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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