Page 105 of Dragon’s Ending

He grinned at me, and then shifted.

I didn’t think I would ever become used to the beauty of it. The flash of pure white scales in the darkness, moonlight catching along the curve of his wings as his dragon emerged. He launched himself into the sky a heartbeat later, those powerful wings seeming to lift him without effort.

My dragon surged joyfully. I leapt after Ben, wings wide in the night air. Cold swept past me, clean and exhilarating, and below us Dragon’s Ending no longer felt like a prison waiting for my return. The house, the family, the future—all of it was still complicated, still uncertain.

But for the first time I could remember, I didn’t want to fly away from it.

Ben banked sharply beneath the moon, bright against the darkness, and I folded my wings to dive after him.

Epilogue

THREE MONTHS LATER

BEN

I sat eating a mince pie and watching my boyfriend get battered to death.

“You’ve outdone yourself, Glenys,” I told her as she whisked past, on a mission to deliver more sausage rolls to the Gruffydd family representatives. It seemed she would sooner die than have other families suspect the Bedwyrs didn’t know how to entertain.

“There’s a plate with Dominic’s name on it, once he’s finished rolling around on the floor,” she told me.

It still startled me sometimes, how much lighter Dragon’s Ending felt now. Glenys calling both Rhodri and Dominic by their first names was just one of the changes there’d been. Apparently, she’d been minding her own business in the kitchen one day and turned around to find Rhodri trying to make himself a cup of tea.

Her horror at his being in the one room in the house he’d never before ventured into had been forgotten as she stopped him rooting around in the tinned goods cupboard—honestly, men—and brandished the tea caddy at him. And then, tea made, he’d sat down at the kitchen table and asked her if there was anything she needed for the house.

“So I got a brand new vacuum and a Thermomix,” she’d declared. “It’s not like I even needed the Thermomix, as I told Rhodri, but it’ll make my life easier.”

Dominic seemed, finally, to have died. His death throes had been suitably prolonged and dramatic, but the horde of small dragon children had at last stopped beating him with their plastic swords. Teddy had claimed Dominic’s foil-covered cardboard shield as a prize and was now parading round with it.

“Who wants to play Musical Dragons?” Rae asked, and a huge cheer went up.

We’d invited the Gruffydd dragonets for a Christmas party. The great hall had been decorated with paper chains and an enormous tree, and mistletoe. Lots of mistletoe, which Dominic appeared to have hung in all sorts of unexpected places, judging by the fact it was impossible for me to get more than ten feet across the hall without getting snogged within an inch of my life.

Apparently the tree was tradition, but the rest of it? Brand new, and all Dominic’s doing. The Gruffydd invitation was very new, and Rhodri and Dominic had talked about it for some time before agreeing.

“Come on, St George,” I said, wandering over and toeing Dominic’s theatrically collapsed body. “I think the dragons won this one.”

He sat up and grinned at me, and one of these days he was going to break my heart with how beautiful he was. With how happy he was now.

Around us, the hall was descending steadily further into chaos. Someone had put Christmas music on, Laura was attempting to enforce the rules of Musical Dragons with the grim determination of a tiny dictator, and Teddy had apparently decided to wear Dominic’s shield on his head.

Near the front door, Dafydd and Rhys were engaged in a deeply serious conversation about rugby training cones. That was another of Dominic’s ideas. Rhodri hadn’t balked at his suggestion of turning the flat area by the lower field into a rugby pitch. “You can do whatever you want there,” he’d said to Dominic. Then, presumably, he’d remembered who he was talking to. “Within reason.”

“There goes my idea for a medieval jousting stadium that blasts Swedish death metal whenever someone falls off their horse,” Dominic had grumbled.

Now, every Saturday morning, the place was full of young Bedwyrs, many of whom travelled in from further-flung parts of the family to be there. Dafydd and Rhys coached them with all the intensity of an international final. Meanwhile, Dominic stood on the freezing, muddy sidelines, yelling enthusiastic encouragement along with tactical advice. Which might have been helpful had he understood more than about fourteen percent of the rules.

And then, on Sundays, the pitch was open to adult dragons and humans from local villages to play. Rhodri had been very clear that humans’ access to the pitch was only permitted on a Sunday. At all other times, the estate remained closed. Dragons were still dragons, after all, and nobody wanted an accidental territorial incident.

Across the hall, I caught sight of Rhodri standing in the open doorway of his study, a whisky glass loose in one hand as he watched the mayhem unfolding in front of him.

He wasn’t smiling exactly. But he looked more relaxed than I’d ever seen him before, as though he was finally beginning to understand that allowing joy into Dragon’s Ending didn’t mean everything would unravel.

Dominic kissed me. “Mistletoe,” he said, pointing upwards at an entirely bare patch of ceiling. “Come on, we need to get you ready for your star turn.”

Yet another of Dominic’s ideas, and I let him tow me through the crowded hall. It was hard to resist Dominic when he got going, and honestly? I couldn’t see why I’d ever want to.

DOMINIC