‘What do you still have that for?’ he says.
‘I couldn’t leave it with Jasper, could I?’ I say. I lower my voice. ‘If Ralph or Wyvernmire get their hands on it, they could listen in on the rebel dragons – the Bulgarian prince I met in Wyvernmire’s tent says he’s never tried to understand the calls, but I don’t believe him.’
‘What does it do?’ Ruth asks.
‘Nothing,’ I say quickly. ‘We should go.’
I doubt Andronikos would get far in an attempted translation of the Koinamens. But if a Bulgarian dragon were to see the loquisonus machine in Wyvernmire’s tent, recognise it and realise she is trying to listen in on them . . . it would give them an even better reason to destroy Britannia in the same way they murdered the Bulgarian people for trying to exploit their telepathic language. I slip the machine back in the case and catch Atlas watching me curiously. Can he tell that a fleeting idea just flew through my mind, a brief but guilty truth?
A small part of me misses being able to listen to the dragons’ thoughts.
‘Take these,’ Ruth says.
One of the girls appears at her elbow with a small box. Inside are six poison pouches.
A vague memory surfaces of myself at the Bletchley Ball, making small talk with a group of people who were marvelling about how the children on Canna had somehow learned to outsmart the dragons. And now we know how.
‘If you’re about to be eaten, swallow the berries,’ Ruth says. ‘If you can’t save yourself, at least you can stop the dragon from feasting on your friends.’
Ruth was right: Canna House is hard to miss. It stands on one of the island’s surviving roads, a lone, ghostly building that stares out to sea, hidden behind exterior walls climbing with bright green ivy. Daffodils and violets line the path that leads through the overgrown garden, having sprouted as they pleased for decades. I feel strangely nervous. Hollingsworth never mentioned Canna House to me, but Ruth said people used to study dragons here. It seems like a crucial piece of information to leave out. I had assumed the journal she gave me would have all the information I needed to know about the Hebridean Wyverns, but it doesn’t even mention that they’re tunnellers.
The red front door is hanging off its hinges. Atlas slips his gun off his shoulder and the others raise their own.I remember them firing rifles in clumsy desperation as we escaped Bletchley Park. But now they all handle their weapons with expert precision. The past three months have changed them more than I thought. Do I even know them at all?
We enter a dilapidated hallway with a worn, cobwebbed carpet. Empty crates are piled up against the walls, likely raided by Canna’s children years ago. Hanging against the peeling wallpaper is a portrait of a baby, and beside it in its cradle, a dragon egg.
‘We’re looking for an office,’ I say quietly. ‘Somewhere research might be kept.’
We wander from room to room, through several sitting areas and a kitchen covered in dracovol droppings.
‘In here,’ Marquis calls from down the hallway.
He pushes the door open with the end of his gun. A mahogany desk, littered with fishing rods and what looks like an old croquet set, stands in front of a marble fireplace. On the walls are cases full of pinned butterflies and beneath them, someone has left the remains of a meal – a rusting saucepan and a lump of mouldy cheese.
‘Glass cases,’ Serena says, following us in.
She nods to a line of display cabinets on the far side of the room. The glass is still intact, of no interest to any past raiders. Inside the cabinets are hundreds of drawings of dragons, each meticulously labelled. Some are rough sketches but others have been filled in with watercolours and my heart leaps at the sight of them. I see Canna’s lush hills, its craggy cliffs and its blue-green sea, each environment depicted with the dragons that inhabit it – Western Drakes, Sand Dragons andknuckers. Marquis appears at my shoulder and gazes through the glass in a captivated silence. He’s always been good at sketching.
‘There,’ Gideon says, reaching over my shoulder. ‘Wyverns.’
The watercolours of the Hebridean Wyverns contain much more detail than the sketches in Clawtail’s diary. I’ve met Green-Spotted Wyverns before, and Mama told me about the Spider Wyverns of East Asia, but I’ve never seen wyverns like these. They’re a muted, blue-grey colour, standing on two legs, with wings where a dragon’s forelegs would be. The wings are entirely feathered in shades of blue and white, making them resemble giant birds, but sprouting off the wings is a short pair of limbs with four curved talons, the index one triple the size of the others.
But it’s the wyverns’ faces that strike me. Their snouts are rounder than most dragons’ and their eyes are surprisingly large and as blue as a robin’s egg, giving them a soft, almost docile look.
‘What are those?’ Gideon says.
Sketched in at one of the wyverns’ feet is a group of small objects. I peer closer and make out a smooth stone, an ink pen and a spool of coloured wool.
‘Maybe they collect shiny things,’ Serena says.
‘Like you, you mean?’ Gideon says, his eyes on the silver pin in Serena’s hair.
She raises an eyebrow. ‘Like magpies.’
‘Like Bolgoriths,’ I say. ‘But none of this will help us find them.’
I walk over to the desk and begin rummaging through thedrawers, my frustration mounting. I pull out a paperweight, an old clockwork toy and a long-forgotten bottle of whisky.
‘I’ll have that, if you don’t mind,’ Marquis says, taking the bottle from me. He glances around the room. ‘Where’s Atlas?’
