“Thank you,” Chenda said, and we all turned back to our books. “Three days. It seems wrong to be able to move anywhere so quickly.”

“Imagine going back to the Fallen Isles with a fleet of ships like this.” Ilina looked up. “We could save so many people.”

“And then what? Float on the ocean for a thousand years?” Chenda shook her head. “Sorry. It just seems so impossible to believe there will be anything to go back to.”

Gerel touched Chenda’s hand, and the Dawn Lady’s shoulders relaxed a little. Then Gerel lowered her voice, addressing everyone around the table. “Anything yet?”

It was difficult to speak freely with our new “friends” over there, but Aaru had built up a wall of soft silence, so that our voices were muffled but not completely muted. It might have been a little suspicious, but they hadn’t said anything about it. Yet.

I shook my head. “Their spelling and the shapes of their letters makes it hard to read.”

Chenda took the library’s copy of The Book of Shadow and flipped through it, sighing wistfully. “At least these are right.”

“What if we can’t find anything?” Zara propped her elbows on the table and hunched forward. “I mean, all the histories of the Fallen Isles, and all the books we have about dragons, and there’s nothing about the first dragon in any of them, right?”

Everyone looked at Ilina. “I haven’t read anything about it, but if Mira thinks it exists . . .”

LaLa and Crystal chittered from their perches atop one of the table lamps—lamps being a generous term for simple arcs of black metal with light sigils carved into them. They made excellent dragon stands, at any rate, and it was nice to have light directly over the books.

“The dragons think it exists,” I said, mostly teasing, but it was true.

“Even if we do find something,” Zara said, “who’s to say we’ll be able to get it in time? The empire is immense.”

“The city we’re visiting is called Sunder,” Hristo rumbled. “It can’t be a coincidence.”

Gerel shook her head. “The Sundering took place all up and down the coast of the mainland. There are probably half a dozen cities and towns with some variation of sunder in their name. And Little Fancy is right: the empire is immense, and just because the first dragon’s bones might have been here two thousand years ago doesn’t mean they still are. Empires aren’t good about leaving things the way they were. Things get moved around. That’s the whole point of conquering: changing things to suit one group’s preferences.”

“I know,” I said. “And it’s just as possible that the bones were never discovered, and now they’re buried under a thousand layers of rock.”

“Even if they do know where the bones are, how do we get them?” Zara scratched her nose. “Assuming the bones are real, and assuming they’re not lost or broken or stolen by bandits, and assuming they’re somewhere we can reach and still get back home in time for the eclipse—”