Tsunami shot toward the island where her friends were. The SeaWing was close on her tail. He roared something, but the wind whipped it away so she couldn’t hear it.

She saw Clay wriggle out of the cliff and take to the air. That’s what she needed — backup. With a quick twist of her wings, she aimed for the strip of white sandy beach where she’d wanted to sleep the night before. The other three could stay safely in the cave. She and Clay together could handle this SeaWing.

She hoped.

“Wait!” her pursuer yelled. “Where are you going? What’s wrong?”

Tsunami’s wings missed a beat, and she nearly dropped into the ocean. She swung around, hovering over the sea between the cliff and the beach. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Clay veer into a circle in the air, waiting to see what she would do.

The other SeaWing paused as well. He kept the length of two dragons between him and her. The scratches on his snout were bleeding.

“What’s wrong?” Tsunami cried indignantly. “Didn’t you just attack me?”

“I certainly did not!” he protested. Glowing lines flickered along his snout. “I thought you — that’s the normal —” He seemed to be getting more and more embarrassed. “You said you liked me!” he finally burst out.

“I didn’t say anything of the sort,” Tsunami said, astonished.

The SeaWing’s brow furrowed. “You very clearly said you liked me, and you’d followed me all the way out here to tell me that.”

Tsunami just about fell out of the sky. “You are a delusional squid-brain,” she cried.

“Well, maybe not in those exact words!” he said. “All right, it was a little confusing. Maybe a lot confusing. But the message was in there. And why else would you be chasing me?”

“When, exactly, do you imagine I said all this?” Tsunami demanded. “Shortly after you attacked me, perhaps?”

The other dragon touched his snout gently and winced. “You were the only one doing any attacking,” he said. “I was being friendly after what you said.”

“Stop,” Tsunami said. Maybe she’d misunderstood his actions. Maybe his approach had been a SeaWing greeting ritual she didn’t know. In which case . . . his poor snout. She winced guiltily. Perhaps she shouldn’t have gotten defensive so quickly. “Tell me exactly what you think I said.”

He sighed. “I said, ‘What are you doing all the way out here?’ and you said —” He paused, rubbing his front talons against his head. “You said, ‘Hey, sparkling teeth, I totally love three of your claws but not the others, and I wish your nose was a herring so I could eat it, and also your wings sound like sharks snoring.’ ”

Tsunami burst out laughing.

“All right, I get it,” she said, although she didn’t really. Did all SeaWings have a strange sense of humor? Would she have to develop one, too? “You’re making this up.”

He stared at her. “Are you seriously going to pretend you didn’t say any of that?”

“Of course I didn’t,” Tsunami said. Maybe he wasn’t kidding. Maybe he was mentally unbalanced. “I didn’t say anything at all — we were underwater, remember?”

The strange dragon hovered for several wingbeats, glowing stripes lighting up along his blue scales. His face slowly went from confused to angry as he frowned at her.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“I’m a SeaWing,” she said hotly. “Just like you, so no need to get hostile.”

“A SeaWing who doesn’t speak Aquatic?” he growled. “Not likely. What are you really? How did you make yourself look like a SeaWing?”

Tsunami’s heart sank. Aquatic?

SeaWings have their own language?

Of course they do, she realized. It felt like the tide was going out inside her, leaving nothing but stretches of bare sand. And of course nobody ever bothered to teach it to me. Just one more creative way the Talons found to ruin my life.

Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Three moons, she was as thick as Clay. The dragons of the sea had a whole palace underwater — of course they needed a way to communicate down there. They couldn’t just pop to the surface every time they needed to chat.

She glanced down at her webbed talons and remembered the gestures she’d seen the two SeaWings making while their luminescent stripes flashed. Talon signals and glowing stripes — she must have said all that nonsense with her stripes without realizing it.

But how can I be queen of the SeaWings if I don’t even speak their language?

And why didn’t anyone ever tell me about this?

Clay had never met a dragon of his own kind before. That’s why he knew nothing about MudWings. But Tsunami didn’t have that excuse: one of the guardians who’d raised them had been a SeaWing.

So why, why, had Webs never taught her the SeaWing language or even told her they had one?

All those scrolls about SeaWings . . . now that she thought about it, there was plenty of dialogue in the underwater scenes, like in The Missing Princess when the lost daughter found her parents. Tsunami had always assumed that was a storytelling technique, not an actual underwater language.

She looked up and met the SeaWing’s dark blue eyes. His head was tilted curiously.

“You don’t look guilty,” he observed. “You look sad. And I imagine it would be hard to fake those.” He nodded at the webs between her claws. “So where did you come from, and what’s wrong with you?”

Tsunami bristled. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she snapped. “I just happen to have been raised by idiot —”

His gaze suddenly shifted behind her. “Look out!” he yelled. His tail whipped around and slammed into her, knocking her aside. She spun toward the water, dizzy and shocked. Her wings brushed the ocean waves as she righted herself and turned around.

The strange SeaWing was grappling with Clay up in the sky.

Tsunami gasped. The SeaWing was full-grown, bigger than Clay, and he was not afraid to lash out with teeth, tail, and claws. But she could tell Clay was holding back, worried about hurting a possible ally. He ducked his head between his front talons and tried to dive away, but the SeaWing seized Clay’s tail and dug his talons viciously into Clay’s scales. Clay howled with pain.

The other dragon started to drag him down to the ocean, where he would have all the underwater advantages of SeaWings, and Clay would eventually drown.

“Clay!” Sunny shrieked, launching herself out of the cliff-side cave.

Tsunami got there first. She smacked the SeaWing over the head with her tail, seized his wing in her talons, and yanked him away from Clay when he turned around in surprise. He tried to spin around her to get back to his prey, but she blocked him with her wings and lashed out at his snout again. He flinched back, and that was enough time for Clay to scramble out of reach.

“What are you doing?” the SeaWing yelled at Tsunami. “I’m saving you from that MudWing!”

“Well, don’t!” Tsunami yelled back. “He’s my friend!”

“But —”

Sunny slammed into the back of the SeaWing, landing between his wings and wrapping her talons around his neck. “Leave him alone!” she panted.

The SeaWing looked more astonished than alarmed. He wriggled his shoulders and twisted his neck, trying to see what was on his back. Sunny kicked his wing, and he yelped.

“That’s my other friend,” Tsunami said. “Sunny, try not to hurt him too badly. We need his help.”

“I hardly think this gnat is going to hurt me,” the SeaWing growled.

Sunny kicked him again. “Promise me you won’t attack Clay,” she said.

His eyes went to the brown dragon circling just above them. Clay rubbed his head anxiously.

“The MudWings are our enemies,” the SeaWing snarled at Tsunami. “If you don’t know that, then you’d better leave the Bay of a Thousand Scales before Queen Coral’s army finds you and does what they always do to traitors.”

“I’m not a traitor,” Tsunami said. “And Clay is not your enemy.” She glanced up at him, then back at the SeaWing. “You’d better learn some respect, squid-brain. We’re the dragonets of destiny.”