Fate, this has become a nightmare.

Eventually, we reach a room with nothing but an enormous window, and I’m briefly blinded as coppery late-afternoon light melts over the smooth white walls. I blink a few times. It isn’t a window at all: it’s a wide, open doorway that leads out to a balcony.

We’re dizzyingly high up on the same side of the mountain we came in through, looking over a wide expanse of dazzling white stone. I lean over the carved railing, but I can’t see Isolde and Olani from this angle, just a long drop to the smooth stone floor. To my left, a spiral staircase leads up the side of the building.

I follow Raze up the stairs.

This set winds upward in an even tighter spiral than the ones on the lower floors, with a pitifully inadequate railing. All it would take is one slip, and I’d be done. Raze, unsurprisingly, seems completely unbothered by the height. I guess being able to sprout wings on command will do that.

My heart beats rapidly, and not just from the exertion of all these stairs. We’re so close to the end. Once we get the treasure, once I get paid, once I get home—then everything will be okay. I’ll figure out a way to get rid of Gossamer and to keep Isolde close. I’ll be safe.

“Raze,” I say, an apology stalling on my lips. Then I bump headfirst into his shoulder. We’re at the top of the stairs, and I didn’t even realize.

Raze looks over his shoulder at me, eyes shining. The apology dries in my mouth. “Look.”

I push past him—and then I almost jump right back down the stairs.

A dragon stares back at me, ivory teeth grinning across a face wide enough to swallow me whole.

Not a dragon, I realize, my heart slowly settling back where it belongs. A dragon’s skeleton.

The tall columns of its spiked spine, bleached as white as the stones it rests on, curve in a spiral, resting on a rib cage the size of my parents’ cottage. The structures that once made up its legs have disintegrated over time, but I can still tell that they’re tucked under its body the same way Birch curls up when he’s sleeping.

It died peacefully.

We emerge onto some kind of enclosed rooftop deck, a crescent-shaped room curved around the dome at the building’s top. The only real wall is open to the air, with pointed arches that stretch its whole length. The setting sun paints the whole space in blazing orange.

But it’s hard to focus on the room, what with the enormous dragon skeleton taking up its square footage.

Something glitters in the fading sunlight, glaring against my eyes. I expect a bed of gold and gems, but this dragon’s hoard is bare, except for one glittering thing. It almost blended in, but once I spot the dragon egg, it seems impossible to miss.

I saw a fire opal once, embedded in a brooch Isolde lifted off someone. It looked like it was lit from within, with swirls and specks of color that sparkled and jumped as if alive. It was nothing compared to this.