The Brightest Night by Tui T. Sutherland Read Free Book Online Page A

them. Resting again? When we’re so close? We can’t be more than an hour’s flight from the desert now. They had only flown for half the night before stopping to sleep, and then risen with the sunrise to fly again a few hours ago.
    Now the sun had cleared the eastern horizon, but the day was barely begun. And they already needed a break? They seriously have no stamina. She rolled her eyes and folded her wings to drop down into the forest as well.
    Wind-flurried green leaves brushed against her scales and a riot of gray squirrels scattered along the branches as she landed, her talons sinking into the soft grass. In the distance, she could hear the NightWings roaring grumpily, and she guessed they were having another unsuccessful hunt. For a trio of menacing killers, they were actually surprisingly bad at catching anything to eat.
    Sunny wasn’t the world’s best hunter herself, but she didn’t need much. She’d always eaten less than her friends — a lizard a day would be enough for her. Kestrel used to grumble that that was probably why Sunny was so stunted and scrawny, but then Dune would shake his head and insist that it was normal for SandWings to be light eaters.
    Kestrel and Dune. Our dead guardians.
    If only she’d had more time to ask Dune about where her egg came from. He’d always been evasive when the subject came up, but if she’d known her friends were planning an escape — if they’d trusted me enough to tell me about it, she thought with a frown — she could have pressed him harder.
    Sunny swiveled her head around, listening.
    There was an odd noise in this forest.
    Actually there were several odd noises. Like thumps and murmurs and a chattery kind of birdsong, almost as though squirrels were trying to imitate their winged neighbors.
    But — it sounded as though it was coming from under the ground.
    She crouched and pressed one ear to the warm earth.
    There’s definitely something under here. Groundhogs? Rabbits? She didn’t think any normal rodents made noises quite like this. And from what she could tell, it wasn’t a small warren underneath her — the sounds seemed to be coming from fairly far away as well.
    Softly she paced through the forest, stopping occasionally to listen. She kept an eye out for the three NightWings, but they weren’t hard to avoid. First there was the roaring and crashing around, and then after a while, snoring that shook the top branches of the trees.
    Sunny worked her way cautiously westward, in the direction of the desert. Small brown and red birds chorused from the trees, occasionally pausing as they saw her approach, and then starting again after a moment, as if they realized she was nothing to worry about. Bumblebees and dragonflies buzzed and hummed and flitted around her talons. In the mild morning breeze, Sunny could smell apples and mint leaves. And something else, too, like old burnt wood.
    She couldn’t hear the sounds from under the ground anymore, but the burnt smell drew her on. Up ahead she could see a break in the trees.
    She stepped out into the bright sunlight and stopped, her eyes momentarily full of light.
    There was a hole blasted in the forest.
    Something had been here once — something that stretched for more than a mile within the forest, bigger than the dragonets’ home under the mountain — but it was gone now, all burned to black ashes.
    Where Sunny stood, at the edge of it, the forest was trying to rise again. Ashes drifted like dead leaves over her claws, but she could see small green shoots wriggling through here and there.
    She spread her wings and took to the air, hoping for a better look. The burnt area stretched in jagged slashes through the trees and ended at the border with the rocky foothills that led to the desert. From above, she could see that the hole in the forest was many wingspans across and black as a NightWing’s scales. It looked like a dark gap in a piece of jewelry where a gemstone had been violently gouged