She felt herself growing tired, the energy and excitement she had felt earlier sapped by time’s passage and her emotional and physical exhaustion. She wondered how long she had been flying. She wondered how much farther she had to go.

Once, she found herself falling asleep, rocked by the motion of the dragon’s body, lulled into a dangerous drowsiness, and she jerked awake just in time to keep from sliding off the dragon’s neck. It scared her enough that she vowed angrily she wouldn’t allow it to happen again.

Ahead, the sun was dropping toward the horizon, and its rays were bathing the slopes of the mountains and the rippled surface of the foothills in shimmering gold.

Then she heard the first faint sounds of the battle she had come to find and, shouting into the wind, she urged the dragon to go faster.

SQUINTING INTO THE BLAZE of sunlight west from out of the blackness of the shadowed corridors of Aphalion Pass, Xac Wen stared in disbelief. He had seen what was flying toward him, and he still couldn’t believe it. He knew it was the dragon—that it had to be the dragon—yet he still kept waiting for it to be something else.

Then it screamed, and right then and there Xac Wen quit trying to find reasons not to believe. That was a dragon, all right! He began yelling wildly for Tasha and Tenerife. He didn’t know where they were or even where he was at this point. Around him, the battle had come to a standstill while the participants stared at the phenomenon overhead.

Then, abruptly, impossibly, Xac Wen saw something else.

“Shades!” he whispered to himself.

He looked again, harder this time, making certain of what he was seeing.

“Tasha!” he cried out anew, repeating the name over and over until all at once the larger of the Orullian brothers was yanking him about by the front of his tunic.

“Quiet down, you little banshee!” The big man was streaked with dirt and blood and his face was a mask of rage. He shook the boy for good measure. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Look!” He pointed skyward. “Do you see it?”

“I see it. It’s that dragon again. As if we needed something else to deal with.”

“No, not the dragon! Look closer. Up by its head!”

Tasha squinted into the glare of the sunset, his hand slowly loosening its grip on the boy’s tunic.

“Phryne,” he breathed softly. “That’s Phryne!”