The Dragonet Prophecy Read Free Page B

dinner into the river with his tail. The stripped white shapes bounced away in the current.
    Fires flickered around the edges of the great central cave. Echoing space yawned overhead, dripping with stalactites, like huge teeth. The cave dome was big enough for six full-grown dragons to fit across with their wings extended. The underground river flowed along one wall, muttering and gurgling as if it were plotting its own escape.
    Clay glanced at the two small sleeping caves that opened onto the hall — currently empty — and wondered where the other dragonets had gone while he was cleaning up.
    “AHA!” yelled a voice behind him. Clay threw his wings over his head.
    “What’d I do?” he yelped. “I’m sorry! It was an accident! Or if it’s the extra cow, Dune said I could have it because Webs would be out late but I’m sorry and I can skip dinner tomorrow!”
    A small snout poked his back between his wings. “Calm down, silly,” Sunny said. “I wasn’t aha-ing at you.”
    “Oh.” Clay smoothed his crest and twisted around to look at her, the smallest and last-hatched of the dragonets. A pale lizard tail was disappearing into her mouth. She grinned at him.
    “That was my fierce hunting cry,” she said. “Did you like it? Wasn’t it scary?”
    “Well, it was certainly surprising,” he said. “Lizards again? What’s wrong with cows?”
    “Blech. Too heavy,” she said. “You look all serious.”
    “Just thinking.” He was glad Kestrel and Dune couldn’t read minds like NightWing dragons. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the idea of escape all through dinner.
    Clay lifted one of his wings, and Sunny nestled in close to him. He could feel the warmth from her golden scales radiating along his side. Sunny was too small and the wrong color — tawny gold instead of sand pale like most SandWings — but she gave off heat like the rest of her tribe.
    “Dune says we should go study for an hour before bed,” she said. “The others are in the study cave already.”
    Dune, the maimed dragon who taught them survival skills, was a SandWing, and so was Sunny … more or less. There was something not quite right about the littlest dragonet. Not only were her scales too golden, but her eyes were gray-green instead of glittering black. Worst of all, her tail curled into an ordinary point like the tails of most dragon tribes, instead of ending with the poisonous barb that was a SandWing’s most dangerous weapon.
    As Kestrel often said, Sunny was completely harmless … and what good was a harmless dragon? But her egg fit the instructions in the prophecy, so she was their “wings of sand,” whether the Talons of Peace liked it or not.
    Of course, there were no “wings of rain” in the prophecy at all. The dragonets had all heard — many times over — about how Glory was a last-minute substitute for the broken SkyWing egg. Kestrel and Dune called her a mistake and growled at her a lot.
    Nobody knew whether the prophecy could still happen with a RainWing instead of a SkyWing. But from what Clay knew of SkyWings, he was very glad they had Glory instead of another grumpy, fire-breathing Kestrel under the mountain.
    Besides, if anyone was likely to mess up the prophecy, it was him, not Glory or Sunny.
    “Come on,” Sunny said, flicking him with her tail. He followed her across the central cave.
    Twisting stone tunnels led off in four directions: one to the battle area, one to the guardians’ cave, one to the study room, and one to the outside world. The last was blocked with a boulder too big for any of the dragonets to move.
    Clay stopped and pushed against the rock with his shoulder as they went by. He often tried to open it when the big dragons weren’t around. Someday it would move when he did that. Maybe not a lot, but even a tiny shift would let him know he was finally getting close to full grown. He felt big. He was constantly bumping into things and accidentally knocking stuff over with his