“Me too.” Stef glanced at Sam, then back to me. “I hear you have quite the story to tell.”
Their attention was unnerving. We’d hardly spoken for weeks, even about Armande’s death, and now everyone was watching me. Waiting. I wanted to look away while I told them about my trip to the prison wall, but I made sure to hold their gazes as I spoke of the climb, playing my minuet to lure the dragons, and the way the sylph had fought for me. I refused to look weak, or like I doubted my actions.
I’d spoken with dragons.
Maybe I could do anything.
Still, the story sounded crazy when I tried explaining the buzzing in my head, the way the sylph had been able to protect me from the volleys of acid, and the urge to jump onto the dragon’s leg while it flew across the valley. “You saw the rest.” I stopped there, not wanting to talk about how I must have looked, yelling and threatening the dragons. “Sam said they haven’t been back at all. Not even to hunt?”
Stef shook her head. “A couple of sylph have been watching the valley just to be sure, but it looks like the dragons aren’t coming back.”
So the dragons had made a decision: no, they wouldn’t help.
I eyed the tent flap, still open and letting in afternoon light. I could just see the edges of our lanterns and solar battery chargers, soaking in the light while it was available. Though we were only a few weeks from the spring equinox—Soul Night—winter kept a tight grip on the land. “I guess it’s not like we expected dragons to agree to anything, anyway.” The admission crushed my pride a little.
“They agreed not to attack us after you threatened them.” Stef gave me a pointed look. “That’s pretty impressive.”
Whit looked up from writing down the last of my story. “Tell us more about the ringing. You said it grew so loud it knocked you out. I thought I heard something like that too.”
I rubbed my ears and nodded. “I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but it must have come from the dragons. They think at one another to communicate, and I was unlucky enough to start picking up on it. It got easier to understand them, like I just needed to practice, but . . .”
Sam leaned toward me and curled his hand over my knee. “They understood our language, it sounds like.”
I hmmed. He was right. Centaurs hadn’t understood us, and their upper halves were human. So why dragons? “Perhaps because their language is thought? Perhaps if I’d focused my thoughts as though I were about to speak, or speaking in my mind and not out loud, they would have understood it the same way, and what I say out loud is inconsequential.”
Whit nodded and wrote more into his notebook. “That seems reasonable. When we speak aloud, we’re organizing our thoughts and sharing them. Dragons may simply pick up on something we’re doing unconsciously.”
That made sense. “I think there’s another level of their language, like we pick up on body movements and facial expressions as a sort of shorthand for what someone truly means.” Having been raised with only Li as an example of this, I wasn’t very good at picking up the subtler signals people gave, but at least I knew now what I was missing and could try to keep up. “But theirs also stands in for words they drop. I think.”
“That’s very interesting.” Whit logged all of that as well. “I think we’ve learned more about dragons in the last twenty minutes than we did in the last twenty quindecs. All we needed was Ana to decide she can talk to anything.”
“Apparently, I’m willing to try.” I twisted my mouth into something like a smile.
“What made you decide to lure them with music?” Sam kept his voice low, like the question was only for the two of us, but the others looked interested, too.
“I’m not sure.” I bit my lip. “It was the loudest sound I could make, but also, everything loves music. Humans, sylph, even the centaurs when I played Phoenix Symphony that night. One of the boys touched my SED and looked—I don’t know—happy. Like he understood it.” Sometimes I felt like everything understood music, or wanted to.
A smile twitched at the corner of Sam’s mouth. “I miss playing music.”
“You can borrow my flute.”
“Ana,” Stef said, “you told Sam you know why the dragons attack him?”
The one with the song.
“I think I know.”
Sam paled, and I couldn’t imagine what was going through his head.