Page 32 of The Teacup Dragon Sanctuary

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked, suddenly afraid something had happened to Jade and she’d been locked away in here.

‘Everyone’s stable,’ he told her. ‘Your family and friends are all having dinner. I thought you might be hungry.’

Her stomach instantly betrayed her by rumbling loudly. As she moved, her back and shoulders joined in the protest and she had to twist her neck to work out the sudden kink.

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I suppose I am. Thank you.’

He smiled that maddeningly attractive smile. She ate the stew and soft bread without really tasting it while Noah watched her and she tried not to think about him. And failed.

‘You should get some sleep,’ he said at last.

‘I have too much work to do.’

‘You’re exhausted, Portia.’ He was using that voice, the one you wanted to listen to, that told you that if you just relaxed and did what he said then surely everything would be all right.

Of course she was exhausted, but she had worked through exhaustion before. And she would again. She had to.

‘Did you talk to Seb?’

‘Yes, he suggested that the answer might lie in your own work rather than your uncle’s book. Something about prime threads.’

‘In our work?’ She blinked, trying to figure that one out. Because it hadn’t occurred to her. The answer had to lie in Art’s book. He knew about dragons and her studies – her and Milo’s research – were about… ‘Thaumaturgical fields,’ she murmured. ‘Not prime threads though. That’s an ancient theory. They disproved that ages ago. But the fields, I can work with that.’

With a burst of excitement, she grabbed the letter from Milo and scanned it again, past the apologies and the promises, past the excuses and explanations, to the last section. She threw the rest of it on the floor and studied that bit.

The results of Milo’s latest experiments. Mostly, he complained about the whole problem of having to do it all without her, but she skipped that as well. Milo had mentioned fluctuations he’d observed in the field under certain conditions which might have something to do with emotion, or could be naturally occurring. They all knew that magic depended on location for power. The island was famous for it. The same spell performed in two different places could have different degrees of strength in the outcome. And hadn’t she seen something in Art’s book about the island itself and its points of power? Lines in the land, he’d called it. No, threads…

She flicked through the book again, trying to find the right place, her magic turning the pages faster than her hands could.

Noah gathered up the dinner things and returned them to the tray. He must have left without a sound because she didn’t realise he’d gone for some time.

* * *

Portia worked through the night. She didn’t mean to. Noah was right, she was exhausted, but now that she was actually on the trail of something she couldn’t let it go. What if the idea lost that tantalising shape it had taken in the back of her mind, not quite formed, not yet, but there nonetheless. There was definitely something there.

Why hadn’t she thought of her own work to begin with? She had been considering it in terms of something that had happened to the dragons, rather than something that had happened to the magic surrounding them, but now… now…

The next section of the book was mainly botanical drawings and she flicked through them in search of text, but when she tried to turn the page again it seemed to freeze, the whole book vibrating.

Like it was trying to tell her something.

The page featured a tiny white flowering plant that had been painted by someone else. Not Art. It looked like her mother’s work. Something caught in Portia’s throat. All of these pictures had been painted by her mother. It had been a particular talent of hers, botanical art. She’d painted those plants she had gathered from across the realms. Portia stared at this one until it blurred with the tears forming in her eyes.

She had let them down so badly. All of them. They’d be so disappointed in her.

Portia forced herself to blink back the tears. She didn’t have time for this. Melancholy and regrets were no use to her. Neither were paintings of pretty flowers and…

Art had written in the lower corner of the page, detailed notes of the plant, its nature, its properties, possible uses, and a recipe.

A Universal Restorative.

Those words made her heart leap. She read rapidly. She’d need the flower itself. It was a key ingredient but it grew here on the island – a moonflower. Not a common plant by any means but not very rare. It loved the woodlands behind the castle. Art’s notes said to harvest it at night where it was attuned to the prime thread of the island. She could do that right now. The techniques weren’t so different from those for the elixir she and Milo had been working on, that blending of mundane ingredients and the thaumaturgical forces around them. She’d need to tap into a thaumaturgical field to complete it but that wasn’t a problem either. She was a living breathing one of those.

…attuned to the prime thread of the island…

No, wait… A prime thread? Here? That didn’t make any sense. Prime threads were theoretical really, more folklore than science, lines of thaumaturgical power in the land itself, and yes, there were stories of them in places of great importance but…

‘An archaic theory,’ her professor of magical history had told her, long ago, when she had first arrived at the Academy and had been forced to sit through his tedious ramblings as every new student was, ‘but imagine that the land itself is a living entity. Like all of you, it had magic running through its veins, some greater, some lesser. And those veins run through the world. Our forebears believed that they could be drawn up and used, that there were certain beings born with a connection to them, who could manipulate and use such power. One of the theories of dragons was that they could sense those threads and follow them, that they gathered them together and their stronghold in Elanholm was a source of such threads and therefore the greatest source of magic. But alas, such knowledge has been lost to us. Or more likely these stories are but myths.’