The returners had been trickling in all morning. Some had stumbled back to Salt’s Mane voluntarily, rather rougher after their nighttime of navigation. Some had been found by those tracking the dragons. Of those, some had even been happy to be found. For the rest, well. Nets weighted for dragons worked equally well on running men. Some had been found dead, by dragon or other beastie, and been brought back for burning. Not all those taken were accounted for. But most were.

It left Aaron to wonder if morning meetings were always this lively on the dragon front. His Majesty sat at the head of the slowly filling table, having chosen to be present for all conversations rather than arriving with any sort of regal lateness. Aaron sat two chairs down from him, leaving empty seats between them where more important people would sit. Hopefully soon, to erase the awkward gap that separated Orin from everyone else. The rest of the table had filled from the end, the arguments advancing into the room with them.

“They should have been penned outside,” one woman was saying. “They could have gotten loose at any point between the gates and their cells.”

“Yes, outside,” another woman replied dryly. “Where any dragons among them would certainly not have held an advantage.”

His sister entered at the head of her own small entourage, and neatly filled in all empty seats opposite Aaron. For herself, she claimed the chair at King Orin’s immediate left. His Majesty greeted her formally, and she responded with the same. Aaron gave her a little wave, and she did not.

“Can the cells hold against dragon’s fire, or their strength?” another man was fretting. “Has it been tested?”

“With griffins, it has, when the enclaves were being tamed,” another replied. “And they’re iron bars. Dragon fire doesn’t run hot enough to burn through iron.”

The Lady came in, all on her lonesome, and took the seat next to Aaron. She smiled across the table at her daughter. This gesture also went unreturned.

“And those that haven’t been doppeled?” another man asked. “You’d have them penned? Locked away until you’re satisfied? You cannot tell me that two dozen of our finest have all been corrupted in a night. One or two of the weak-minded may have given in—”

“Or none did,” interrupted one of the younger lordlings, his hands on the table, half-risen from his chair. “And this is all a bid to paralyze our leadership. What is the chain of command, when my brother—your commander—is kept locked up like some animal? When even our king stands accused, you cannot tell me this was not their plot from the very beginning—”

King Orin was, perhaps wisely, choosing to remain silent. His was a biased opinion, no matter what his listeners believed him to be.

The door opened again, and Duchess Morgan entered cloaked in the muted gray-blues of her house, one of her own entourage holding the door for her. She was a woman a few years shy of Adelaide’s mid-thirties. Paler in face, lighter in hair, but with a strikingly similar number of limbs. Those entering with her filled out the remaining chairs as she continued towards the front.

“Those in the dungeon will keep for the length of a meeting, my lords,” she spoke as she moved. “There will be time to interview them later. If I may be so bold as to suggest—” She paused, one hand on the back of her chair, her other outstretched to hand her crutches off to an attendant. “Lord Sung.”

“Duchess Morgan,” Adelaide replied.

“I heard you fought a dragon on your very own balcony last night. I heard that was the only direct combat you participated in.”

“Your ladyship’s hearing is as acute as always.”

“My lady,” the duchess said, eyeing the bandages peeking from under Adelaide’s loose sleeve. “Please stop shoving your arms inside of dragons.”

“As if you’ve a leg to stand on,” Adelaide Sung replied dryly.

There was a moment where no one spoke. Then the duchess snorted. She sat down, taking the final place at the table next to His Majesty’s right, and gestured to the waiting servants to begin setting out the breakfast platters she’d helpfully ordered. Aaron filled his plate quickly, and began the much slower process of filching things away to his poor empty pockets, as the group began its business.

“If I may be so bold as to suggest an agenda before Your Majesty,” the duchess said, “then I advise we focus on preventing this from happening again. And if we could divine what is happening, that would certainly be beneficial to the course of the discussion.”

What was happening was this:

The season had started as usual. Some few single dragons had begun arriving on the beaches outside Salt’s Mane weeks ago, already; a prelude to the flocking for which real troops were necessary. Some had been killed there. Some had escaped inland, to bother villages along the front. Single, uncoordinated attacks.

“Like what killed your old captain of the guard?” asked the Lady, one eyebrow raised.

“Yes,” Duchess Morgan said. “Precisely.”

The new captain, Mabel’s mother, was missing from today’s discussion. Aaron remembered a dragon crawling down the wall to where she was stationed. He hoped that Salt’s Mane wasn’t on its third captain for the season.

In a typical spring, the newly-hatched dragons would fly across the strait as soon as their scales were hardened and their wings steady enough for the endeavor, landing where their egg memories told them to go. They expected humans to meet them there, and would not be alarmed to see them turned out in numbers. They expected to be presented with several fine choices for their doppeling, and then to be on their way.

Their memories would not include traps laid under the sand, or ballistae hidden on the cliffs above, or any of the other ways those who came were killed.

Aaron snuck another handful of snacks into his pantry. There were roasted nuts, which he didn’t think would molder at quite the same speed as bread if he were caught out in the rain again. He left the softer foods on his plate untouched, until the topic was less distasteful than lies and murdered children. That answered his question on how long their mother had been asleep. A dragon’s nest could take a century to hatch, triggered by the heat of the growing babes and a dozen other factors Aaron would never know. To be still flying into a trap their mother had imprinted in their minds as safe, their eggs had been laid nearly two decades ago, at the earliest.

She must have trusted the humans she’d known, to have left her children in humanity’s care for so long.

Connor and Rose would have been old enough to stand on the sand, this year, if the pact hadn’t been broken.

The season had been progressing normally. A bit slowly, perhaps, but the storms were lingering longer than usual. And if that made the dragons that did come more skittish than usual, quicker to fly at the first sign of attack, well. That happened, some years.

“How many other officers have you lost this way?” His Majesty asked.

“Too many,” one of the duchess’ men replied. “And not enough. It seemed unlucky, not suspicious.”

And then last night. Dragons that flew in storms. Dragons that scaled walls to avoid ballistae, that targeted the highest of their ranks, that not only arrived together but fought together. Dragons that knew what welcome awaited them.

“We’ve not seen tactics like this since…” Duchess Morgan hesitated. Her eyes flicked to Adelaides Junior and Senior, on their very different sides of the table, before she chose the tactful route. “Since the pact was first broken. When this war truly was a war, and not a culling.”

“Since Michael,” the younger Adelaide said, grimly. That was, Aaron vaguely recalled from a long-ago conversation with Rose, the Sung’s second born. The one who’d been forfeited to the dragons. She really didn’t have much luck with brothers, did she.

The Lady drew in a measured breath, and let it out again. “I think it is safe to presume that one of those doppeled last year has some knowledge of our tactics, and opinions on appropriate countermeasures. They’ve some ability at leadership, as well.”

King Orin sat tall under the weight of the table’s stares. But he offered fewer words, after that.

Typically, dragons that had doppeled simply left, flying back to the greater archipelago. They were not flocking animals, and Last of the Isles lacked the sort of large prey needed to support a growing dragon for long.

Those from the attack last night had not departed. Trackers had found signs they’d gone further inland—found the crushed circles of underbrush where bodies far larger than any deer had bedded overnight, found the splintered branches where aching mouths had teethed, found the coughed-up pellets that showed diets changing from fish to land-based prey.

Tracking dragons through their flights was difficult, given how freely they could match their colors to sky and cloud. But they were children, and they had to land sometime.

“They knew more than our tactics,” Duchess Morgan said. “They knew where our highest officers would be stationed. They took Captain Martinson from her post. They scaled the wall to Lord Sung’s rooms. And that is without even touching upon those whose deaths they caused seemingly without even touching them.”

Aaron had been lifting a fork to his mouth. Scrambled eggs. He put it in his mouth still, because that was less suspicious than setting it back down. But he remembered dead animals outside a village, and a dead man at his feet while the fellow’s Death warned him off interfering.

Apparently existing was interference enough, so. That boded well.

“This,” Adelaide said, “is on an entirely different level than military tactics thought up by the mind of a fifteen year old. Michael’s doppel was smart, but we left our forfeits untutored for a reason. What we saw last night was our own war turned against us by one who knows it. Yet we cannot fight, if we must be suspicious of our own.”

“Lady,” the duchess said, smoothly taking over where her fellow noble had left off, “forgive me if this is common knowledge in the capital, but here our doppeling problems tend to fly off soon enough. Is there a reliable test for doppelgängers? Ones who haven’t yet begun to show?”

“It is possible to force a shift,” the Lady said, leaning back in her chair. “In the right circumstances, a doppelgänger pushed to the brink of death will instinctively take on that form most likely to survive. There is a poison we use—slow acting, relatively painless. We administer greater doses over the course of several days until the issue is deemed settled. It does not work for the sort we see in the capital, because the human form typically has a stronger constitution than the animal. But for dragons and the greater beasts, it can succeed in revealing their true nature. It can also kill the innocent. It is the Late Wake’s position that such a test should only be administered voluntarily, or when the burden of evidence has already condemned the accused to execution. I am not aware of any so condemned here.”

Ah. Now people were having trouble looking at their king.

She let that sit in the silence of the room for a moment, before continuing.

“I believe in this case, having the accused testify over kirin’s bone should suffice. So long as they are the people taken from us and not dragons wearing their skins, then they can be loyal enough for this season. Past that… well. Doppeling will always show.”

“Would you and your apprentice see to the interviews, then?” King Orin asked, his voice steady.

“If I might borrow my daughter’s sword,” the Lady said, inclining her head to her junior.

“You may borrow my presence, as well,” said Adelaide, rather less indulgently than she’d spoken with her mother yesterday.

“One more suggestion, Your Majesty, if I may,” suggested Duchess Morgan, with the sort of casualness that only came after great deliberation. “If the dragons had been aiming to kill rather than capture last night, they could have left our leadership bleeding. In light of their new strategy, it would be wise to spread our leadership out. Perhaps Your Majesty would consider Helland as a suitable location for your spring court?”

Helland, in the enclaves. Helland, as far north—as far from any meaningful role in the spring battles—as Orin could be sent, while allowing His Majesty to save face. It was still on the coastal front. Technically. That it was nowhere near the narrows where dragons typically crossed was not the point. Or rather, exactly the point.

King Orin opened his mouth, his shoulders stiff.

“It’s a wise idea, Your Majesty,” Lord Adelaide Sung said before he could speak, her eyes steady upon him. She was echoed near immediately by the other southern lords, and those loyal to Morgan. And a few who fell under Orin’s own banner, though their moment’s delay did much to exonerate them from whatever pre-meeting had left the others entirely united.

“...If that is this assembly’s decision,” King Orin replied, after a delay that probably had more to do with his inability to find an honest reply than an appropriate one, “then who am I to refuse?”

A dragon king would have a very hard time sabotaging the war effort, from Helland.