“Where’s the dragon?” I asked, because it should have been right in the middle of all that confusion, having caused most of it. And, considering how fast dragon fire burned, it must have been there a moment ago, or the fey would have been ash long before this. The guards had even been spaced out in a circle when we first tuned in, with a suspiciously dragon-shaped hole in the middle of them. But now…

There was nothing.

“What dragon?” Gertie demanded.

“It was there, in the courtyard, right before my party left. What must have been just a minute ago.”

“Hm. Let’s see, shall we?”

I didn’t know what she meant, but abruptly, the falling, blazing fey reappeared, soaring backwards through the air and onto the battlements again. And then the pieces of his disintegrated comrade flew back together, and the two of them went racing around on fire once more, as time reversed itself. But I didn’t have much of a chance to watch them, because—

“There!” I pointed.

“That’s a dragon,” Gertie agreed dryly, not looking nearly as surprised as I’d have expected. Maybe she’d seen one before. Although she shouldn’t have been seeing this one, because it had appeared out of nowhere, just popping into existence.

It was absolutely the same one that had grabbed me, a fact made clear a moment later, when I caught sight of a tiny Mircea and a tinier me running backward through the chaos. Pritkin was nowhere to be seen, but considering how many tricks he had up his sleeve, that didn’t surprise me. And then I spotted him, over by the mechanism for the gate, wrestling with a fey.

“Hm,” Gertie said, obviously seeing the same thing, but not commenting. She did start time forward again, however, at maybe a quarter speed, and also zoomed in a bit. We were still too far away to make out what anybody was saying, but we could see better.

And there was something to see.

We stood there, mouths agape—at least mine was—watching the huge dragon suddenly shiver and morph and shrink—into Aeslinn.

It had happened so fast that we’d missed it the first time, and had almost missed it the second, despite the slower pace. The king’s body had changed with liquid speed, almost too fast for human eyes to track, going back to his fey form and shrinking down to the approximate size of the guards. The speed had helped to hide the transformation, along with the drifting smoke and billowing clouds of dust and mortar that had been stirred up by his recent trip through the castle wall.

“How many forms does he have?” I demanded angrily.

“Shh,” Gertie said, maybe because she was watching what happened after my little group disappeared.