Chapter 4 #2
‘You seem to know a lot for a dragon who only got here a few months ago,’ I say dryly.
It’s meant to be sarcasm, but the dragon’s mouth immediately stretches into a grin so wide it looks menacing. I almost stumble backwards in surprise. The Bulgarian Bolgorith is smiling.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I did my research.’
It feels unnatural, comical even. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Chumana smile.
‘You know you’re not here for a friendly visit, don’t you?’ I say.
The Bolgorith snaps at a fly. ‘I was conscripted here at the orders of the Regal Krasimir, but I have my own reasons for coming to Britannia.’
I frown. Why is this dragon being so talkative? Bolgoriths are meant to be hostile and aggressive, and yet this one is as cordial as a diplomat.
‘What’s a regal?’
‘Bulgaria is divided up between the great dragon regals,’ she replies, her voice deep and warm. ‘They are the strongest, most respected dragons, those who glitter in the jewels that make up their vast hoards.’ She looks at me from beneath impossibly long eyelashes. ‘What is your name?’
Does she not realise that we are enemies?
That she is part of a foreign army threatening to turn my country into a new Bulgaria?
My eyes run along the length of her body, which is solid and strong, her scales slick and shiny without a single one missing.
I doubt she has ever seen battle. From the shore, Wyvernmire beckons me towards the boat.
I don’t move. ‘Vivien,’ I reply. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Daria.’
‘I wish I could say it’s a pleasure to meet you,’ I say in Slavidraneishá. ‘But it’s not.’
Making a sudden switch to a different language is a way to test people, to gauge what they think of you by disarming them, catching them unawares. But Daria doesn’t even flinch.
‘They sent word about you,’ she says. She watches a gull soar across the sky.
Goranov has echolocated to other Bolgoriths about my arrival? But we’re miles from London. How could the Koinamens have stretched so far?
‘You’re the brasstongue from Bletchley Park, the place where the Bulgarian-British alliance was made.’
There’s that word again.
Brasstongue.
‘What does that mean?’
The old man waves frantically from the boat and I see Wyvernmire’s face grow taut with impatience.
‘A human who speaks many dragon tongues. Sometimes you can be useful. But most of the time you are . . . dangerous. In my country, there is not a single one left.’
‘That’s because you murdered everyone,’ I spit.
Daria’s amber eyes blink twice and I think she’s about to reply when the old man bellows across the sand. ‘Come on!’
Daria flicks her tail towards him. ‘Go. The rebel dragons are almost here.’
She must be hearing their echolocation calls.
‘You would do well to cooperate with your Prime Minister until you reach the island,’ she continues. ‘But then you must escape. If you wait until you are under Bulgarian guard, it will be too late.’
I turn to her. ‘Why would you tell me that? I’m a rebel human. You’re a Bulgarian dragon.’
Her red tongue flickers inside her mouth. ‘You remind me of a survivor I once met in the motherland. I quite liked him.’
A survivor? In Bulgaria?
I walk towards the water. ‘Bye.’
‘Goodbye, brasstongue.’
My feet squelch into the algae-covered mud of the shallows. The old man helps Wyvernmire into the boat before offering me his hand. ‘Do ye’ want to be food for the dragons, wean?’
The boat is long and wooden, heavily varnished with leather seats and a steering wheel. It’s the type used for pleasure-sailing, not war.
‘Welcome aboard,’ the old man says. ‘I’m Craig.’
I take a seat. ‘Are you a turncoat, Craig?’ I ask calmly.
He laughs as Wyvernmire sits down next to me, her lip curling at the mud and water we have trailed across the deck.
‘What makes ye’ say that?’
‘Mainland Scotland is controlled by rebels, but this piece of Skye that sits just across from the Small Isles is conveniently unguarded.’ I look across the water at Daria, who is still watching us.
‘So my guess is that you are the guard, and you’ve turned your station into another access route for the Prime Minister’s Guardians. ’
Craig raises an eyebrow at Wyvernmire. ‘Clever little thing, isn’t she?’
‘The rebels will realise what you’re doing soon,’ I say.
‘Course they will,’ Craig replies. ‘Scotland’s PM is a right dragon-lover. But in the meantime—’
‘You support her because you don’t like dragons?’ I interrupt, gesturing to Wyvernmire. ‘You know we’ve only seen a fraction of the Bulgarian dragons about to invade Britannia, don’t you?’
Craig sniffs. ‘They only think they’re in power. Prime Minister Wyvernmire will bide her time, use them to put the country back to rights, then send them on their way.’
‘Right you are, Craig,’ Wyvernmire says softly. ‘Now . . . to Canna?’
I sit back in disbelief. What is it about politics that make people believe only what they want to believe? The boat speeds off across the water and I watch Daria get smaller until she is just a black pinprick in the distance.
The sun is high in the sky by the time Craig says we’re near the archipelago of islands I read about in the library at Bletchley Park, the one I first saw from Marquis’s plane. I hear the roaring before I see the first island.
‘Sound travels faster across water than it does land,’ Craig calls out, and I’m reminded of the way ultrasound travels more easily through glass.
A few moments later, he points to Rùm. It appears on the left side of the boat, a mountainous, barren island made of rock and black sand.
I know from the maps I’ve studied that this dragon nesting ground is sandwiched between two other islands: Canna, controlled by Wyvernmire, and Eigg, home to the rebels.
I instinctively shrink back from the sheer size of it, and at the sight of several Sand Dragons basking on a small beach.
They could well be Ignacia’s, and I am travelling with the woman who betrayed her.
Craig cuts the motor and lets the boat drift, steering it quietly around the island so that we come so close to the rock I could reach out and touch it.
A creeping fear tingles across the back of my neck.
With the Peace Agreement broken, a dragon could kill us now and get away with it.
Stones and hot ash fall down into the boat and when I look up, I see what must be the edge of a nest built halfway up a cliff.
Craig veers the boat back towards open waters and starts the motor again, and we glide through a cloud of afternoon mist until I spot another land mass, this one a long, horizontal stretch across the water.
‘Welcome to Wean Island,’ Craig says.
‘Wean?’
‘A Scots word for child,’ he says with a wink.
Child Island.
Craig is referring to the Peace Agreement’s imprisonment of so-called criminal children on Canna, left there as food for Ignacia’s dragons as part of a secret clause.
‘That’s barbaric,’ I spit.
‘It’s the concept that’s barbaric, lass, not the name for it.’
I stare across the water at Canna. It’s flatter and greener than Rùm and covered in white dots which, as we get closer, I realise are grazing sheep.
It looks idyllic, far safer than Rùm, but I know the opposite is true.
I feel a lurch of dread in my stomach. How long have I been begging Hollingsworth to send me here, desperate to finally set foot on the land where Clawtail once walked, to see the home of the Hebridean Wyverns with my own eyes?
But now I’m here, I suddenly want to be back in London.
Because at least if Hollingsworth had deemed me ready, she would have sent me to Canna with a pack of supplies.
A team for protection. And, crucially, with more information than I currently have on the wyverns, like why they are the key to winning the war.
I shrink back in my seat, smoothing down the thin material of my office trousers, as I realise how woefully unprepared I am.
We sail around one side of the island, keeping to the edges of the cliff faces. Someone has scrawled across them with a black liquid, the words half-painted, half-smeared.
The rebels were supposed to liberate the children left on Canna.
Have they done so already? As we skim the shoreline I begin to recognise the shape of the island from the descriptions in Clawtail’s journal.
Attached to Canna is what looks like a second expanse of land, sprawling across the water as if Canna has sprouted a wing.
It’s a tidal island called Sanday, linked to Canna by sandbanks and only accessible at low tide.
We approach a small bay that embraces a body of water and to its right is a circle of rocks where boats are docked.
I stare out across the rolling hills beyond and spot several Guardians marching through the fields towards us.
They reach us as I’m stepping out of the boat.
‘Prime Minister Wyvernmire,’ one of them says as they all raise their visors. ‘We have come to escort you to the camp.’
He takes the Prime Minister’s bag and pushes it into the arms of another Guardian before reaching out a hand to help Wyvernmire out of the boat.
‘Wonderful. As you can see,’ she says with a glance at me, ‘I have unfortunately been forced to play the role of prison warden.’
‘Ma’am, we would have sent someone—’
‘Please ensure she is escorted at all times.’
The Guardians eye me suspiciously as the motorboat sputters to life again. I turn to watch Craig speed away.
Rùm looms just across the water, closer to Canna than I thought it would be.
I think of the children sent here to be eaten by the dragons nesting on Rùm and feel sick.
It would take a dragon about a minute to fly the distance between the two islands.
Back when I was staying on Eigg, sharing a guesthouse room with Ursa, Rùm was so much further away – a distant, abstract threat.
I look for the rebel headquarters now, hoping to catch a glimpse of the island where I left my sister, but it’s concealed behind Rùm’s mountains of rock.
‘This way, miss,’ says the Guardian holding Wyvernmire’s bag.
The face behind the white helmet is young and almost apologetic.
I wonder if he knows who I am. I follow him up a winding chalk pathway.
I can hear the steady sound of birdsong I don’t recognise, a constant squeaking that Clawtail must have heard each day when he lived here, and realise they must be the oyster-catchers he described.
I find the thought vaguely comforting as I follow the Guardians in their white suits.
We climb over a wooden fence and walk down a steep path, treading carefully around twisted tree roots and across sloping ground.
Below us is a beach, completely invisible from the direction in which we approached the island.
It’s formed of dark, damp sand and is covered in green army tents, stacked up as close to the cliff face as possible to stay dry from the incoming tide.
I can see Rùm from here, too, and the far end of Sanday.
We walk across the compact sand and come to a stop outside the biggest tent.
It’s guarded by a Bulgarian dragon with a tattered wing.
It leers at me, and I’m suddenly reminded of Daria’s words.
If you wait until you are under Bulgarian guard, it will be too late.
Wyvernmire disappears into the tent and a moment later I’m being pushed through the same flap.
I almost scream as a dragon’s head appears at my shoulder, its black eyes staring, its yellow teeth caked in glue.
There are a dozen of them, ancient, taxidermy heads that hang down from the high ceiling, sewn up at the neck and suspended by long strings.
They’re all wyverns, I realise. The wyverns that decorated the office at 10 Downing Street a mere few months ago, the ones I hoped Chumana’s fire would burn.
‘Familiar surroundings. How thoughtful of you.’
It takes me a moment to realise who Wyvernmire is talking to. The dim light from the oil lamp illuminates a small table and behind it, two people are waiting. The first is a tall man with olive skin and long, dark curls. When my eyes land on the second, horror settles in my bones.
His face seems to pale at the sight of me.
I take him in – shiny Guardian uniform and smooth, white hands.
They hover over something on the desk, trembling as if the object is too precious to touch.
I feel a nervous swoop in my stomach. The contraption is small and made of steel, with a few more dials than I’m used to.
But I know what it is. Just like the face of Atlas’s murderer, I could recognise one anywhere.
Ralph Wyvernmire has a loquisonus machine.