The flame has burned my finger and it immediately starts to blister. The two other dragonlings, still playing, pause. The first cocks its head. They both turn to look at us with their bright black eyes and then they stare at each other again. One of them gives a little shiver that vibrates up its wings.
‘I think they’re communicating,’ I whisper as I crouch down.
‘What?’ Atlas says. ‘You mean … telepathically?’
‘Sort of.’
The third dragonling opens his eyes, looks at the others, then rolls over and goes back to sleep.
‘The first two are closer,’ Atlas says, bending down beside me. ‘Taken from the same nest. But the other one keeps to himself.’
The nest-mates peer at the sleeping dragonling, getting so close that their snouts almost touch his hide, but he doesn’t stir again. I wonder if they’re trying to talk to him, but surely he would react if they were? Wouldn’t it be impossible to sleep if someone was speaking to you inside your own head?
‘Would their nests have been close by?’ I say. ‘In the same area?’
‘Oh yeah,’ Atlas says. ‘They came from the same hatching ground in Inverness. They might even have been neighbours.’
So, if the three dragonlings come from the same region and learned whatever echolocation dialect their parents spoke to them before they were hatched, surely all three should understand each other? Unless my theory is wrong and the dialects aren’t regional …
I stare at the two nest-mates – siblings – and Mama’s face flashes through my mind.
The dialects may not be regional. They could be—
Understanding dawns on me slowly, like the sun rising.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I say, standing up.
‘Oh … okay.’
Atlas follows me as I stride back towards the stairs, my mind connecting the dots so fast I can barely keep up. I pass by one of the open burners and pause. Inside, nestled among the hot coals, is a dragon’s egg.
Atlas’s face falls. ‘It came with the dragonlings. I don’t think it’s going to hatch.’
‘Of course it’s not,’ I say, my hand on the bannister. ‘It needs something only a dragon can give.’
Atlas frowns. ‘What’s that?’
I turn round at the top of the stairs and look down at him. His shoulders are slumped and his face tight, as if simply being here weighs on his every bone.
‘Echolocation,’ I say. ‘A dragonling won’t hatch from its egg unless it hears its parents’ calls.’
And the truth, the missing piece of the puzzle, is suddenly there before my eyes. I know what Mama was trying to say before Hollingsworth cut her off. She wanted to prove that each dragonfamilyspeaks its own dialect. And the same is true for echolocation. The Koinamens isn’t a war weapon and it’s certainly not a dragon-made code. It’s a language containing thousands of others, each one sacred, each one unique to a different dragon family. The reason that Soresten and Addax, and Muirgen and Rhydderch, speak their own dialects isn’t because they’re from the same region. It’s because they’re related.
The echolocation dialects aren’t regional.
They’re familial.
BACK IN THE GLASSHOUSE, RALPH is waiting for me.
‘What took you so long?’ he barks.
‘Burned myself on the hot water in the bathroom and had to go to the sanatorium,’ I say, holding up my red finger with a sigh.
I take my seat and pull the loquisonus machine towards me. All this time, I’ve been talking about echolocation as if it’s just one singular language that varies slightly according to the region. How can I – a translator – have been so blind? Humans have languages, dialects and even particular ways of speaking among families: their own accents, words, inside jokes. Why wouldn’t dragons – who only developed spoken language because of humans – be the same?
Mama wanted to prove that, like human languages, dragon tongues include dialects. And now it’s up to me to prove the same of echolocation, of the Koinamens. It’s a language full of family dialects that are not only used to communicate and to hunt, but that have the power to heal,to make dragonlings grow inside their eggs . . .
Dragons may have only learned to speak orally due to the presence of humans, but language has been woven into their very being since the beginning of time.
