‘Featherswallow?’ Serena hisses.
I suddenly remember we don’t have to rely on body language to communicate.
‘Nà foin,’ I try to say, wincing at my pronunciation. ‘We are sorry to intrude.’
I must have said it wrong, because a low growl sounds from the wyvern’s throat. Its foretalons snap together like a pair of monstrous scissors.
The others follow suit, emitting shrieks that echo through the cave. I tread water and see the alarm on Marquis’s face. There’s nowhere to escape to. These wyverns could tear us to pieces here in this pool and no one would ever know. Explorers will find our skeletons years from now, buried in the rock, and think we were looking for food or shelter.
‘Fasgadh!’ I shout. ‘We needfasgadh.’
The wyverns fall silent.
I remember the word from Clawtail’s journal. It’s Gaelic, but borrowed by the wyverns as part of their tongue, and meansshelter. And they take it seriously. Immediately, their wings drop and their heads bow.
‘Hva thu tha?’ the wyvern snarls. ‘Who are you?’
When I hear Cannair spoken out loud for the first time, the puzzle pieces click together inside my head. It’s like hearing sheet music played by a virtuoso on a fine-tuned instrument, when you’ve only ever heard the notes stabbed at on a broken piano. It’s as melodious as Gaelic and as smooth as whisky.
‘Tell it we’re not invading,’ Marquis whispers.
‘I . . . We are . . . friends,’ I stutter in Cannair, my mind grasping at the vocabulary I learned from the journal.
The wyverns blink.
‘Gideon,’ Atlas says quietly. ‘You’re a polyglot, too. Don’t you speak Scottish? Maybe it’s similar.’
‘Cannair is descended from Scottish Gaelic, not Scots,’ I snap. ‘They’re two different languages.’
‘And yet somehow neither of you speak either of them,’ Serena whispers shrilly.
I steady my breathing and try to block out their voices as I picture Clawtail’s writings on linguistics.
‘We are . . . friends of Patrick Clawtail,’ I say.
The first wyvern takes a step forward and the scant daylight illuminates the white scars across his face. Most of his wing feathers are white, but some are a luminescent, royal blue.
‘Patrick Clawtail is dead,’ he snarls in Cannair.
Relief crashes over me. The wyvern understood what I said. I smile smugly at Serena. Does she not realise what an important moment this is?
‘Yes,’ I say with a shiver. ‘But we have the journal he wrote when he soughtfasgadhwith you. That is where I learned Cannair.’
A second wyvern comes forward, this one younger with silver mottling on her blue scales.
‘You learned it,’ she says tentatively, ‘from . . . paper?’
I nod.
The second wyvern says something to the first, who has smoke rising from his nostrils. He glances at the tunnel entrance hidden beneath the water, then back at me.
‘You lie,’ he says. ‘Patrick would never have written of our location.’
This wyvern looks old. Did he know Clawtail personally?
‘No,’ I say quickly. ‘We found your tunnels with a . . . machine.’
‘A machine?’ he says slowly. ‘A human-built machine that detectsskugvels?’
