“I told you! I am Lysira.” She sounded stern and thoroughly put out, like his old tutor. “And this is not proper behavior!”

Marcus had never liked his tutor, and so he ignored her. Like a drunken reveler—or an escaped prisoner, drunk on freedom— Marcus capered into and out of the minds of the dragons. Naked, shouting his defiance, shouting his adoration, he wrapped his nakedness in the colors of their amazement and danced from dragon to dragon. He glided into their minds with the elegance of a dancer, doing a turn, singing a song with the colors of his own mind, then gliding swiftly out. He played tag with them, hide-and-go-seek, dodging and darting, evading and avoiding, all the while laughing wildly at the sheer joy of it all.

Marcus was a child again, a lunatic child, and his soul remembered what his brain worked hard to try to forget—the beautiful, dazzling, alien world of wondrous, magical beasts, whose thoughts wove silken tapestries, using the stars for needles and the sunbeams for thread. This was the reason that, long ago, he had traded madness for sanity, traded the lonely, isolated, shut-off, locked-up-tight gray world of humans for the dreams of dragons.

The dragons soon got over their shock that a human had actually managed to invade their minds. They were horrified and angry, just like his parents had been. He knew how that worked. It made him powerful.

Some of the dragons tried to catch him. Another dragon, a young female, sought to protect him. They all ended up in a bitter argument, and Marcus was forgotten or shoved aside. The flames of their passion roiled around him, but could not touch him.

Marcus kept it up, made himself a nuisance.

The young female fluttered about after him. “Listen to me, Human! You must come to your senses. Draconas sent me to warn you—”

“Draconas!” Marcus called. “Where are you, you old fart? Still alive? I should have known it. I escaped, by the way. No thanks to you.”

He laughed and stumbled about in a dazzling, brilliant fog.

And then the fog shredded, torn apart by a dragon’s claw.

The eyes that had found him in the cave found him again.

Marcus had stumbled into the mind of Grald.

No pretty colors here. Steel blue bars slammed down around Marcus, trapping him. He hurled himself against Grald’s mind, trying to free himself, but the dragon held him fast.

“As long as you are here, Prince Marcus,” the dragon said, “you can see what I see, feel what I feel. When next you meet your brother, you’ll be meeting me.”