“Is this the highest tower?” Walter said, looking nervously out a narrow window he was passing. “Or the widest?”

  The staircase up which he followed Sea Mist and Larry wound around the massive interior of a tower Walter thought must be at least a hundred feet across. He pressed himself closer to the wall as he continued, the thin wrought iron handrail on the interior side of the stairs giving him little confidence that he would not, with every new step, fall to his death. Beyond the handrail, the dim interior was thick with wooden trusses supporting the massive tower. The wavering light cast by torches mounted along the wall above the staircase did little to illuminate the tangled web of beams, through the middle of which Walter was fairly certain a single massive beam had been running uninterrupted from ground level straight up to their current height and beyond.

  “It must be wide,” Sea Mist called back, “to support the chamber atop it.”

  Walter glanced out another narrow window. “I can’t even see the ground.”

  “It is night,” Leaf said from behind him.

  Walter did not respond.

  They completed another revolution of the tower before Walter could see their destination.

  He stopped and pressed himself against the wall as though it might absorb him. “This isn’t a tower,” he said. “This is a convenient way for you to get to the top of a tree. A really, really big tree.”

  What Walter had thought was a beam he now saw was a massive trunk that in the tower interior above them split into branches that wove through the truss of beams, or vice versa, before passing through what looked to be a wooden floor bigger than the deck of the largest wooden ship.

  “The biggest tree!” Sea Mist called brightly as she approached a landing at the top of the stairs.

  “You can’t imagine the expense,” Larry said conspiratorially over his shoulder. “If not for the free labor, we’d never have been able to have this tree uprooted, brought here, and the tower built around it. It’d have bankrupted the realm.”

  “Is the tree what we’re going to see? Is it a talking tree?” Walter said, knowing as he did that he almost certainly wouldn’t be that lucky.

  “Not the tree,” Sea Mist chirped, “the nest!” She was crossing the landing to a single massive door crafted from dozens of squared-off, vertically oriented tree trunks, beyond which lay whatever was supported by the wooden floor and limbs that passed through it. “Dear?” Sea Mist said.

  Larry nodded and looked around for a place to put down the nearly empty platter. He strode to the handrail that ran the edge of the landing and reached beyond to balance the platter on a beam. But before he’d fully turned back to answer Sea Mist’s request, the platter had tilted and begun a fall into the darkness of the tower’s interior.

  “Oh, drat,” Larry said.

  Everyone on the landing watched the platter disappear. After a few seconds, there was a reverberating crash, presumably as the platter and whatever contents remained in its hurtling vicinity struck one of the truss beams. The sound repeated a moment later, slightly less loud and more distant. And a moment after that. The group stood in silence, listening to the ever more distant clangs. Larry cleared his throat. After a particularly long pause, there was a nearly inaudible impact. “Well, I guess—“ Larry started, but another clang caused him to stop and strain to hear. Three more consecutive impacts followed. The group waited. “Well,” Larry said, before pausing and listening for a moment, “shall we?”

  After a quiet sigh, Sea Mist nodded, and the two approached a smaller door, inset into the much larger door, that neither Walter nor Leaf had previously noticed. Although it represented only a fraction of the larger door, the smaller door still required Sea Mist and Larry’s combined effort to open. Once open wide enough that Larry could squeeze through, Sea Mist motioned them to follow and herself walked through.

  Walter looked to Leaf, who tilted her head for him to follow.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Taking small steps toward the opening, Walter strained to make out what lay beyond. All he could see in the dim light was, below, a brown mat of branches and, above, stars visible through the open-topped chamber.

  “It is a nest…,” he said and stopped just short of the doorway, “a nest I’ve seen before.”

  From within the darkness of the cavernous space, light glinted, and from where he stood frozen, Walter counted four pairs of eyes. Massive heads lowered out of the darkness toward Sea Mist, who, when it reached her, placed a hand on the snout of the largest. The scales were the blue of a deep sea.

  “Dragons,” Walter said quietly.

  “They look the same breed as we espied from the ridge on our trek to the ford,” Leaf said.

  “Not the same breed,” Walter said. “The same dragons.”

  From where she stood just behind him, Leaf squinted uncertainly at the side of Walter’s head. “How can you recognize these dragons some eight years on?”

  “It hasn’t been eight years for me,” Walter said quietly. He raised a shaking finger and pointed at the front right tooth of one of the dragons. The tooth was chipped on one side. “I’ve seen that tooth before.” Walter thought he might be sick. “Over, and over, and over…”

  Walter bolted toward the stairs but immediately pulled up. Nyx sat on the topmost stair. The cheetah did not look inclined to move.

  Walter bolted toward the handrail. Flight had been the lesser of two painful deaths when he had last faced the dragons.

  A lithe but strong hand gripped his suspenders from behind. With a sense of slowed time, Walter felt his momentum wane until he was stationary for a fraction of a second, before being yanked backward. As he was pulled to her, Leaf wrapped him in her free arm.

  “Steady, Wurmsl—,” she stopped herself. “—Walter. Do not do anything rash.” Still squeezing him in one arm, she lifted him enough that his feet lost contact with the landing. She turned and walked through the door to join Larry, where he stood a few yards behind Sea Mist, who was now greeting another of the dragons with her raised palm.

  “We will provide you with a winged mount to hasten your return to Thhia,” Sea Mist said. “I can think of no means at our disposal to spirit you there more qui—,” she broke off as the dragon that had been muzzling her hand suddenly lifted its head a dozen yards into the air.

  The dragon tilted its head first one way, then the other. A forked tongue long enough to wrap round a halfling twice, as Walter knew from experience, darted out, sampling the air. The dragon’s gaze lowered to Walter.

  Walter began to squirm within Leaf’s grip.

  “Steady,” Leaf said.

  The head inched closer to Walter. Once within a few feet, it turned one nostril toward him and sniffed strongly enough that Walter felt the air being sucked from around him, rustling his hair from head to toes. The dragon made a sound so low that Walter felt it more than heard it, and though he had neither heard nor felt that particular noise during his relatively short but very intense time in the tree-top nest that was, for him, only the day prior in real life, he was somehow sure the sound was equivalent to one of appreciation when sitting down at the dinner table.

  If it had been less terrified, the executive portion of Walter’s brain might have remembered Leaf’s twice-given advice and steadied himself. But it was not less terrified, and he acted as quickly and as rashly as was within his abilities.

  Sea Mist, Larry, Walter, and Leaf all flinched as the dragon that had been inspecting Walter reared back and emitted a screech like metal against metal. Walter covered his ears, his raised arms hugging Leaf’s arm to him as he did.

  The three other dragons looked at their enraged kin for a moment before they turned narrowed eyes to Walter. In quick succession, their eyes widened and all three gave similar screeches, their combined wrath enough to be felt through the wooden floor of the nest.

  After more than a minute, the beasts’ cries trailed off, though they looked no less displeased. Sea Mist and Larry looked at Walter, who was still held tight against Leaf’s chest.

  “I have never seen them behave such,” Sea Mist said, her face pale.

  “What did you do?” Leaf said quietly.

  Walter had not yet moved his hands, and when he responded, his words were the quiet of someone whose own voice is loud within their covered ears. “I don’t think they can attack me if they’re in the Colony.”

  Leaf slowly relaxed her arm, and Walter slid down her cloak and found footing. He uncovered his ears.

  A snarl from the landing outside the door caused Walter to flinch again, and the dragons responded to Nyx’s feline complaint with another round of screeching that sent Walter’s hands back to his ears.

  When the new round of fury died down, Walter again uncapped his ears.

  “Having joined your colony,” Leaf said, voice still low, “against, I would once more point out, their choice, does not seem to have improved their disposition toward you.”

  “It has not,” Walter said.

  “Can you think of no better solution to managing Nyx and the dragons, let alone the trunk of undead, while you must bear their companionship?”

  “I cannot,” Walter said.

  “Do you know how to release them from the colony, should that become the clearly better choice?”

  “I do not,” Walter said.

  “I intended,” Sea Mist said, her voice carrying none of its usual warmth, “to send you with a single mount, which could easily carry your entire party to Thhia in a matter of hours. If the four are now bound to you, it seems we must send you with all four if we are to stand by our agreement.”

  “I’m sorry,” Walter said. “I would prefer if we didn’t have to do that.”

  “So,” said Sea Mist, “would they.”