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

out.
    She circled overhead. Everything inside the hole looked twisted and blasted into dark ashes, but as Sunny studied the wreckage, she realized that it wasn’t just trees that had been burned here.
    Some of the ghostly shapes that remained looked like … buildings.
    But these buildings were too small for dragons.
    Sunny landed next to one of the ruins and stared at it in confusion for a moment. Even she was too big to fit through the stone doorways that leaned silently out of the ashes.
    But why would any dragon build houses so small?
    She walked around it, her wings stirring up small tornadoes of ash flakes, and saw that in the center of the burnt area was a kind of open square. She could feel hard, cracked stones meeting her claws under the layers of ash. In the middle of the square she found a collapsed pile of round rocks, and tipped sideways among those was a blackened metal bell about the size of Sunny’s head.
    Somebody definitely built this. Were they keeping some kind of small animal here?
    She turned to look at another of the small stone doorways and found a shape sticking out of the wreckage beside it. When she clawed it out, she realized it was a piece of stone, roughly carved into a shape with two legs, no wings, and holding something pointy over its head.
    Oh! Sunny inhaled sharply, getting a noseful of old soot smell. Scavengers! The statue, if that’s what it was, looked a bit like a drawing from one of the old scrolls about scavengers who attacked dragons for their treasure, waving sharp little toothpick claw things called swords.
    Did scavengers build this place? Can they do things like make bells and carve statues?
    Sunny knew scavengers lived in dens, but she hadn’t thought they could build real buildings like this. She always imagined them clustering in caves or digging out holes to live in, or maybe leaning long sticks together to create shelters, at most. Here there was clearly advanced masonry, deliberate foundation work, and a sort of organized street plan, as far as Sunny could tell.
    Plus the statue … it was crude, but wasn’t it art? What kind of prey made art?
    Maybe I’m misunderstanding all of this. Maybe dragons built this place and kept scavengers here for some reason.
    And then burned it all down? Why would they do that?
    She lifted into the sky, feeling unsettled.
    The dragonets had studied scavengers in their scrolls, but Webs and Kestrel had never brought any back to their mountain caves for eating or practice hunting. Sunny had seen a few small scavengers in Queen Scarlet’s palace, scurrying around under the dragons’ feet at a banquet for the visiting SandWings. But she’d been up in a giant birdcage, on display as a gift for Burn, so she hadn’t gotten a very close look.
    Scavengers were the ones who’d started the dragon war by killing Queen Oasis and stealing all her treasure, leaving Burn, Blaze, and Blister to fight over the throne and the empty treasury. Sunny didn’t know much else about scavengers. She knew they liked shiny things. She’d always imagined scavengers as sort of fierce magpies or squirrels — bigger than either of those, but not much smarter. They couldn’t have very much of a brain if they thought attacking dragons was a good idea, right?
    She glanced down at the destroyed village once more, then turned back to find a spot where she could hide and wait for the NightWings.
    Maybe there’s more to scavengers than we were taught.
    But what happened here?
    Who burned down this scavenger den … and why?

Heat blazed across Sunny’s scales. She burrowed into the sand, feeling the tiny particles drift across her talons and tail. The Obsidian Mirror caught the sunshine as if it were trying to suck all the light into itself, and the black wisps of smoke on its surface looked like small sandstorms.
    “Why wouldn’t we go straight to Burn’s stronghold?” Fierceteeth’s voice demanded.
    “Because she’ll have us slaughtered the moment she sees