The dragon lay in the clearing in front of her gate, but paler than before and wounded. Eppie remembered that from before she’d fallen, or jumped, but now even more of the dragon’s fiery blood fell. It dripped from her neck, and where the blood fell under the dragon’s body, the earth was doing strange things, shifting and changing colors and making the world tilt around her again.
The next person Eppie saw was Sunna. She’d seen Sunna, too, just before it all went black, but now Sunna carried some sort of wound that didn’t bear looking at, at least not with a woozy head. The Defenders and the bandits had gathered around the dragon. Sunna bent and touched her forehead to the dragon’s nose, then stepped to one side, cradling Tiada’s head, which looked almost as big as the priestess’s body. V
