I know zero Arabic and don't expect it to come up again very often, but I'm happy to go over whatever you wind up with in terms of what you think the incantation should mean to look for ambiguities before you render it in French.

Fair enough; I'll definitely take you up on that. I also know zero Arabic, so I'm going to be working off a dictionary and maybe a couple books on tape to get the hang of the pronunciation. Unfortunately I suspect this dialect wouldn't prove useful for talking to existing Arabic-speakers even if I end up with a vocabulary that isn't mostly magic jargon.

If we do manage to get as far as trying to convince critters to drop the masquerade, we might end up needing to interact with ones from other countries. I hope English is as internationally useful as it is among humans, if it comes to that.

Translate translate homework translate. For the first time in many years Margaret is starting to resent school; the ability to make medallions is so close she can taste it. She keeps on top of her schoolwork anyway. Her parents see her learning a third language and pouring every free hour into a research project, and drop their plan of suggesting she get a part-time job.

I think English is internationally useful among critters but there are more critter speaking populations of ultra obscure languages than there are of humans.

Why are you going to learn Arabic rather than use the incantations to scaffold a new incantation in French?

I'm not going to learn Arabic in any meaningful sense; the eventual incantation will be in French. I just need to look up a bunch of word roots and so forth to fill in some of the gaps in what I've got first. I'll just probably end up with some understanding of the grammar along the way. 

Translate translate translate. She starts hearing the tapes in her dreams.

She receives an urgent summons from the Avalon council to appear at noon on Saturday "pursuant to concerns about unsupervised healing experiments on human patients".

Wow, seriously? They must've remembered something else they wanted her to include in her research proposal and decided it was extremely important. Or the kid with the comatose human grandmother blabbed and now she's going to go to Critter Prison, but why would he have done that, and why now? So it's either red tape, or doom. Great. 

She's going to show up, of course. If It's red tape she wants to hear it, if it's doom she wants a lawyer. But first she emails Bella the medallion incantation notes, and the diagrams in lots-of-photos form, with a note saying where she's been summoned, and that it's probably nothing, but that if she disappears would Bella please take over the medallion project?

No reply before she has to show up at the Avalon.

She's there at noon on Saturday, scared stiff but trying not to show it. She's convinced that even if this is about the grandma, the only thing she did wrong was get caught.

"Thank you for coming, Miss Peregrine," says the more talkative of the councilmembers. "We need to know where you were on the eighteenth."

"The eighteenth . . . of this month?" She sounds as bewildered as she feels. At least this can't be about the grandma, that was months ago. But then, what on Earth . . . ? "That would have been, um, a Thursday? Thursdays I go to robotics club after school, and then I go home and eat dinner and do my homework and go to bed."

(She does still go to robotics club once a week, though her heart's not really in it. She can't put "advancing the state of magical knowledge with my awesome dragon powers" on a college application, after all.)

"What time does your club meet?"

"Three-thirty--that's when school lets out--to four-thirty." 

"And in the afternoon you claim you were at home, doing homework and eating dinner?"

"Yes."

She really hopes they don't question her parents about whatever this is. They'll confirm what time she came home, sure, but if one of them slips up and says "dragon" instead of "wyvern" the results could end up being way worse than whatever the punishment for healing a human is.

"Will your parents be able to confirm this for the eighteenth in particular?"

"Yes." It'll be fine. They'll say she was home and nobody will quiz them about their species and the Council will realize this was all some sort of mistake and go away. Definitely.

"Do they have a way to guarantee that you didn't sneak out after claiming to go to bed?"

Given that they haven't asked her about her invisible nighttime flying habit, she's going to guess not. "No, I guess they couldn't prove that, but why would I, what is going on?"

"It said in your summons. You stand accused of, having not completed your review, surreptitiously performing spells on unwitting human subjects at Virginia Mason Hospital."

"I did not do that."

"Do you have any collaborators with access to your artifacts or spells? Has anything been stolen?"

"You're looking for me," says Bella's voice, as she turns visible just behind and to the left of Margaret. "Let her go."

Margaret had just realized that Bella had seen her diagrams and was trying to come up with a technical truth that wouldn't suggest as much when she hears the voice behind her. She jumps about six inches anyway. "You--?"

"I didn't think anybody was paying attention, since this is not the first time, but I guess they might have watchdogs on Virginia Mason in particular and not the other hospitals? Yeah, it was me, and she didn't help me or know about it."

"You are -?" says the councilmember who's been doing the talking, blinking rapidly.

"If you don't already know I'm not clear on my motivation to make your life more convenient, since you seem to think curing cancer is a criminal offense."

Wait. Cancer? Her diagram can't fix cancer. Bella must have made a bigger version and not told her because she was worried about the emails getting read. Or (gulp) because she was afraid Margaret would sell her out. 

She says, barely audible, "Thanks." She means: Thanks for getting some use out of my spell, thanks for daring to heal without any draconic safeguards, thanks for putting yourself at risk to clear my name--thanks, in short, for being incredibly brave.