Thisbe flushed and smiled back. “You could try it out on me,” she said, holding out her arms. “Though I quite like my scales. I feel wiser and more intuitive with them. I wouldn’t want to lose that extra sense—they seem to stand up when something awful is about to happen.” She gazed at the flat scales on her arm, twisting it to catch the light and thinking about the proposed spell. “The Revinir’s whole body is different now,” she mused. “Much larger. Removing her scales might help, but we’d still have to have something lethal that would work on someone several times larger than our typical enemy.”

They batted other ideas back and forth a while longer, but Thatcher and Thisbe kept shaking their heads at every suggestion. The Revinir’s size, strength, and firepower seemed to make her impossible to beat.

At one point during the session Thisbe grew quiet, deep in thought. Every kind of magical weapon they were coming up with was physical, but the dragon-woman was physically indestructible. Was there some other way to get to her? Thisbe contemplated the time she’d spent with the woman. Was there anything she could remember that seemed like a weakness? Any other way to beat her?

But Thisbe couldn’t put a finger on anything in particular, at least not at the moment. Eventually the group members parted one by one, each having some other commitment to work on, until only Thisbe and Aaron remained.

Unlike Alex, Aaron and Thisbe had always gotten along pretty well. “How are you doing?” Thisbe asked him. They hadn’t talked about Alex’s death very much lately.

Aaron’s expression softened. “It hurts,” he said. “Pretty badly sometimes.”

Thisbe’s eyes welled up. She felt more for Aaron’s pain than for her own grief over Alex’s death. That seemed wrong too, but she couldn’t change it.

They talked a little more, and then Aaron turned the conversation back to the Revinir. “I’m not sure what you’re thinking about as far as attacking the Revinir,” he said seriously. “I know you believe you need to go back there. And I respect that you feel that way. But I’m also very scared for you. I don’t want to lose another sibling.”

Thisbe looked up at her brother’s tender words, but she felt threatened by them too—was he about to forbid her to go? Thisbe had been dreading this conversation, but she was going to be very firm with him. “You won’t lose me,” she said quietly. “Not to death, anyway. There’s no way she’ll outsmart me. I’m already planning.” She hesitated. “But I just want you to know that if you try to keep me from going, you might never see me again.” She surprised herself with the ultimatum.