it.
She let herself feel a small, twisted, bitter pride in it. They all thought she was foolish, stealing shiny things for her own untrained eye, unappreciative and pessimistic. She was, in a way. But she had turned stiff and brittle, blithely admiring the gold hilt of the swords, when asked about their motivations. She would not let on anything more. She held the secrets, and the people they concerned, tight to her chest. Peri did the same.
They were in a distant tower, stacked against the far reaches of the palace. It had been a dungeon, once, but must have been converted out of it even before the war. There were holes in the walls where shackles might attach, and slats broken in the stone floor. Thin glass panes crossed the window, with the same removable lattice Cloud recognized from other old sections of the castle.
The room was a small circle, deviating from the shape only in the windows and arches over the ceiling. They sat on the floor. There was, of course, no expectation that they would stay here for long. In the morning, Crystal, Tern, Vanilla, their parents, and the rest of a council of senior royal members would reach a conclusion on how to punish the girls. Neither Cloud nor her parents gave protest when Baroness Vanilla suggested this room, far above and just to the west of the central throne room where they sat.
Despite this, Cloud still let herself become absorbed in the tower, having withdrawn her head from her chest and begun to look around. She paced in circles for a while, in a slow stride, tail and wings dragging on the floor, and had gone back to leaning against the wall.
“I’m sorry,” Peri said suddenly, breaking the silence. She slouched even lower. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was so quiet, and struck against the stone walls, sounding brittle and metallic.
Cloud took a long time to respond. There was no rush to do so.
There never had been, really. It occurred to her that being with the Stowaways was the first time anything in her life moved with any real sense of urgency, anything that made her aware of time outside of the arbitrary bells that guided her daily life. Now, even those were gone, and she had no idea what the hour was, except that it was dark.
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Cloud. After so many hours, always in the presence of guards or family members, she thought she might have more to say to Peri, alone. She couldn’t think of anything.
Peri let herself slide further down against the wall and sighed. “How long do you think it’ll take for them to know?”
“The Stowaways?”
Peri nodded.
“They’ll figure it out soon enough, I guess. We were… supposed to rendezvous. Me and Effer.”
“Maybe they’ll notice before then. I suspect they keep their eyes on us.”
“You really think so?” Cloud asked, looking up. “Effer said they try to disperse. I don’t think they’d want to draw suspicion.”
“Please. They’re already talking about announcing their presence.”
Cloud glanced to the side. “How so?”
“The spear. Hold it ransom, in exchange for privileges or protections.”
Cloud suddenly felt like bursting into tears. “The royals would never negotiate with them. They’d just crush them with the guards. Unless Ptarmigan has a similar army.” She stared at the wall. “He doesn’t,” she mumbled to herself, as though it was even a possibility.
“Yes,” sighed Peri, and it all began to feel like they were children playing in the sectioned off grounds of the bailey, constructing elaborate stories and roles and battles to reenact, until they became old enough to be consumed by their own worlds.
Cloud had almost forgotten the feeling, the bleakness that was knowing her future contained nothing.
She lay on the floor for a long time. Later, she approached the window, first hesitantly, and then began pawing at the lattice and bars with a slow kind of desperation.
“What if?” mumbled Peri from beneath her. “What if we could?”
Cloud pressed her lips together. “Could what?” She knew the answer under her pulse.
Cloud worked on the window while dictating Peri’s writing. Even in the scrawl of the loose rock against the stone floor, her handwriting was neat, the hard texture bringing out the sharp angles of the cursive. They worked simultaneously and immediately, without giving themselves time to ruminate. When Cloud first broke through the lattice and when Peri first ground the rock into the stone, they brushed past the sense of finality onto the act itself.
What they wrote took up most of the floor. It said:
We would like to think that our message to you will be remembered and cherished, but we are not as naive as you seem to think. We understand that our lives, everything that led to this moment, will be reduced to a whispered cautionary tale in the ears of wayward dragonets, between clicking tongues in disapproval. We know you won’t understand.
	Do not come looking for us. You may know we travel south, to Possibility, to strike out on our own against the cold and find ourselves. You will not find us. Your attempts to do so will only cause more grief and pointless loss this eternally damned castle has already suffered.
	And this castle, and those who live in it are indeed damned. We were condemned to be obedient heiresses of a falling empire, and then, when we rebelled, criminals to be locked away. We are sure that a new identity, of bleeding heart fools, will encompass us soon enough. But do not forget our messages. The loss of your children is not easily forgotten. Our bodies’ presence in your ranks is our most powerful tool to you.
	We will only think of you on occasion in the outside world. We can’t know if you’ll do the same. We wish you farewell as daughters, granddaughters, nieces, cousins, but nothing else.
When they were finished, they stood over it together, twisting their necks to follow the lines. It was melodramatic and posh. It might be effective.
Cloud had splintered the wooden rails of the window far enough to reach through, dig her fingers into the channel, and pry it free. Her talons had grown chapped as she worked, but the shakiness initially present was steadied by her own words.
Like everything that had to do with this life, it didn’t feel as though it was happening to her, to the person who was afraid of consequences.
She held the torn wooden bars over the edge of the tower for a moment, before quickly drawing it inside and casting it across the floor. Peri stood up moments before it reached her feet. Cloud couldn’t parse the look on her face as she appeared to read the last lines over and over again, but it was familiar to Cloud. “Okay,” she finally said.
Cloud was the first to push her front half through the window, and it was as though she could see the earth swaying underneath her when she did so. The bracing cold had seeped in through the walls a long time ago, but surrounding her now, it was dizzying.
She crawled out, carefully contorting her body, folding her wings, until she grasped the outside of the windowsill, an ancient rail her talons nearly froze to.
She liked to imagine that the snow had just begun falling as she held herself against that wall, but truly she had no idea how long it had been storming for. The sun would eventually rise, but be so hidden by grey clouds it was unrecognizable. The cold was harsh on her skin, but the wind and snow made it feel almost thick to move through. Or perhaps it was only the circumstances.
She watched the ground for a long, long time; beyond the banks of flattened snow she could see through what was floating through the air. She saw a dark patch on a swath of ground down a slope, and thought it might be trees.
And she began to climb upwards, very, very slowly, deliberate in every latch of her talons through the chipped palace walls, shielding her body with her wings, which, her blue blood vessels tight, had a frosted, opaque appearance.
She knew Peri was behind her, approaching from the other side of the window. She knew Peri was stronger than her, but did not mind when her cousin was the first to cross the sharp corbel and heave herself over the top of the bartizan. The roof was gently sloped, with a sharp pinnacle sticking up that may have once held a flag. Peri stood in place of it, her lace veils and jewelry swirling around her. She looked beautiful.
Cloud palmed at the domed roof until she stood beside her, her eyes adjusting to the blankness of the sky to the complex spires and twisting arches and paths of the castle from above. It, too, was beautiful.
They let themselves breathe for a moment, and began to stumble down the gaps between the palace towers, to their destination.
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Category:Content (Nibby the Bird)
Category:Fanfictions
Category:Fanfictions (Incomplete)
Category:Genre (Tragedy)
Category:Collaborations