He jumps as a wyvernling appears at his side, wearing aharness made to carry glasses filled with a golden liquid. His wings flutter beneath the weight of it and he rises just above the ground.
‘A honeyed wine, for erudite dreams,’ Aodahn says. His tail intertwines with the wyvernling’s and gently tugs him back down to the ground. He lets out a purr as Aodahn gestures to Marquis to take a glass.
‘Th-thank you,’ he stutters to the wyvernling.
Atlas and I walk back to the chamber together, hand in hand down the hot tunnels.
‘These are the oddest dragons I’ve ever met,’ I say. ‘My mama would be fascinated. I wish she could see them. Their tapestries, their memory scrolls, theirwine. Dragons who make art, it’s . . . What’s wrong?’
Atlas is walking with his eyes on the ground, his mouth set in a tight line. ‘Sorry?’ he says, as if I’ve woken him from sleep. ‘Nothing, I’m fine.’ He looks up and gives me what he must mean to be a reassuring smile. ‘It’s a lot to take in.’
We curl up beneath tweed blankets and the feeling of lying in his arms is so strange that my body responds to his slightest movement. His face is buried in my hair, his hands placed firmly above the blankets. But as my mind begins to drift and my breathing slows, I feel him slip away, gently extracting his arm from under me, to sit by the fire. He feels uncomfortable lying next to me, I think as my heart hammers silently inside my chest. There’s something different about him. An inwardness – a turmoil – that has replaced the confidence he had back at Bletchley. He isn’t sure about us, not any more. We’ve never really defined whatweare, after all. We’ve noteven spoken about all that happened between us when we were Wyvernmire’s prisoners.
I think of the reckless abandon with which he kissed me back in the forest, of how natural it felt to walk across the island hand in hand. But if those things were real, then why do I get the impression that Atlas is more of a stranger to me than I thought?
‘HOW DID YOU BRING THE LOQUISONUS machine inside without getting it wet?’ I ask Abelio.
His request to show him how it works came at the crack of dawn, and Cindra barely has time to nudge a cup of herbal tea towards me before Abelio is leading me through the tunnels.
‘We have several tunnel entrances,’ Abelio says. ‘One thing you will learn about wyverns is that we are resourceful.’
He has a spring in his step and I realise that our cultural exchange has officially begun. My dread rises as I follow him, the loquisonus machine in my arms. The time has come to lie, to pretend that the loquisonus is a tunnel detector that I can teach Abelio to use, while somehow convincing him to help me win this war. I catch a glimpse of Gideon inside a chamber, looking pale as Aodahn animatedly interrogates him on his knowledge of French. Abelio leads me past the cave with the pool entrance and down another tunnel. We climb up a steep slope towards a tall, vertical line of light.
‘Here.’
Abelio creeps through a gap in the rocks, the same sort of entrance that led to Ruth’s tunnels, and I press the loquisonus machine to my chest as we climb through. We’re standing on top of a grassy sand dune and behind us is what looks like a cave entrance blocked by a rockfall. You’d never guess it leads to an intricate underground tunnel system.
‘Where are we?’ I ask.
‘The north side of the island still, but facing west,’ Abelio says.
I stare out across the island in the direction of Wyvernmire’s camp, but the view is blocked by hills and mist. Is she still sending her Guardians and dragons out to look for me? Does she know we’re searching for the Hebridean Wyverns on this side of the island? Will she come this far?
‘A demonstration?’ Abelio says politely.
It’s not a suggestion.
I set the loquisonus on the ground, keeping an eye out for dragon-shaped shadows.
‘Did you always live on this part of the island?’ I ask him. ‘Even before you went underground?’
‘Yes,’ Abelio replies. ‘We have always been private creatures and the proximity of the opposite side of Canna to the other islands does not appeal to us, especially during the nesting season, when Rùm is overflowing.’
‘So when Clawtail lived with you, it was here?’
I fiddle with the dial on the loquisonus, waiting for his answer.
‘Of course,’ he replies.
The government has been here before, then. This must be where they killed him. I hand Abelio the headphones.They’re much too small for his head.
‘You can press these to your ear,’ I tell him. ‘They’re for listening.’
He gives me a curious look as he takes them. I flick the switch and the loquisonus machine whirrs. Abelio recoils as the crackling noise fills the headphones, but it’s quickly replaced by the steady musicality of the Koinamens as I find the correct frequency. The machine is designed to convert echolocation into a series of sounds audible to the human ear, and so while Abelio can hear the sounds through the headphones, they in no way resemble what he, an echolocating dragon, hears when communicating telepathically.
He has no idea he’s listening to a transmuted version of the dragons’ most sacred tongue.
I pick the machine up and gesture to him to walk with me towards the cave entrance.
