“Are you sure this is right?” Dev asked her, bewildered. “You went to the place where Ashguard’s palace was, right? The purple-and-orange bulbous castle with the—”

“With the gilded roofs,” Astrid said. “Yes. This is the correct location. I’m sure of it. See over there?” She pointed through some tall, thick overgrowth, but Dev couldn’t see anything orange or purple or gilded.

“I… don’t… understand,” Dev said, his voice faltering.

“I’ll show you.” Astrid landed smoothly and took several steps as Dev continued to try to make sense of what had happened here. The dragon pushed through the brush, trampling it down to make a path. When the last trees parted, Dev spied a large building, mostly gutted but with a few enclosed spaces. And five smoke-stained towers with bulbs on top that were definitely not gold. Astrid continued toward it. “This is the palace,” she said gently.

Dev’s lips parted as he stared. When Astrid stopped in front of it, he slid down her wing and stood quietly for a long moment between two of the towers, looking into the deserted covered courtyard before him. No one came out to welcome him home.

Putting a Lid on It

Back in Artimé, above the mansion’s new open-air, sunlit second floor, Quince and Gorgrun circled, ready to torch the place at a moment’s notice, but trying hard to remember that, after accidentally setting the mansion tubes on fire, Florence the warrior trainer had asked them not to burn anything else down if possible.

Additionally, no matter how hard they tried, the ghost dragons couldn’t tell which people running around the mansion and lawn were friends and which were foes. They were a smattering of good and evil. Some were more good than evil, others more evil than good, but the dragons knew full well that that wasn’t an indicator of anything regarding being on the right side of the war. It was never that easy. Even the black-eyed people were a broad variety of levels, so there was no putting humans into groups based on that.

So they decided to refrain from killing anyone unless called upon by the leaders they trusted: Thisbe, Maiven, and the great warrior woman. Instead they looked to help in other ways, like rounding up escapees, or assisting the black-eyed children and Maiven Taveer in hunting down dissenters in the maze of rooms on the second floor below them.

Since the doors to each Artiméan’s personal room were locked, the dragons used their tails like ropes and ladders for the Grimere children, lifting them up over the walls to access the ones hiding in their rooms. And if the children were struck by a spell, Gorgrun and Quince picked them up and put them on their backs for safekeeping until the effects wore off or until someone was able to release the spell. Whenever one of the black-eyed fighters scared up a dissenter and identified the person as such, the dragons either chased them down the stairs to the spell casters working below, or they snatched them up in the curls of their tails or gripped them in their claws. Then they delivered them to the lawn for Simber to take care of.