“I saw.” He was somewhen else for a moment. “I saw you on the wall. When I woke and found your note”—he tensed all over—“I saw that your things were gone, too. Your flute. Your SED. Your sleeping bag. Everything. I thought you weren’t coming back.”
“You were supposed to go home.”
He snorted and shook his head. “No, I would never leave you. No matter how afraid I am of dragons, losing you scares me more.” He shifted closer to me, just a little. Enough that our knees touched. “I woke the others and called out for you, hoping you hadn’t gone far. Hoping you would hear.”
“I left just after midnight. By the time the sun rose, I was already on top of the wall. I wouldn’t have heard you calling in the forest.” Maybe when he’d been on the cliff, though. I’d heard something I thought was forest animals, but now that I thought of it, the noises could have been voices.
Sam slid one hand forward and touched my ankle, all caution in his movements. “When we finally read your note again, it was obvious you meant to find the dragons, but not where you were going. So we kept searching and found the cliff, and when we looked north, we saw the dragon perched on the wall. And you were lying in front of it, sylph all around you.”
His voice had deepened, heavy with the things he wasn’t saying. I finished his thought. “You feared it had killed me.”
“Yes.” His voice was wretched. “Yes, I was certain. You were lying across your backpack. You looked broken. You weren’t moving. I couldn’t imagine how you were still alive.”
I rubbed my head, still sensitive after the falls and the shriek of dragons’ voices. If not for the sylph, I would have been dead.
“But then you got up, and I couldn’t understand what you were saying, but I could hear your voice. I wanted to fly across the valley to you, even if it meant I had to face the dragon, too.” He took a long breath. “Then you started playing your flute, and the sylph were singing with you. The sylph you’d left with us started singing, too. It was amazing. You were amazing.”
I ducked my face to hide my blush.
“What happened to you on that wall?”
I took a long breath. “This is probably something everyone needs to hear, but I think I know what the dragons’ weapon is. And why dragons always attack you.”
His expression darkened. “Why?”
Haltingly, I rested my fingertips on his knuckles. His hand was still on my ankle, just barely. “Because they don’t have the weapon. I mistranslated those lines in the book. You are the weapon.”
I didn’t feel well enough to explain everything twice, so Sam went to fetch the others. I ate another bowl of soup, a little more confident in my ability to keep it down. My muscles and bones still ached whenever I moved, but the movement did help.
While I ate and stretched, sylph came in, warming the air that had cooled in their absence. Cris trilled comfortingly as he dropped into the natural shadows with the other sylph, and I managed a smile.
“Did it hurt you?” I asked. “Absorbing the acid to protect me?”
Cris rippled, like a shrug. -Our powers seem limitless at first. We can absorb tremendous amounts of energy. But yes, like Menehem’s poison hurt the others, the acid hurt. The pain fades and we recover, but too much at once might do irreparable damage.-
I lowered my eyes. “I’ll try not to rush into danger from now on.”
He trilled, a laugh. -Sure.-
“I mean it.”
-We are your army. We’ll protect you, no matter the pain or cost. That is all you need to concern yourself with.-
He meant it, too. They would do anything for me. I wasn’t sure I liked the burden of their commitment and confidence. They believed I could help redeem them, but what if I couldn’t? The thought of disappointing them was unbearable.
When Sam returned with Stef and Whit, they each gave me a long, appraising look and didn’t comment when Sam sat near me. Not next to me. Not touching, as he had been. But near. It was enough for now.
“I’m glad you’re back, Ana.” Whit flashed a smile. “And unhurt.”
“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.