The Lost Heir Read Online Free PDF Page A

balance. The salt water felt like it was scraping roughly against her gills. Where were her natural SeaWing instincts? Her world was supposed to make her stronger, faster, tougher — not pathetic.
    She swam all the way to the next island, fighting the currents. More of the pinkish coral reef stretched across the sand here as well, dotted with waving green fans and lacy dark purple ferns. Her wings felt sore and tired, so she spread them wide and floated near the surface, not far from the land.
    Something flashed below her in the shadows of the coral reef.
    Something very large.
    Tsunami had a brief vision of all the large, toothy things that might live in the ocean, then dismissed it. If it was a shark, she would kill it and bring it back to the others to eat — mainly so she could see the look on Starflight’s face.
    She flicked her tail to swim closer.
    It was another SeaWing.
    A shiver rippled across her scales when she saw him, and part of her wanted to bolt right back to her friends.
    Don’t be a smoke-breather,
she scolded herself.
This is what you were hoping for: a dragon from your own tribe.
    She took a deep breath. The strange SeaWing had dark blue horns and sky-blue scales several shades paler than hers. He was paddling by the reef, shifting his talons and wings slightly to change course. His head turned alertly from side to side.
    Well, it wouldn’t hurt to follow him for a while first,
Tsunami told herself. She crept along the top of the reef, peering over the edge at him. Her claws caught on small gaps in the coral. She accidentally poked an indignant black lobster, which came bustling out with its long whiskers bristling and pincers snapping. It took one look at her and hustled right back into hiding.
    Up here, the reef was covered in a layer of green mosslike algae. Tsunami passed a couple of large sea turtles slowly swimming nearby. An enormous, tentacled thing like a sea spider sat nibbling bits of algae. The tips of its eight dark purple legs glowed orange-yellow and so did its eyes.
    The SeaWing down below stopped suddenly and glanced around. Tsunami flattened herself against the reef. Knobbly bits of limestone poked into her underbelly. She peered through one of the holes at the other dragon.
    He spun slowly, staring into the ocean depths. Had he heard her?
    But he didn’t look up. The dragon checked around him one more time, then lit up the stripes along his wings.
    Almost immediately another dragon swam out of a cave in the coral reef.
    Hmmm,
Tsunami thought,
much less handsome.
His green scales were perfectly nice, but she didn’t care for the black spiral patterns on them. She’d never seen a pattern like that on a dragon before. And his face wasn’t nearly as handsome or friendly-looking as the first dragon, although perhaps that had something to do with the giant bruise swollen over his left eye.
    She wondered if they were guards switching patrol duty. If so, they were being quite strange about it.
    The two dragons floated in place, staring at each other, for what seemed like an eternity. Occasionally the stripes on one SeaWing would light up, then on the other. They moved their talons about as if waving away fish, even though no fish went anywhere near them.
    And then the spiral-marked dragon ducked back into the cave, and the blue dragon swam on.
    Some kind of SeaWing patrol ritual?
Tsunami wondered.
I guess I’ll have to learn all that stuff in order to become queen.
She lifted her wings to swim after the first dragon, and a pair of yellow-striped fish wriggled out from under her and shot away.
    The sky-blue dragon swam back the way he’d come, toward the stretch of open sea between this island and the one where Tsunami’s friends were sleeping.
    Now or never,
Tsunami thought. She’d rather meet this dragon than the other one, and she’d rather do it while he was alone, if she could. That seemed easier than trying to explain herself to a whole bunch of dragons at once.
    She beat her