‘It’s so we can pass them down.’
‘I had forgotten how bad you are at teaching your offspring to speak,’ Borislav replies, shaking his head so that several Guardians jump back in alarm. ‘Dragonlings learn at least three tongues in their first year of life.’
‘And yet here you are, unable to converse with your own species without a human translator,’ I reply coolly.
Borislav roars, rearing backwards with a terrible screeching sound as his tail hits a tree. The Guardians raise their guns as splinters of wood rain down on to the cars.
‘What did you say to him?’ Owen bellows as Muirgen and Rhydderch snarl.
‘English is a slothful language, one I refuse to speak. And your patrol dragons are juveniles, still unlearned in the tongues of the East,’ Borislav spits. ‘It is a weakness akin to their so-called peace with humans.’
My heart thumps loudly in my chest. For a moment, I thought the Bulgarian dragon was about to kill me.
‘What do you want me to translate?’ I ask.
Borislav gnashes his teeth, his tail still swinging from sideto side. ‘Tell Wyvernmire that the dragons of Bulgaria agree.’
I relay the words to Owen.
‘Agree to what?’ Rhydderch growls in English.
I turn to ask Borislav, but Owen speaks first.
‘That’s all we need, Vivien.’
Rhydderch’s eyes narrow. I look at him, then up at Borislav. What have the dragons of Bulgaria and Wyvernmire agreed to? And why doesn’t Rhydderch – who serves Queen Ignacia – seem to know?’
‘Tell the dragon that Wyvernmire thanks him for travelling all this way,’ Owen says. ‘And remind him that his hunting must be restricted to wild animals until he has crossed British borders.’
I translate and Borislav lets out a laugh.
‘You tell your superior that I feasted on two of his colleagues when flying over London this daybreak.’ His eyes swivel in their sockets to look at me. ‘We don’t obey human rules – your Prime Minister knows that.’
Borislav’s wings unfold suddenly, stretching across the field and knocking the mirror off one of the cars. After a few thundering steps, the dragon launches himself into the air. We watch in silence as he soars upwards, circling over the field a few times before disappearing into the clouds above the forest.
‘Someone get me Ravensloe,’ Owen says. ‘Now!’
Muirgen and Rhydderch have moved closer together and are conversing quietly. They don’t seem to understand anything more about this encounter than I do. But why is that? The question circles in my mind as Owen opens the cardoor for me and the Guardian drives me back to Bletchley Manor. If all dragons speak echolocation, then why weren’t the patrol dragons able to communicate with Borislav when they saw him in the sky? I decide to ask Dr Seymour about it, because there’s already an even bigger question pressing on me.
Why is Wyvernmire talking with the Bulgarian dragons, the most ruthless dragons in Europe? And if the Dragon Queen is Wyvernmire’s ally, then why did her dragons look so surprised?
I PULL MY HEADPHONES OFF and swear. I’ve spent an entire week listening to the same sequence of echolocation calls on repeat and every time I feel like I’m beginning to understand what they mean, I hear them used in a different context that has me back at square one.
‘Trill-type4 seems to mean “let’s hunt”, right?’ I say to Gideon.
Gideon glances up from the index cards and nods.
‘Then why is it being usedhereas a command to follow?’
I hand my headphones to Gideon, hitrewindthenplay. He listens for a moment, then gives me a bewildered look.
‘See!’ I say, throwing my hands up in the air. ‘It makes no sense.’
I glance over my shoulder. Dr Seymour is working on a reperisonus machine, trying to fix one of the wires, and I wonder how it could possibly have been damaged when it’s tucked away against the rear wall. Sophie is at the other loquisonus, attempting to write down the rhythm ofa sound pattern with Katherine’s help.
The scribbles in my logbook swim in front of my eyes. I’ve been trying to liken the echolocation calls to the dragon tongues I know, searching for similarities in the lexicon or pace. But the calls I hear through the loquisonus machine are sounds more similar to the song of a bird or the blare of a horn than they are to spoken words.
Languages – even dragon ones – can be transcribed on to paper using letters or symbols that deconstruct each sound or meaning, but echolocation isn’t like that. The terminology we’re using, like Trill-type13, doesn’taudiblysound like the noises I hear through the headphones in the way that the lettersconveys the hissing of the wordhahriss, which meanstogetherin Slavidraneishá. Bulgarian is easier to grasp once one knows that the capital Cyrillic letterVelooks like a capital RomanisedB. Echolocation, on the other hand, has none of these rules, none of these signposts that could eventually lead to a full translation of the sounds.
