Wings of Fire Book Four: The Dark Secret by Tui T. Sutherland Page B

RainWings knew about them. Isn’t that how you got here?”
    She shook her head. “We flew across the ocean. It was so long and so boring. I swear I nearly fell asleep and ended up in the sea a couple of times.”
    He perked up, full of geography questions, but she was already squeezing into the room and making “Oooooh!” noises. He squashed himself through the door behind her and saw, in the plume of fire she sent out, a couple of wooden sticks on the floor. He picked one up and lit it so they could look around more easily.
    But when he lifted it up, the first things they both saw were the shriveled corpses of two dead dragons.

Starflight clapped his talons over Fatespeaker’s mouth midshriek.
    “You’ll bring the mountain down on top of us,” he whispered, and she snapped her mouth shut. He glanced down at the two midnight-black bodies. “Don’t worry, these two have been dead a long time,” he added. “Probably since the volcano erupted.”
    When he released her, she whispered, “How did they die?”
    Starflight lifted the torch again and peered a little closer, although he really didn’t want to. A spear lay beside one of the NightWings, but it was an ordinary spear, not the creepy hooked-and-pronged kind all the guards carried now. Neither of them wore armor either.
    “Suffocation, I bet,” he answered. “Or starvation. Or heat, although dragons can withstand a fair amount of heat. My guess is they were guarding the treasure when the eruption happened and they were trapped here. Nobody could come find them until the lava cooled enough to make the tunnel we crawled through, and by then it was too late.”
    Fatespeaker shook herself from horns to tail. “How incredibly awful.”
    Starflight turned to look around the room, which, as he’d predicted, was otherwise empty. Bare shelves lined all the walls, reaching up to the ceiling, and large urns stood in the two back corners. He could imagine that they had once been filled to the brim with gold and jewels.
    He caught himself thinking, A giant urn full of gold and jewels would be kind of cool to have. Which was ridiculous — just his dragon instincts talking. What would he do with that much gold? Unless it could get him back to his friends or stop the war, it would be useless to him.
    Something went ping at the back of his mind, but before he could figure it out, Fatespeaker said, “Maybe we should go.”
    “I think so,” Starflight said. “I don’t know how much air is down here, but I don’t want to find out by running out of it.”
    “Yikes,” she said, her eyes widening. “That’s all you had to say!” She turned and scooted out of the room faster than he’d ever seen her move before.
    He took a step to follow her, and the torchlight flashed on something small and bright in one of the corpse’s talons.
    Starflight hesitated.
    A piece of treasure that was left behind? Something they missed, because who would want to search a corpse.…
    Well, not him — not particularly.
    But — he felt as if it was calling to him, as if it had been waiting for him these eleven years, hiding from anyone else who came along until the right dragon arrived.
    Now you sound like Sunny, with her faith in fate and destiny and signs and magic.
    So if taking the lost jewel was what she’d want him to do …
    He braced himself, reached down, and plucked it from the dead guard’s claws. Rough dead scales scraped against his, and he shuddered so badly he nearly dropped the gemstone, but instead he gripped it harder and jumped back, knocking against the shelves behind him. The claws were left clutching the air, as if hanging on to the memory of treasure would have to be enough.
    Now Starflight felt fairly sick, but when he held up the torch and glanced down, he realized he’d done the right thing.
    The blue star-shaped sapphire glinted in his talons with a tiny inner spark of its own light.
    He’d only ever read about these. There were supposedly three of them