Page 11 of Dragon’s Ending

I stared in mounting horror at where a centuries-old account book had been wedged under one corner of a bookcase to steady it.

A large table stood in the middle of the room, flanked by two chairs and buried beneath several piles of documents. Dust motes drifted through the light from the tall windows, and the whole room smelled of old paper and leather.

I set my laptop down carefully on the only clear corner of the table I could find.

My dragon warbled happily inside me. The disorder scarcely mattered when there were this many records. This looked like months or even years of work for one person. It would be amazing to get my teeth into a solid project, and the fact this was all brand new to us meant the tantalising possibility of discovering something unexpected.

The downside to this big an undertaking was the fact it was in this house. Even up here, the atmosphere felt oppressive. I certainly didn’t think I’d yet met a dragon with a sense of humour. Not that I was exactly the life and soul of any party, but my family wasn’t like this. Evelyn was our head and no one ever forgot that fact, but she hosted Christmas drinks and summer parties and seized on any excuse to bring the family together in the large Georgian rectory where she and her wife and the closest family lived.

I tried to imagine Rhodri dressing up as Father Christmas for his dragonets, and my mind simply refused to go there.

I was getting distracted. First things first—I needed to clear a workspace, dust off the table, and rescue that poor scroll before it disintegrated entirely. And then… Then, I supposed, my first move would be to try and understand the order in which these records were stored, because right now, it looked as if they’d just been shoved in anyhow.

Which, actually, made the entire prospect even more fun. I was grinning as I started stacking piles of papers.

Chapter Six

DOMINIC

The records room. What the hell could Berstow be doing in there? The options were limited, of course, but what was he looking for exactly?

The question nagged at me as I headed through the gardens, the wet grass soaking the hems of my jeans. But something else was bothering me just as much. Berstow himself.

He was an infuriating puzzle of a dragon. Like a locked room with no key. He’d given me nothing earlier. Not that I’d been particularly interested in getting him into my bed, but I’d expected something, even if it was embarrassment or shock. Instead, he’d merely held to his purpose, treating me as if I were nothing more than a GPS giving him directions.

My stride lengthened. I didn’t have a destination. I rarely did. Not that it mattered—movement was enough. And with each step, the house behind me shrank, and the sky seemed to open up above me, letting me breathe. Beckoning me into freedom. No, I told my dragon. Not in daylight. Tonight.

My dragon settled again, watchful as always, but willing to wait just a little longer.

I’d left the maintained grounds behind and was halfway up the hillside when I saw it. A dry stone wall had a large portion missing. Well, not missing, precisely. The stones were still there. They just happened to be scattered over a large area of field rather than stacked closely together in the shape of a wall.

I remembered the satisfaction of stones giving way to the might of my dragon. I hadn’t meant to do it. But I hadn’t not meant to do it. It’d been a last act of rebellion after a flight, when I’d landed and remembered all over again that I had to go back there. To the house. To my father.

For a moment, I stood, hands in my pockets, looking at the mess I’d made. I could leave it. It wasn’t my job to patch up walls, and John would notice it soon enough and put it right. It wasn’t as if we had any livestock to worry about—dragons and prey animals weren’t a good mix.

I kicked a small stone, hard, and watched it tumble down the slope. I didn’t exactly have anything else to do. Might as well do it properly.

I turned and headed back to the house. To the old stables, to be precise, where the tools were stored. I wondered how dragons in centuries past had managed with horses as their only available transport. The grooms would have had to be human, surely, but how would horses cope with having dragons in the carriages they pulled? I selected the tools I needed and headed back to the wall, managing to keep my brain busy by figuring out non-harmful ways to dampen horses’ senses. Blinkers, and a nosebag with scent in, and bells on the bridle, perhaps?

But what about that instinctive, crawling feeling that every creature got in the presence of a predator? Reminded suddenly of my father, I lengthened my stride to reach the collapsed part of the wall. Yeah, I’d really done a number on it.

Once I’d cleared away the last of the dislodged stone, I was glad to see the foundation stones were still exactly as they should be. It was a testament to the skill of the original builder that even tonnes of dragon picking a fight with the wall hadn’t destroyed it completely.

Maybe it had been Laurie’s work, who’d been groundskeeper before John. He’d been the one to show me the skill involved in repairing these walls and was probably the only person who’d not been worried about upsetting me.

“Make yourself useful,” he’d said when I’d wandered past him during my first week back in this wretched household, watching his strong hands placing oddly shaped stones with an ease and accuracy I could only hope to imitate.

I’d thought he mustn’t know who I was, and that was like freedom. And then later, when it became clear he knew exactly who I was, he didn’t change. He gave directions that he clearly expected me to obey, but which always had a gentle edge to them. Orders that made eighteen-year-old me wish viciously that he was my head of family. My father.

He was the only one who’d ever mentioned my mother to me. He’d fixed those blue eyes on mine and simply said, “You must miss her.”

Anyone else, I’d have flamed on the spot for such a stupid statement. But the expression in his eyes… He knew what loss was. For a second, I hadn’t been able to breathe. Then I’d bent to the stones, already moving before I’d decided to. I broke one clean in half that should have needed two strikes with the hammer, the impact jarring up my arm as gold had filled my vision. He hadn’t said anything like that again. He hadn’t needed to.

But then Rhodri had heard I was hanging around the stable buildings, painting and mending things, and all hell broke loose. It wasn’t appropriate, he’d said. As if everyone would forget who—what—I was because I got my hands dirty.

After that, I’d gone back to drifting aimlessly around the estate and village instead. Looking for increasingly meaningless ways to fill the hours.

I’d got the first few courses seated properly when I heard someone approaching. John, of course.