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

right back,” she whispered to Sunny, lifting her wing and stepping away.
    Sunny caught her tail, wide-eyed. “Don’t go!” she whispered. “It’s not safe! You heard what they said.”
    “About rainforest monsters?” Glory rolled her eyes. “Can’t say I’m terribly worried about that. I won’t go far.” She shook Sunny off and slipped after the soldiers, carefully stepping only on the dry patches so her claws wouldn’t splash in the mud.
    It was weirdly quiet in the swamp, especially with the fog muffling most sounds. She tried to follow the distant rumble of voices and what she thought might be the sound of marching MudWing talons. But after a few moments, even those became impossible to hear.
    She stopped, listening. The trees dripped. Rain drizzled moodily through the branches. Small gurgles burbled out of the mud here and there, as if the swamp were hiccupping.
    And then a scream tore through the air.
    Glory’s ruff flared in fear and pale green stripes zigzagged through her scales. She fought back her terror, focusing her colors back to gray and brown.
    “Glory!” Sunny yelled, behind her somewhere.
    Shut up
, Glory thought furiously.
Don’t draw attention. Don’t let anything know we’re here.
    The other dragonets must have had the same thought and stopped her, because Sunny didn’t call out again.
    Unless it was one of them who screamed
. But it couldn’t have been. The scream had come from somewhere up ahead.
    Glory checked her scales again to make sure she was well hidden and then sped up, hurrying through the trees toward the scream.
    The fog was so dense, she nearly missed the two dark lumps that looked like fallen logs. But her claws came down on something that was decidedly a dragon tail, and she leaped back.
    Two brown dragons were sprawled in the mud, surrounded by pools of blood that were already being washed away by the rain. Their throats had been ripped out so viciously that their heads were nearly severed from their bodies.
    Glory stared into the rolling gray fog, but nothing moved out there except the rain.
    The MudWing soldiers were dead, and there was no sign of what had killed them.

“Remind me why we’re walking
toward
the place with the monster and the screaming and the something that kills dragons?” Clay asked.
    “We could go somewhere else,” Starflight said. “Maybe to the IceWings?”
    “IceWings! Yes!” Clay said. “That sounds like a great plan. Let’s do that. No mysterious dragon-killing things in the Ice Kingdom. Right? What are those animals they have up there? Penguins? I bet I could beat a penguin or two in battle. Couldn’t I? How big are they? Maybe just one penguin.”
    “So we can freeze to death instead,” Glory said. A rumor and a couple of dead soldiers were not going to scare her away from her home when she was finally this close. “Fantastic plan, Starflight. Not to mention the Ice Kingdom is half a continent away while the rainforest is right here.”
    “Besides, Webs will never make it all the way to the Ice Kingdom,” Sunny chimed in. She glanced nervously up at the trees, which seemed to be getting taller and taller as they walked.
    It was also warmer the farther they went, and up in the vines overhead Glory could see flashes of color. The bright summer yellows and purples and blues might have been birds or flowers, but they were definitely not typical of the brown, brown, brown Mud Kingdom. Glory wasn’t sure, but she guessed the dragonets were in the rainforest for real now.
    The gnarled claw shapes of the marsh trees were half a day behind them and so were the MudWing bodies. Tsunami had wanted to stop and search the area for clues, but she’d been outvoted by the other dragonets when Starflight pointed out that now they’d
really
be in trouble if they were caught right next to a double murder . . . not to mention whatever had killed the soldiers couldn’t have gone far. That was enough to get everyone, even Webs, to fly through