This made her angry, and for the next year or so, she turned her anger at Draconas and blamed him as the cause of all the trouble. She knew she was being irrational. He wasn’t the cause. Maristara had started it all by seizing that human kingdom and then breeding humans with dragons to produce humans with dragon magic. Lysira didn’t like to admit that part.

At this point, she decided that she didn’t need Draconas. She would find out who the traitor dragon was on her own. Lysira’s investigations were halfhearted, however, and didn’t get her anywhere. The other dragons she questioned were brusque and even rude. They obviously did not want to think about any of this. They were hoping it would all go away. They shut their minds to her and shooed her off.

Which brought Lysira right back to Draconas. She would talk to him. She was determined to talk to him. Boldly, trembling, Lysira reached out her colors to him.

Only to find that the colors of his mind were gone, as though they had been wiped away by a wet sponge.

Lysira crouched in the empty Hall of Parliament and, for the first time, she began to be afraid. Not only for Draconas, but for herself. And all of dragonkind.

Anora felt true regret that she had to kill Draconas.

Of all the walkers who had sacrificed their dragon form to take on the illusion of a human, Draconas had been the best. One of the hazards of being a walker, of living among humans, was that the dragon tended to either become too human—in which case he forgot the reason he’d been sent to walk among humans in the first place—or he remained too dragon—in which case he moped and pouted and whined about having to put up with the inconveniences of being human.

Draconas had been the first to separate the two halves of his being, maintaining a firm division between the dragon and the human. Even now, though it appeared that he was acting for the humans, siding with the humans, and protecting the humans, Anora knew better. Draconas was doing what he was doing because he firmly believed he was helping his own kind.

Admirable. Mistaken, but admirable.

She stood, masked by illusion, inside the building where she’d set her trap for Draconas. Watching him from the shadows, she pondered the idea of letting him live. She could try to explain to him that he was wrong, hoping he’d see reason. She discarded that thought with a regretful sigh.

Draconas’s asset had become his liability. He was working hard to keep humans and dragons at peace, as they had been since the first human had raised himself up off all fours. Draconas would never understand why that peace had to end, and Anora knew he could never be made to understand.

He had to die.