Simber was still upset with Aaron. But he cared about him too, as well as Fifer and the rest of them who were camped out on the Island of Legends. And now that Thisbe had so bravely gone with the Revinir, Simber had to spend some of his emotions worrying about her, which left less anger to express toward Aaron.

Karkinos had become something of a respite from the chaos growing on Artimé’s shores, and a few others from the old rescue team occasionally snuck over for a day to get away from the noise and help with the brainstorming. But whenever Simber tried to sneak away to see how the banished ones were doing, Frieda always found out and called him back. He began visiting at night instead, when Frieda was asleep, but the problem then was that Aaron and Fifer were exhausted. They preferred to work on their plans in daylight to conserve their magical highlighter components.

And work they did, for as many hours a day as they could think straight. Knowing the new, improved seek spell would be the first thing they’d need when Thisbe finally contacted them, Florence commissioned Fifer, Thatcher, and Clementi to help Samheed come up with it. Samheed, still skeptical of Aaron, was glad not to be stuck working with him. His goal was to turn the seek spell into a broader communication device using Samheed’s idea of a magical pencil and paper component. The problem for them was the size of it—the prototype of a notepad took up way too much space in the component vest, and so far they hadn’t been able to figure out how to reduce the size while still leaving enough room to write a note.

“Plus we’d also want to be able to provide Thisbe with a way to respond if possible,” said Clementi. “Like by including a pencil.”

“I don’t think there’s a way to do that,” said Fifer. She’d never heard of any spell that would be able to provide the recipient with a fresh component. “That would be an entirely new spell we’d have to create on top of this one. Like a delivery spell or something.” She frowned, deep in thought. They kept working.

Aaron, Lani, and Ibrahim doggedly put their heads together to come up with a way to stop the dragon-woman who was covered in protective scales and able to use mind control to surround herself with more dragons. And, as before, they continued having a terrible time of it. “She’s just too powerful,” Ibrahim muttered now and then.

“There’s got to be something,” Lani said firmly. “We’ve never not been able to come up with something. We just need to think harder. Can’t we at least cut off the mind control somehow? Then we’d only have to destroy the Revinir and hopefully not worry about the other dragons.”