Zaraduck6: No, I'm not Muslim, I've just picked up the knowledge that the Hijri calendar—excluding Iran—is lunar, and used it as an example.

A/N: So, the POV is going to alternate between chapters; odd numbered are the ones with Glory and even the ones with Jambu. I have the ones with Jambu fairly well planned out. I have hardly any plan for these Glory chapters. Something's going to happen Deathbringer-wise, but I'm also constrained by canon and in canon they're still not in a real formal relationship by the time of book seven, so... I don't know. God help me. Also, thank you all for your patience. I barely got through writing this one alive.

1: Bubble Hour

"Alright. Let's run through this one last time."

Facts and ideas swam in Queen Glory's head as she kept her balance perching uneasily close to the edge of a high walkway. The sun set ablaze her nigh-monocoloured green scales, which had spread further and grown brighter than usual from her great concentration in keeping them green. Across from her, nearly on the other edge of the walkway (which was fairly wide), was a dark blue RainWing, Orchid, staring down at her shadow—it was easier to face than the Queen herself. Between the two and off to the side stood—not sat as the other two had—the final point in the triangle, the Queen's aptly-named bodyguard Deathbringer. His eyes stayed raptly on his sovereign.

Glory continued, a rough summary of all the myriad words Orchid had said having been conjured in her head. It was a tough script to compile, her chest burning so—while her heart intended to beat as fast as it could, Glory kept the rhythm of her diaphragm tempered during the conversation, and like a petulant dragonet her heart had reacted to this refusal to lend it air by thrashing around and trying to hurt her. "Three red- or orange-scaled strangers visited—"

"SkyWings," Deathbringer specified.

Glory acknowledged this deduction with a nod. "—and asked you for tranquilising brew and blowguns."

Orchid let out a quiet sound of confirmation. Its volume was tempered by shame, Glory could tell, and while she wanted to comfort Orchid as the blue on her scales grew deeper, she did need to finish summarising.

"You had neither of these with you, of course, and directed them to other dragons about finding them. For the brew, you told them that Tualang may have some—we've already questioned him—and you did not know where to find spare blowguns. However, you told them that Jambu might know. Within three hours, Jambu went missing."

Another tiny snippet of noise came from Orchid's mouth, this time barely recognisable as an mhm. A few seconds passed before she suffixed this with a louder "..sorry."

"It's... fine," Glory failed to reassure her despite her desire to. It was quite the haughty task when she herself was full of worry—the way it shot out of her mouth, quickly and brashly, made very few things seem fine. On the contrary, it had been infected with a nearly disciplinary tone.

"Alright, do we have everything?" Deathbringer tried to move things along, past the uncomfortable set of feelings that had just been exchanged.

I still don't see any reason for SkyWings to kidnap him, Glory thought rather than answering Deathbringer, as though he would read her mind and realise that no, they did not have everything. A deeply flawed mechanism in her brain spun straw into a fluid made of ideas, most of it splashing onto the floor rather than neatly into the bin that had been set up for it. All I can think of is that they wanted a source of blowguns, or information on how to make them, and decided that Jambu was perfect for the job? But they didn't take Tualang...

Time was running out for the prospect of this pause staying of a normal and expected length, and Glory needed to come up with a conclusion to these thought before answering Deathbringer. Before she could construct one, however, one was shot into her brain like a dart, its arrival coinciding with a sudden burning sensation in her eyes.

What if they'll try to?

This idea was worrying, enough to possibly warrant a no to Deathbringer's question, but at the same time standing on four very flimsy poles. Taking a break from working the idea mill for a short moment, such that it wasn't strained to failure, she stared across and slightly down into Orchid's eyes as they antsily motioned to the treetops overhead, as eager as the rest of her to be home with Mangrove and done with all this.

She needs a rest, she concluded from the short observation. I don't think she'll be of too much more help, not knowing anything about SkyWings or kidnapping in this SkyWing-related kidnapping. Water was absorbed and spat out by her lungs, filling her chest with a heaviness and an odd wet feeling, but she paid it little mind. She won't disappear as soon as stop talking to her; she'll be here if we need her again, she reassured herself and drained the water through a hole in her torso. Whether this was true or not was another matter, but worrying about it was hardly so important right now.

"Yes, that's all," she said, taking her place by Deathbringer's side. She began working the great mechanism again, turning a wheel to unclear effect. Should we try to protect Tualang, just in case? Maybe use him as bait? It seems like a—

"Wait."

A weak section of board creaked underneath Orchid's weight as she took a step towards the pair of investigators, the sound sending a pebble flying into the workings of Glory's capricious machine and forcing her to listen to what she was saying.

"I just remembered," she put forth her final assistance at the same time she put forth her leg, "When we were talking..." A premature breath escaped her lungs. "I asked their names, but only one of them told theirs to me. He said it was 'Siyayo.'"

That is not a SkyWing name.

Such was Glory's immediate reaction; it took about a second for the other half to squeeze through the hole in the wall where ideas not manufactured by the mill sought audience. ...that's not even a RainWing name!

"I don't know if it'll help, but..."

A thousand questions ran through Glory's mind about this bizarre name, and they were all sliced in half with a woodcutter's ax as she drew on her prior wisdom and acknowledged that Orchid had no answer to any of them. They were for Deathbringer and, had he not disappeared, Jambu, two dragons she could fairly easily bounce ideas off of; Jambu's usefulness was as limited as his perspective, but she would be damned if she said he wasn't weirdly creative at times, and Deathbringer was obviously Deathbringer. These questions, notably, were not for this poor fruit-picker who just wanted to be home.

"Thank you," Glory recognised the vague potential helpfulness of this last addition. "And thank you for finding the time to answer our questions."

Orchid responded with a nod, a replacement for closing greetings in this situation where the typical formalities were not applicable. Glory hopped off of the boardwalk and dove down to a far lower level, followed closely behind by her bodyguard. In the cold shadow of the bridges far above them, Glory took her place opposite Deathbringer. Now was the time of debate, of these ten thousand ideas finally being sold at the market. Just the two of them were party to these results, excepting a colony of woodlice that had taken residence in the wood rarely trampled beneath their talons. Glory clenched her teeth—her heart had not calmed and her face was still a small bit burnt. Use of the idea mill came with a price.

"You think that last bit was anything?" the NightWing asked.

"That wasn't his name," Glory said, so certain of this fact that she had began the first syllable before Deathbringer had ended his last. "That SkyWing was lying. It's his idea of a RainWing name."

"Well, they sound pretty easy to identify as 'not RainWings,'" Deathbringer replied, "so it doesn't make a ton of sense that one of them would try to pretend they were."

Glory entered for the briefest moment the mindset of these SkyWings. Whatever helps, right? she tried to re-think one of their thoughts—it would be best, wouldn't it, if they could somehow trick whoever witnesses them into thinking they're RainWings. She was about to voice this to Deathbringer, but hit a hitch; wouldn't the RainWings, she imagined the kidnappers to think, notice if one of us called themself by a name that didn't exist? The rotating list of names wasn't common knowledge, but she had a feeling it would be equally as strange as if she walked into a SkyWing village and asserted that Gweerg was a common SkyWing name.

"They could've been just trying to cover every base," she started to voice this series of thoughts with her incorrect presumption, "but why would they take the risk, is the thing? They would've known that if they did somehow make Orchid think they were RainWings—or at least that the one of them was—she would know that Siyayo wasn't a RainWing name. Well, they should've known in any case."

Having all three of them talk to Orchid, and only one even attempt to disguise themselves; it's as though they're trying to leave a trail. Brief mystery scroll-esque thoughts budded off of this one, but none of them blossomed. This did not point to a greater conspiracy; this pointed to incompetence.

"They think you dumb, is why." Deathbringer's blunt words severed the immature buds from the stalk. "'They're just RainWings,'" he continued, doing a slightly better job at reconstructing the thought process of the kidnappers than his sovereign had (and also a voice), "'They hardly pay attention to themselves, lounging about all day, let only anyone else. We can just call ourselves RainWings and throw a name out there, any name, and they'll be too stupid to tell the difference."

A slight twang was released in Glory's heart, the tension in her heartstrings releasing in a high note, as Deathbringer made reference to the hegemonic belief in RainWing uselessness that she'd had to deal with so unbearably often only three or so months ago—which had threatened her very life on more than one occasion. Once he had finished, she pondered his impression. The intellectual aspect of it, at least; she paid little mind to the voice, now matter how amusing it was.

If Orchid hadn't noticed they were SkyWings, she thought, would she have noticed that Siyayo wasn't a RainWing name? A frozen sheet of idea fluid was suddenly subjected to high heat, melting it back into liquid for inspection. The final step of this process, which was slow but not difficult, involved draining the resultant liquid down into a hole, where it moved a water wheel that, cyclically, helped to work the mill. I don't think she would have, Glory concluded once this work was done but before any really good ideas had been generated. I was wrong. Me and the ex-Queens are the only ones who know the list of names, and it sounds enough like a RainWing name that anyone who didn't know the list would... yeah, they would just figure it was a normal name.

"That and their own experience with not being RainWings," Deathbringer stopped the voice, having exhausted its rhetorical function and been in obvious discomfort while doing it—it had been a very high voice, like a baby bird. "They wouldn't know about the list, of course, and while there's only so many SkyWing names most dragons wouldn't know every single one—so, if you wanted to come up with a SkyWing name and didn't know any, you probably could just throw something out that sounds like a one and most dragons would believe that it was. They wouldn't think it'd work any different for RainWing names." His shoulders rose and his wings unfurled in a gesture of whatever, of acquiesence. "And you gotta admit that Siyayo does sound like a RainWing name."

"Sure, sure," Glory accepted Deathbringer's judgement, having already noted the RainWingishness Siyayo carried with it. "I'll admit, I think I was wrong; Orchid wouldn't have known that Siyayo wasn't a RainWing name. It really does sound like one."

The words sound like one echoed off of the walls, their volume increasing and lighting up magical crystals that lined the walls of an ancient cave. They travelled deeper in, illuminating more of the winding passages. Glory followed them. Like a bloodhound, she followed them.

They led her, after so many trials and so much error, to a grand chamber, draconic-made, in the centre of the system of caverns. Nothing remained in the vastness but a pedestal with a single slip of paper atop it. Glory picked it up, and, to its instructions, spoke the words written on it aloud.

"Wait," she began, "if they knew what RainWing names sounded like, surely they would know some RainWing names. Why wouldn't they use some of those?"

"Well, they must have not wanted to risk using a name that someone else already had." Deathbringer spoke smoothly, as though he'd been expecting this objection.

"But wouldn't they figure that the 'dumb RainWings' wouldn't notice? That seems to have been their entire philosophy—they were incredibly careless, really: all of them talked to Orchid despite only one of them needing to, and only one of them even tried to disguise themself as a RainWing. That only went as far as a name, when they could have easily gone further. Tualang said that the one who visited him tried to steal the tranquilising brew, but managed to knock over all the cups while trying to take just the one. They were banking hard on nobody noticing as they did things clumsily and brazenly, because RainWings aren't supposed to notice just about anything. They would totally have figured that nobody would notice if they just called themselves by names they had heard in a scroll somewhere."

Glory was proud of this argument, but she felt a bit unguarded now—she'd torn down the only clear motive as to why that SkyWing had called himself Siyayo. Maybe it was a SkyWing name, and he was just being honest? That sounded a little too unwise even for these clowns.

Deathbringer paused a moment before attempting to solve the shortage of explanations that presently affected the market, unready for the demolition of the small tower of wooden blocks he had been putting together and slow to pick them back up.

"Maybe the reason they didn't cover their tracks was because the kidnapping wasn't intended?" He sounded almost excited as he laid out the possibility. "Maybe it was an accident; maybe Jambu was just a witness to an unrelated crime?"

Glory had a sudden realisation as she tried to fit a newly-acquired round peg into an ancient square hole. Moons... We've been presuming it's a kidnapping, but it could just be a murder.

"If that's the case, then this isn't a kidnapping; he's certainly dead," Glory said condescendingly, as though Deathbringer had taken some position which totally outruled the possibility of Jambu's death. This was better than the alternative, which was to say it slowly and deeply—to accomodate the weight in her lungs that had manifested with the realisation.

Deathbringer's expression soured a bit, but it wasn't immediately obvious why; he had to have considered that Jambu might be dead at some point, so that couldn't have been what was bothering him. Maybe something more personal?

I can't know, Glory acknowledged the treachery of empathy, but either he hears my... tone, and he's concerned about my stress, or he thinks that I really am being casual about Jambu maybe dying. She considered asking him about it, or just telling him that she was legitimately worried about the possibility, but she decided it would end up too awkward. It was sweet of him to consider, though.

"Yeah, maybe we should let this possibility alone for a little while." A strand of sunlight briefly lit Deathbringer's face, and Glory wished that some would hit her too. They didn't need to stay down here, come to think of it, but moving would be a hassle. It wasn't that cold. "Just until we've explored the other motives. Speaking of, do you have any ideas regarding that?"

"I was thinking," Glory answered, turning her head away from the higher walkways she could easily move to if she really did want some sunlight, "what if they think he can make blowguns?"

Deathbringer made a passive grunt vaguely recognisable as a request for Glory to continue.

"They needed blowguns and tranquilising brew—I guess they already have the darts. What if they need a larger supply than they found, if they found any, and thought that Jambu could make them—or tell them how?"

"And this concept comes from where, exactly?"

Glory had to sever and tie back together some vines to make her answer work, but overall the gist of her construction remained the same. "They saw Tualang first, and he does make tranquilising brew. They must have thought that Jambu, being the dragon Orchid directed them to, likewise made blowguns."

"No, no." Deathbringer shook his head. "I mean, what's prompted you to think that this might be their motive?"

"...hm." Glory suddenly felt acutely aware of the gnarled path her thoughts had been taking during the investigation. Such a formal word, that, for what amounted to the Great Guessing Competition of 5,011. "Desperation, I guess."

Deathbringer let a small laugh escape his lungs, causing Glory some fantastic anxiety about his looking down on this show of weakness before its true nature was revealed. "Same here," he said, dispelling Glory's reality-unattached insecurity, "same here. That's the short of it for just about every thought there is."

"Speaking of," Glory asked, "what about you? What's your explanation for all of this?"

Deathbringer did not answer for a moment five seconds long, taking two gasps of air in that time as though he were about to start speaking and only actually starting to speak after the second. The first had been at the very beginning of the pause—whatever was in his mind wasn't as easy to word as he thought it was.

"I think they just kidnapped him for ransom. Might've known he was your brother, might not've." Deathbringer did not give the concept much prestige despite arguing for it, attaching no grave or grandiose words or tone to his sentences. "They thought," he reinvigorated the voice, "'Nobody'll notice if we take anyone. RainWings only care about their naps and their fruits, they won't see us coming and they won't see us going.'"

A small tremor of anger tightened Glory's chest as she imagined the kidnappers thinking as such. That had been the rationale for the NightWing abductions and her own, and both times it had worked out swimmingly. Never in a million years did she want it proven right again—though the state of her tribe made this feat difficult, to say the least.

Deathbringer continued the voice—his point had not yet been made in the slightest. "'Only the families'll notice'—they wouldn't know that you don't have families—'and then they'll pay us handsomely to get them back.'" The voice ended again, another baby bird leaving the nest. His typical ravenish squawk replaced it. "They thought it would be a risk-free reward-middling way to earn treasure. 'Course, they didn't know that things don't work that way in the rainforest."

Glory looked towards the hexagonally shaped tower of facts in the corner of the room in which she worked the idea mill. The knick-knacks she'd been making out of hardened idea fluid were designed to add to the tower, but this gift she'd received from Deathbringer—it fit the fact tower into it. It was a solid wooden box, wider than it was tall, and in the middle was a hexagon-shaped slot. She placed it overtop the tower and, as designed, the facts went through the slot. It seemed perfect.

Except for the bottom fact. It was still hexagonal, but it was larger than the others. You would need to amend the box for the opening to be wider and then narrow into the standard fact shape for it to fit perfectly. She didn't have the tools on hand to do this, so she decided to hand it back to Deathbringer and notify him of the design flaw.

"If getting blowguns and tranquilising brew wasn't the entire reason for their visit—if they just wanted to ransom Jambu as you said—then why'd they bother taking them at all?"

"Maybe they needed them for some unrelated reason and decided to turn two trips into one." Deathbringer flashed a smile of unseriousness, but his tone suggested he thought this was a legitimate possibility, no matter how silly.

Glory focused on the latter clue to his intention. Again, she thought that was too imbecilic for anyone above the age of four to think a good idea. "No, no way," she objected. "It would be way too stupid of them to show themselves like that—to link themselves to this crime just for convenience's sake."

"You're the one who said they were careless."

"Not this careless."

Glory caught sight of a flock of black bushbirds swooping down next to them before returning to the sky. She could hear snakeskin being cured somewhere up above them—there were four or so walkways attached to this group of trees, and they were still on the lowest. The sounds of the rainforest, while relaxing, did not help her think.

"Perhaps they thought they couldn't subdue him normally," she said, "and had to shoot him with a tranquilising dart?"

"He's not that strong."

"Yeah, but what if they thought he was, for some reason?" Glory noticed that she was trying to fix Deathbringer's box not by actually changing it, but rather by creating more decorations and additions for the tower of facts. Or maybe that he was too weak, that they'd break his neck, she'd intended to say, but it was just another doily to put on the tower. The solution lied elsewhere. "That's probably not it."

"Or they thought he was flimsy, and he'd kill himself struggling..." Deathbringer, his volume tempered by the fruitlessness of this approach, quietly restated what Glory had thought.

And that was it.

That was her last idea. The mill had broken down. Glory closed her eyes, the feeling in her head like if her brain had suddenly been replaced with a bundle of sloth fur. Fruitless, fruitless—that was the word her sloth brain had given to everything she'd thought of so far. She considered herself quite good at thinking about things; about courses of action and about other dragons, most notably and with the most ferocity, but she thought about a true multitude of other things as well. Rarely was there a moment that she wasn't thinking about something.

And it wasn't like there was nothing to think about here; there were scores and scores of facts to ponder, the tower growing ever higher. Glory's problem was personal—it's not that she couldn't put in the effort to put the pieces together, she was just born the kind of dragon who didn't want to. Admit it, she demanded of herself: nobody normal would start giving up like this after only some three minutes had passed.

She tried, she tried, and most of her really did want to start coming up with ideas again—but that RainWing apathy was as hard as steel sometimes, and it had the final say. No thoughts could pass through the grey mass inside her head, not even when she pushed as hard as she could. The blood had gone still.

She sat down and tented her wings over her head in frustration, her green dulling but spreading to her ruff, her chest, conquering the rest of her continent. The slight dampening of the rainforest noise did not help her think, but she hadn't really covered her head for that purpose. It was how she justified it after the fact, but in the moment she had just done it instinctively, the vague notion that it would relieve her stress being present somewhere in her brain. How it did not say; perhaps by warding off evil spirits?

In the darkness (metaphorical; neither did her wings block out much light) under this covering, Glory could see reasonably well into her mind. She stood atop some great building or another, a wide but not particularly detailed view of her thoughts laid out before her. She caught the faint, golden shadow of an idea—a correct idea!—down at the very bottom, but she could not drop down and pursue it. She was dragged back into reality as Deathbringer shoved his entire face into the dome she had built.

"You alright in here?"

Were Glory an sufficiently flashy insect, or perhaps just a dragon with worse control over her reflexes, she would have been startled into displaying a host of colours in order to scare off Deathbringer, mistaken by the thing in her brain that looked kinda like an almond for a predator. She was neither of these things, though, and so her immediate reaction totalled in a sigh of frustration. "Yeah, I'm alright," she replied, eager to see that golden light again. "Of course I'm alright." A slight dissatisfaction gnawed at the inside of her mouth once she had spoken, but she couldn't find its source.

"Ah, I seem to have forgotten." Deathbringer made the effort of putting his claw in under the tent just so he could put it on his face in mock shame. "Your daily Bubble Hour, where you... do this."

That was it—in Glory's haste to get back on track, she had forgotten that it was weird for her to be engaging in this hunt while on the ground surrounded by her own wings. "Oh..." she replied more quietly. "Yeah, I don't know why I did... this."

She started to get up, but Deathbringer protested, still laying on the boards below while she had just about finished uplifting herself. "No, come back!" he pleaded. "I can see the merit in this." Devoid of Glory's wings to cover him, he outstretched his own over his head. "If this is a RainWing thing, you might have the right idea for once."

For once?! Glory wanted to protest, batting him with her wing in mock offence, but that idea was only getting further away. Time was slipping, here, and the most she could spend on this aside was a small laugh. She looked away from the shady walkway and out into the bright jungle. Relaxed a bit, now, she could follow the idea's path more closely as it imprinted its trail on the mud beneath her mind. Realising that this made it easy to track, it had a penchant for ducking in and out of lesser thoughts, thoughts that should not have been able to contain it. A favourite of its was Glory's analysis of the name Siyayo; that one was at least big enough for it to conceivably fit. It didn't really matter, of course, this light and the thoughts it hid in being imaginary representations of concepts that had no size or shape, but it did bug Glory a lit—

"No, but seriously."

Glory looked over her shoulder at Deathbringer's eyes and the small specks of light under his wings, a few seconds needing to pass for her eyes to adjust to the light and see the rest of him in detail. He suddenly looked quite serious, a strange departure from his earlier joviality as he joined in what he had deemed Bubble Hour. Maybe that was actually bad for you? Did it let the evil spirits in?

He swallowed. "Are you alright? I don't... like to see you like that."

Glory sighed. "It's like I told you, I'm alright. I just... had the impulse to do that."

"You don't usually act on those."

"I was stressed, alright?" Glory was still stressed, as a matter of fact, and Deathbringer's intrusion wasn't helping.

"Well, that's the problem, isn't it?" Deathbringer sounded like he was trying to win an argument. "Listen, we've been working hard, and it's getting to us. I think we should take a rest."

What was with this sudden concern for her? Surely seeing her during her Bubble Hour hadn't spooked him that badly. "I think we should keep investigating and not dawdle as our chances of finding my brother dwindle," she replied. Hopefully, that was firm enough to shut him up.

Deathbringer gave a short sigh, sounding more like he was out of breath than angry or tired. "You keep doing this, Glory."

What did he mean, she kept doing this? Doing what? Refusing to dawdle? Well, to rest, the way Deathbringer saw it. She rested often enough—Jambu always thought she worked too hard as well, and he kept trying to convince her to take more breaks like Deathbringer was doing now, but Glory could at least see why he thought so; he didn't really understand how much responsibility went into being Queen, beyond the fact that he didn't want it. Why was Deathbringer suddenly taking after him? He shouldered a lot of what would have been Glory's burden, so he was well acquainted with all her duties, but even if he wasn't he would still know well that she was stressed out and racking her brain right now due to Jambu's disappearance. She appreciated it when he looked out for her when she was feeling stressed or sad, but... why now? What had so terrified him about the Bubble Hour?

Used to defending herself when arguing against dragons who hated her, and quite unused to legitimately squabbling with Deathbringer as opposed to their usual joking, she immediately threw out the most inflammatory reading of what Deathbringer had said that she could come up with within the four seconds she had to think. "Keep doing what? Staying on track?"

"You keep..." Deathbringer lapsed into a thoughtful pause, his calm and vaguely (irritatingly!) paternal tone unaffected by Glory's venom. She originally thought he was just finding the words for what he wanted to say, but the longer it went on the more it seemed like he was trying to think of something to say at all. "Well, you're working yourself to the bone, here."

"Because we're investigating a kidnapping!" Glory shouted, uncaring until after the fact that she was in public and other dragons could hear her arguing with her... bodyguard. That was about the most conservative word for what they had going on. Prime minister was the best, most detached title, but it implied a formal delineation about between his duties and hers, among other things, so it unfortunately had to be drowned in the river. "I don't do this all the time. What I do all the time is relax—around you, at least. It's why you can call me Glory and not Your Highness."

"Well..." Deathbringer's eyes weren't the best tells, but there was fear behind them—not just this strange concern that Glory thought manifested from some kind of fear of the Bubble Hour, but that fear itself made visible and manifest. Glory knew him quite well, having worked closely with him for a little longer than three months, and even she had no goddamned clue what he was afraid of right now. "You know, you're right, you're right, but... like I said, we've been working hard—"

"We've not been working hard." Glory did not shout this time—the argument seemed to be winding down. "We've been standing around coming up with awful ideas for five minutes. I'm trying to mull over what we just heard in hopes of finding some good ones, and meanwhile you've suddenly become a Sun Time Fundamentalist."

Deathbringer, oddly enough, was not dismayed in any way by Glory's rebuttal—an opposing relief, or some kind of hope, crossed his face instead, like he'd been trapped in a ravine and was getting rescued. "We have been working hard, Glory!" he said, an inspiration flooding out of his mouth that did not flow onto Glory. "Four hours, ever since the early morning, ruthlessly questioning every possible witness—we've been coming up with ideas for all that time as well. We've done what should take a day in one sixth of that time." He took a deep breath. "You're amazing, but it's no wonder you're having a bit of trouble after being amazing for four hours straight. Let's just go back to the treehouse, rope Grandeur into this, and rest for a while."

Glory took a long look into Deathbringer's eyes. The fear was still there.

She sighed. "You know what? Sure."

Glory'd agreed to this out of a pity for Deathbringer, a desire to see that fear in his eyes disappear—and as well recognition of the fact that it would indeed be useful if Grandeur were contributing—but she soon realised that, in the end, he was right. Glory had been doing better than she gave herself credit for—burning herself out probably wasn't going to help Jambu any. Probably. She was willing to take the chance.

After a minute more of talking, Glory and Deathbringer set off on the short flight to the treehouse where she saw petitioners, the sort of capital building of the three member strong RainWing government. Just as they landed on the balcony just outside, their conversation reached a peculiar turn.

"Well," Deathbringer said, "worst case scenario we can fall back on the motive from last time."

"Experiments on our venom?"

"Exactly."

Glory and Deathbringer both laughed, despite the fact that there wasn't much funny about what they were talking about—Deathbringer hadn't even really said it like a joke.

It was much easier for the both of them to treat it like he had.

The joke was not funny anymore.

Four more hours had passed since the interviews had finished, or at least been suspended, and for most of that time Glory was letting the possibility of Jambu being the first of more test subjects stir in her mind. It meshed very well with her previous theory about some SkyWing army or another needing blowguns and taking Jambu so that he could make them for them. Thinking back on it, that was a stupid and unsatisfying conclusion to draw, but it held a special spot in Glory's heart at the moment simply because she'd thought of it first.

The thing about both of these theories was the words SkyWing army. What SkyWing army? Glory couldn't say she was friends with Ruby, but she'd done most of the diplomatic heavy lifting when Jade Mountain Academy, which at the time was just a series of three words rather than a place, needed at once to occupy Jade Mountain, which was undeniably SkyWing territory, and to also be an independent entity unaccountable to any single monarch—moons, that was a pain and a half. That had established some trust between her and Ruby, and by extension the Sky and Rainforest Kingdoms, that would be severely violated were she to suddenly develop an interest in RainWing venom and kidnap, of all the dragons, Glory's own brother to research it. Rather than, you know, just asking to collaborate. Glory would have said no to that, but it's a vital first step before taking the dive of kidnapping.

She'd talked this over with Deathbringer and Grandeur already, and together they'd ruled the possibility out. Now came the hard part, which she was undertaking with Deathbringer alone as Grandeur took her sun time: who else could it be?

This discussion did not take place in the great treehouse, but rather a small hut on ground level—one of the only huts with a door—in an out-of-the-way area of thick jungle. The secrecy for which this hut was built was unnecessary, but Grandeur was a light sleeper, sure to be woken if the discussion became animated, and this was the only other place in the rainforest that was both comfortable (to a degree) and consistently private—and sheltered from the rain that was razing the earth right now. On a leathery seat in the back, before a large table displaying a five hundred year old, horribly innacurate map (the Bay of a Thousand Scales was an archipelago, not one big island!) that had been salvaged from what remained of the NightWing archives, Glory and Deathbringer sat together, slightly cramped by the latter's size and the narrow walls.

"So, either we have on our talons the worst diplomatic incident since the MudWing Coast Crisis, or these are mercenaries."

Glory leaned over the table as she restated the last hour's findings, plus an added hypothesis as to the identity of the kidnappers. She leaned over the table to look at the map—she didn't need to do this, and it held almost no salience to what she was talking about, but she wanted a moment's reprieve from the vague discomfort that irritated her skeletal muscles when she lay fully on the seat.

"Mercenaries?" Deathbringer echoed, shying as best away from her as he could as she rebounded back onto the leather.

"We were all thinking it. What other SkyWing military forces are there that aren't sanctioned by the Queen?"

"I see we're still sticking to 'venom' as their motive."

"Yeah. Answer me, though."

Deathbringer spent a moment in thought. "Scarlet's private army? I know from you that she's still alive."

Glory caught her tongue just before it uttered a meaningless retort. That was a decent possibility. Unlikely, still, but plausible. She had heard about attacks on villages in the area around Agate Chasm that Scarlet, dreamvisiting Ruby, had claimed herself responsible for—just out of spite, she supposed. She had the malice, she probably had the private army Deathbringer was suggesting, but...

"You know, that's plausible," Glory said. "If we say it's her, we can toss out the old motive; she just did it because she hates me. That's way more likely than more experiments on our venom—I can't imagine she'd be very curious about it, at least not in the way your tribe was." She created a small rip in the map, tracing her claws along its antique paper, recently treated with devil's tongue, a rainforest flower, in a failed attempt to increase its durability. Waiting for the words of her objection to come to her, she succeeded in rendering the Talon Peninsula even more unrecognisable from its depiction on modern maps. "But here's the thing: she hates me, but she doesn't know the slightest thing about me. All she knows is that I'm a RainWing, that I dethroned and almost killed her, and that I sometimes dream about you." Deathbringer smiled at the end of that sentence, and Glory felt a slight, bashful regret about having added that part. "She has no clue who Jambu is. I remember all the nights I've been dreamvisited, and in none of those dreams did he ever appear. Unless she has RainWings on her take—likely story!—there's no way she could know about him."

"What about NightWings?" Deathbringer replied.

"You ask ninety percent of all the NightWings in the rainforest what's the name of the Queen's brother? and they'll say, she has a brother?" Glory smiled as the pieces failed to connect—it probably wasn't Scarlet, thank god. "Or curse you out for implying that I'm Queen of the NightWings. It's still possible—the ones who do know aren't any kind of incorruptible—but it's very unlikely, is all. Plus, who's asking those NightWings about him? SkyWings? If Grandeur's to be trusted, which she is, these visitors are the first to come from the Sky Kingdom in fifty years."

"You brought up RainWings on the take, didn't you?" Deathbringer attempted to spread his wings slightly as an argumentative gesture, but there was no room—he only succeeded in lifting Glory's chin slightly with one of the tips.

"That was a joke." Glory retracted her head and slipped it underneath Deathbringer's wingtip. "Were you joking?"

Deathbringer paused, giving this question an unnatural amount of thought—six seconds' worth. "No, I didn't realise."

The two of them were left in silence after that, both trying to stoke the flames of thought again. Glory, in a gesture of affection, moved further under Deathbringer's wing, a bulge appearing in the membrane as she lay just beside his torso. This lasted for about thirty seconds, the peaceful sound of rain and insects running through Glory's ears, before she removed herself to peer over the map again, just out of a desire for visual stimulus. She looked northward from the mangled peninsula where the Darkstalker's teeth had fallen out, up to the Kingdom of Sand. Glory assumed that the Kingdom of Sand remained recognisable, if undetailed, purely because it was just a plain, vertical stretch of desert. Her destruction of the Talon Peninsula wasn't the only damage she'd inflicted to this old map. Right next to the Stronghold had been scrawled:

ALMOST ALL SKY KINGDOM CLOSER TO FOREST AND DIDN'T CARE ABOUT SECRECY

twelve words which summarised the reasons why Glory didn't think the kidnappers had taken the tunnel, beyond the less certain question of whether they knew it existed at all. Moving east, the Sky Kingdom had no such luck in remaining recognisable—the cartographer had seriously botched which direction the Claws of the Clouds trended towards, seemed to imagine the Great Five-Tail and Diamond Spray rivers to be the same, bisecting the Sky Kingdom into north and south—and, depending on whether she was reading it right, flowing from the sea into the sea?—and had not drawn the mountains as mountains but rather as a long and eye-hurting series of consummate Vs. Perhaps Illuminator of the NightWings should have stuck to drawing stuff in the margins of scrolls instead of trying their artist's hand at cartography. The SeaWings they'd drawn in the western ocean were pleasing enough, at least.

Glory intended to continue wasting time by seeing just how awfully they'd messed up the intricate system of rivers, bogs, distributaries and swamps that made up the Mud Kingdom, but she suddenly caught another glimpse of that golden shadow. She thought it had deserted her, or her it, four hours ago, but it was giving her a second chance. She chased it, but she didn't even have to try; it was limping, but it wasn't injured. It was like it wanted to be caught. She looked around for any sign of a trap, but only saw the towering monuments that were her thoughts all around the strange SandWing-esque plaza that she was hunting after the shadow in. She leapt for it...

At last, a trueidea. She held a true, righteous, correct idea. It was real. It was real. It was so simple, so beautiful... it glimmered in her talons.

Glory wasted no time in spitting it out of her mouth. "Siyayo—not a name, maybe, but an acronym?"

"What?" Deathbringer replied. Glory considered repeating herself, but Deathbringer had good hearing; he wanted clarification.

"The name one of the SkyWings gave to Orchid. Could it be the name of some organisation—CIO? Could Orchid have misheard; could he have said 'We're CIO? I'm from CIO?'"

Deathbringer took a breath, looking at the same spot on the map Glory had been—the Diamond Spray Delta. "That... might ring a bell, but... the idea that they'd just tell Orchid whatever criminal organisation or mercenary band, they're a part of is... flimsy at best."

"Maybe she asked?"

Deathbringer, in his effort to stifle a laugh, let loose a rare snort. "In any case, it's something more to ask Ruby about."

Glory turned herself around fully to look at Deathbringer without craning her neck. "Oh, yeah, I wanted to ask: are we doing that? Is Grandeur?"

"Uh..." Deathbringer stuck his tongue out of the side of his mouth for a second. "I suppose we are, yeah, once we've had a little while longer to think; and we've compiled these thoughts into a dossier, or something."

"Okay." Glory nodded. "I think we could send Grandeur, if we needed to. We could brief her pretty easy, especially with that hypothetical dossier."

"Yeah..." Deathbringer was about to issue a polite objection—rather, an offensive objection that he was applying a polite tone to in the hopes it would sting less. "It might be better for us to go and for her to stay. It's very unlikely that she'd mess it up, but the chance, I think, is slightly better if we do it." He paused, looking at Glory's face as if monitoring her reaction. Glory didn't really mind his slight insult to her grandmother, even if she didn't fully agree. He continued, "And if something happens while we're out, we rely on her a lot when we need help governing, but she could handle it on her own. Maybe not in the best way, but she could."

That was insult to Glory's grandmother number two, but she agreed with this one. Grandeur was experienced, a great advisor and mentor, but from what Glory had seen of her reign those months ago... yeah, she wasn't a terrific monarch.

"Alright." She reached out to grasp Deathbringer's talons in hers. "We leave, say, noontime tomorrow?"

Deathbringer smiled. "Deal."

A/N: This was difficult as hell, and is probably still OOC despite my best efforts. Compounding the difficulty, here, is that I think this ship is bad, but I, being constrained by canon, must write around it being canon. This is the reason this chapter's taken so long! The Jambu ones will be way easier!

(Another reason for that is, as stated earlier, I have an actual plan for those. All I have in my notes for chapter seven is "something funny/dramatic happens. leaning funny.")

Also: age gap! I don't really think the age gap is a problem, not because it's excusable—God save me if I thought like that—but rather because it wasn't intentional on Tui's part and there are more references to Deathbringer being ~8 than there are to him being 12 (at the time of The Hidden Kingdom, that is.) Still, I'll put up for vote Deathbringer's age in this fic, the options being ~8 or 12. The poll is on my profile, or it might not be depending on when you read this. It will be soon, in that case.