Wings of Fire Book Three: The Hidden Kingdom Read Free Page A

her tribe.
    Really, Clay was the only one happy about the weather. Only a MudWing could appreciate the squishing and squashing under their claws as they traveled through the swamp.
    Starflight swiveled his head suddenly. “I think I smell someone coming,” he whispered. He shuddered from horns to claws.
    “Don’t panic,” Tsunami whispered back. “Clay, you hide me and Sunny. Starflight, find a shadow and do your invisible petrified-NightWing thing. Glory, you can shield Webs.”
    “No, thanks,” Glory said immediately. She wasn’t going anywhere near Webs, certainly not to save his life. “I’ll take Sunny.” She didn’t like touching other dragons, but Sunny was better than Webs.
    “But —” Tsunami started, stamping her foot.
    Glory ignored her. She lifted one wing and tugged the little gold dragon in close to her side. When she lowered her wing again, Sunny was hidden by Glory’s gray-brown camouflage.
    “Yikes,” Clay said. “That was so weird. Like Sunny just got eaten by the fog.” His stomach grumbled woefully at the word
eaten
, and the MudWing shuffled his big feet in embarrassment.
    Starflight peered at the spot where Sunny had just been, twisting his claws in the mud.
    “She’s fine,” Glory said. “Go follow orders like a good dragonet, or Tsunami might fling you to the eels.”
    Tsunami frowned in her direction, but Starflight slunk away and found a dark tree hollow where his black scales melted into the shadows.
    Now Glory could hear it, too: the
tramp-squelch-tramp-squelch
of enormous claws marching through the swamp toward them. The heat from Sunny’s scales was uncomfortably warm against her side.
    Webs hadn’t moved while they talked. He lay curled against the tree roots, snout resting on his tail, looking miserable.
    Clay shepherded Tsunami up next to Webs and spread his mud-colored wings to hide them both. It wasn’t a perfect solution — a blue tail stuck out on one side, the edge of blue-green wings on the other. But in this fog, they looked mostly like a blobby mound of mud, which should be good enough.
    Tramp. Squelch. Tramp. Squelch.
    “I don’t like this patrol,” a deep voice grumbled. Glory nearly jumped. It sounded like it was coming from two trees away. “Too close to that creepy rainforest, if you ask me.”
    “It’s not really haunted,” said a second voice. “You know the only things that live there are birds and lazy RainWings.”
    Years of learning self-control kept Glory from flinching. She’d heard “lazy RainWings” thrown around often enough by the guardians, under the mountain. But it felt like an extra stab in the eye to hear it from a total stranger.
    “If that were true,” said the first voice, “then Her Majesty would let us hunt in there. But she knows it’s not safe. And you’ve heard the noises at night. Are you telling me it’s the RainWings screaming like that?”
    Screaming?
Under Glory’s wing, Sunny turned her head a little, as if she were trying to hear better.
    “Not to mention the dead bodies,” the first voice muttered.
    “That’s not some kind of rainforest monster,” said the second guard, but there was a tilt in her tone that sounded unsure. “That’s the war. Some kind of guerilla attacks to scare us.”
    “All the way down here? Why would the SeaWings or the IceWing s come all this way to kill one or two MudWings here and there? There are bigger battles going on every where else.”
    “Let’s go a bit faster,” said the second voice uneasily. “They should really let us patrol in threes or fours instead of in pairs.”
    “Tell me about it.”
Tramp-squelch-tramp-squelch.
“So what do you think about the SkyWing situation? Are you for Ruby, or do you think . . .”
    Glory strained her ears, but their voices faded into the mist as the two MudWing soldiers sploshed away. She badly wanted to know what “the SkyWing situation” was. Maybe her friends wouldn’t notice if she slipped away for a moment.
    “Be