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.
“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.
“When they asked me to play for them again, they had another conversation among themselves. One was worried I had ‘the song.’ Another said he couldn’t see it in me.” I shook my head, trying to recall exactly how the dragons had worded it, but my headache had been so powerful. The way my ears rang had made it hard to focus. “They were testing me. And then when they noticed you all on the cliff, one said, ‘The one with the song,’ and they all got worried. They could see it in you. They tried to lie to me then, saying they were getting rid of my distraction so I would play for them more, but—”
“But they came to kill me.” Sam’s voice was low and terribly even. “I’m the one with the song.”
I nodded.
“I thought they liked music.” Whit studied him. “Why kill Sam if they like music?”
“Because of what song he has. The song is the weapon. I mistranslated the symbols from the books. I thought it was a weapon they possessed, but it’s not. It’s a weapon they’re terribly afraid of.”
Whit snorted. “And that’s Sam.”
We all looked at Sam, who sat hugging his knees and biting his lip. Stubble darkened his chin, and black hair breezed above his eyes. “I don’t feel like a weapon,” he said after a minute.
“You don’t look like one either,” Whit replied.
I rubbed my temples, trying to piece together all their clues. “The weapon is the phoenix song. They were afraid Sam would use it against them.”
“What’s the phoenix song?” Whit looked at Sam, who shook his head and seemed lost.
“The only music I have involving phoenixes is Phoenix Symphony, but I wrote that long after dragons started making my death their priority.” Sam shoved his fingers through his hair. “Unless dragons can see possibilities of the future like phoenixes, I don’t think that’s the phoenix song they’re worried about.”
“They’re convinced the phoenix song can destroy them,” I said. “One at a time. All at once. I don’t know. It seems to me they should be more concerned about actual phoenixes coming around and singing at them.” But real phoenixes didn’t kill, so maybe they weren’t a danger after all. “Phoenixes don’t exactly travel far from their jungles, though, do they?”
One of the sylph shook its head. Cris. -The last time phoenixes emerged from their jungle was to curse the sylph.-
“Five thousand years ago,” Stef muttered. “So it’s not Phoenix Symphony, and they’re not worried about actual phoenixes. Because actual phoenixes aren’t a danger. But anyone else who knows the song is in trouble.”
“And that’s me,” Sam said.
I touched his hand. “That doesn’t seem fair.” Not that the dragons appeared to care much about fair anyway.
Something else the dragons had said, though, about my asking them not to destroy Sam, but also asking them to do it . . .
The thought flew away.
“I wish I could say it makes me feel better to know I have the power to destroy dragons.” Sam grabbed his water bottle and turned it in his hands. “I’d feel better if I had any idea what this phoenix song actually is and how to use it.”
“Would you use it?” I asked. It was strange, imagining Sam going out and singing at dragons until they were no more. The Sam I knew wasn’t that callous. He’d applauded my compassion when I couldn’t kill Deborl—though I had no doubt he would have shot Deborl if he’d been given the chance. Not after seeing him the night of the earthquake, when Mat had attacked us in the washroom. Sam had killed him and others. There was a darker side to Sam than the one I knew. There were thousands of years to Sam. I’d never know all of him. But he wasn’t a murderer.
“I don’t know,” he said at last.
“Well, I hate to be the one to bring it up.” Stef’s expression was hard. “But in spite of Ana’s success in speaking to the dragons, I don’t think they’re going to help us.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“What’s our next step?”
No one looked at me.
I looked at my hands.
Very slowly, Sam said, “What if we did know the phoenix song?”
The tent went quiet.
“Rather, what if”—Sam set his water bottle on the ground in front of him—“we let the dragons believe we know it in order to persuade them to help us with Ana’s original plan: use the poison, get the dragons to destroy the temple, and hopefully keep Janan from ever having a chance to ascend.”
I didn’t like that hopefully in there. It still sounded so unlikely, though it wasn’t as if anyone else had other suggestions. And now Sam was thinking up ways to make my idea happen again.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Relieved, because he believed in me? Horrified, because he’d risk his life pretending he knew something he didn’t? What if Acid Breath called his bluff?
“No,” I whispered.
Everyone looked at me.
“For one, we’d have to go after the dragons. They haven’t returned here. They can make the trip much more quickly than we can. We won’t have time to get back to Menehem’s lab and the poison if we have to go searching for dragons, too. Already, we’ll have to hike extra hours to get there in time.