‘Very well,’ she says.
I feel weightless, as if I might begin to float at any moment.
‘But if you fail, your cousin will meet his end by way of the hangman’s noose – just like the rest of your family.’
I nod. ‘I accept your offer.’
Wyvernmire reaches into her briefcase and pulls out a handful of typewritten pages.
‘You are required to sign the Official Secrets Act before you go anywhere. In doing so, you are taking a lifelong vow never to reveal the details of the job you are about to undertake. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I say, taking the pen being offered to me.
I scan the page quickly and words like SECRETS and DRAGONS and GOVERNMENT GUIDELINES jump out at me. But there’s no point in reading it. This job is my only hope.
I sign the paperwork and Wyvernmire gives me a satisfied nod. Then she tips her head in the Guardian’s direction.
‘Get Miss Featherswallow cleaned up.’
I suddenly notice the state of my trousers, smeared in dragon blood.
‘And release the boy,’ Wyvernmire says. ‘They’re going to the DDAD.’
‘Can I ask one question?’ I say as the Guardian escorts me to the door, without handcuffs this time.
‘One,’ Wyvernmire says.
‘The dragon, the one that burned your office. Has it been destroyed yet?’
Lines crease across the Prime Minister’s forehead.
‘No,’ she says. ‘For now, that particular rebel is still alive.’
Transcript of an excerpt from ‘A Natural History of Dragon Tongues’, a paper delivered to students at the University of London in 1919, by Dragon Anthropologist Dr Helina Featherswallow MA, PhD.
Before one can embark on the proper study of dragon tongues, as all you bright young things are about to do, one must first take into account their origins.
Over the last fifty years of scholarship, it has become widely accepted that dragon tongues did, in fact, develop from human languages. Indeed, had human beings not walked this earth, dragons might never have developed any form of spoken language at all. And yet dragons display a mastery of language that far surpasses our own.
There is no evidence to suggest that dragons ever spoke verbally before the evolution of humans on our planet. When our ancestors, whose first spoken languages began to emerge only once they learned to control their primitive vocalisations, started to migrate throughout the world, interaction with the dragon populations became inevitable. It was at this precise moment in time, when the dragons had grasped the basic foundations of human language, that dragon tongues were born.
This explains why the six known dragon tongues spoken in the anglophone countries of England, Australia and America bear multiple similarities to English (a Germanic human language) but almost none to Spanish (a Romance human language). Indeed, these six English-related dragon tongues bear in turn similarities to the dragon tongue spoken in Germany, dueof course to the fact that both German and English evolved from the same unwritten ancestor, Proto-Germanic.
Furthermore, Wyrmerian, a modern-day tongue spoken by British dragons, and Draecksum, spoken by Dutch dragons, are so close that many words are interchangeable. This is because Holland is one of the main areas from which the Anglo-Saxon settlers in England migrated from. Our human languages now even borrow from dragon tongues, withskrit, a common word in English vocabulary meaningfool, originating from Wyrmerian. It is interesting to note that dragon languages contain many words requiring the ‘s’ sound, which comes naturally to dragons due to the forked nature of their tongues.
Only once a linguist has understood the origins of Dragonese as a whole can they hope to study each tongue separately. Indeed, it is this manner of proceeding that will allow one to delve even further into the subject of dragon linguistics, as I know you hope to do, beginning with the fascinating theory of dragon dialects, which—
ST PANCRAS STATION IS CHAOS. The sharp November air slips its frozen hands inside my coat and I shiver. The Guardians let me wash and change into new clothes before climbing into the same type of motorcar that took my parents away. I pull at the jumper and the too-small skirt, trying not to think about who they might have belonged to before. Marquis, I was told, will be following in a separate car. But as I watch people running to catch trains, pulling groaning suitcases and crying children, I see no sign of my cousin.
‘Britannia is at war once more!’
The newspaper seller has parked his stall in front of the ticket office, where a man with a trolley, holding a cello and several other instruments, is gesticulating urgently. The vendor’s voice echoes through the station as a train pulls up in a gush of steam. It’s small and old and blue. Something tells me I won’t be needing a ticket.
‘Are you sure this is the right one?’ I ask the Guardian closest to me.
He nods, the visor of his helmet hiding his face, and pushes me towards the train. I peer through the window at the empty seats, then step onboard. My escorts remain on the platform. My coat, the only thing I was allowed to keep, still smells of dragonsmoke. I find a carriage and sit in a window seat as my stomach fills with dread.
Marquis isn’t here. I should have known, shouldn’t I? As if the Prime Minister would bargain with a seventeen-year-old criminal. I blink away hot tears – I won’t cry with the Guardians watching me. A newspaper is stuffed down the side of my seat and I pull it out, flicking past the Selfridges’ adverts for ladies’ mackintoshes on the front page.
