She was back in human form, cleaned up and wearing a shift dress made of unmelting snow that one of her sisters had conjured for her. They were sitting together on the steps of his mother’s throne, watching the human cleaning staff go to pieces over the wreckage in the throne room. Estella’s body, thankfully, had already been quietly burned while the Heartstrikers had been deciding what to do with their clan, though Julius wasn’t sure if the quick funeral was a family tradition, or if the Daughters of the Three Sisters just couldn’t wait to be rid of her.
“Bethesda’s the one I’m worried about,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the closed door to Bethesda’s private apartments. “She’s… upset.” And almost certainly planning his downfall.
“She’s probably just in there hiding her treasures from the revolutionaries,” Katya said with a shrug. “Old dragons don’t take kindly to change, and tonight has been nothing but.”
With regime changes for two of the most powerful dragon clans in the worldandthe death of one of the three dragon seers, that was putting it mildly. “She’s not going to roll over on this. Bob forced her into signing today. He’s holding the seal over her head to keep her in line, but we have to unseal her sometime, and there’s no way she’s going to keep playing along after that. The moment we sit down on that council, she’s going to start trying to take over again.”
“Naturally,” Katya said. “You took away her power. Of course she’s going to do everything she can to take it back. You’ll just have to make sure that you and whichever Heartstriker gets the final council spot can work together well enough to stop her.”
That was exactly what Julius was afraid of. “So,” he said, changing the subject to something less terrifying. “Have you found Svena yet?”
“No,” Katya said, her face falling. “We came here hoping to reinstate Svena as clan head. We weren’t actually planning to kill Estella, but when I saw my chance, I took it.”
He arched an eyebrow. “And the whole ‘I am Katya, bow before me!’ part was also spontaneous?”
“If I do the work, I’m not going to refuse the reward,” she said primly. “Who do you think I am? You?”
Julius made a face, and she laughed. “Honestly, though, satisfying as it was to finally see Estella fall, I’m handing this mess off to Svena as soon as possible. I’ve spent my whole life running from my sisters. I have no idea how to lead them. Svena was always the one who did all the work.”
She glanced over at the balcony, where the moon was already rising over the desert. “I’ve already told my sisters I’m abdicating to Svena, and they’re fine with it. I think they’d take anyone sane at this point. But no matter how hard we look, we can’t find our sister anywhere. All our spells turn up nothing. It’s like she and Ian both just vanished.”
Knowing Ian, Julius had his own ideas about that. He didn’t think Katya would find them comforting, though, so he kept his mouth shut. One of her sisters, he couldn’t tell which at this point, was already coming over to ask her more questions anyway, so he wished Katya good luck and made himself scarce. He was about to head downstairs in search of where the staff had stashed Marci when Bob shouted his name.
That was a surprise. The last he’d seen, the seer had taken the contract and his pigeon and vanished into his hoarded warehouse of a room. But apparently he was now back, running across the throne room toward Julius with Black Reach following behind him at a stately pace. “Julius!” he cried, panting. “Good, I found you. You have to meet my guest before he leaves.”
That struck him as a little odd, but it wasn’t every day you got to meet one of the three dragon seers, so Julius put out his hand. “It’s an honor to meet you, Black Reach.”
The dragon peered down at the offered handshake like he wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
“The Black Reach agreed to help us as payment for a favor I’m going to do him in the future,” Bob explained as Julius awkwardly lowered his hand. “He’s about to go home, but he wanted to talk to you first.”
“Sure,” Julius said, trying not to sound as nervous as he felt. “What about?”
“Nothing in particular,” the old dragon replied in his strange, too deep voice. “Just that I am pleased with the path your clan has chosen today. It is nice to finally find a dragon who isn’t bent on repeating the mistakes of the past.” He smiled, which somehow only made him look more intimidating. “I see why my brother helped you.”
In the space of those seven words, Julius’s stomach shrank to the size of a marble. “T-thank you,” he stuttered at last. “I’ll try to keep it that way.”
The Black Reach inclined his head a fraction before turning back to Bob. “We shall meet three more times, Seer of the Heartstrikers. See that you don’t waste them.”
Bob smiled wide like this was a perfectly normal thing to say, waving goodbye and calling out well-wishes as the dragon turned and walked out of the room. Julius, on the other hand, was barely keeping himself together. “Bob,” he whispered as soon as the old seer reached the throne room doors. “Do you know—”
“I know,” Bob said through his plastered-on grin. “Shut up. He can still hear you.”
Julius clamped his mouth shut, but that didn’t stop him from fidgeting nervously the whole ten minutes it took the Black Reach to walk down the hallway and into the elevator at the end. When the elevator doors closed, though, he couldn’t hold it any longer. “That’s Dragon Sees Eternity!” he blurted out. “The guardian of the future!”
“I am well aware,” Bob said, dropping his fake smile at last. “Trust me, I didn’t want to involve him, but he was the only thing in the world big enough to scare Estella into wasting her time.”
Julius cringed. “Did she know what he was?”
“Probably,” Bob said with a shrug. “We all figure it out in time. There are only ever three dragon seers alive at any one time: a male, a female, and the Black Reach. That should make things pretty cramped—the future’s not a big place when you’re dealing with competing seers—but whenever we look into what could be, the Black Reach’s hand is nowhere to be seen.”
That didn’t make sense to Julius. “So is he not a seer then?”
“Quite the opposite,” Bob replied. “He’s the greatest of us all. It’s taken me centuries just to learn how to spot his movements, and even when I do, I still can’t see why. He’s clearly operating on a completely different level from the rest of us, and once you add in a basic knowledge of dragon history, it’s not that hard to guess the Black Reach isn’t your usual grumpy old dragon.” He fell silent after that, and then, almost like an afterthought, he added. “He’s also the first seer we see.”
“What does that mean?” Julius asked.
“The first vision of the future any seer sees is their own death. As you might imagine, it’s a traumatic experience for a young dragon, definitely not the sort of thing you talk about. But even if you tell no one, the Black Reach always shows up the next day. That’s his test. If you recognize him, that means you’re a true seer.”
