Page 32 of Dragon’s Ending

“What?”

I held up the book. “The Corsair.”

He stared at it in genuine horror. “Oh no.”

That probably shouldn’t have been as funny as it was.

“There’s more,” I informed him gravely, pulling another book free. “The Mysteries of Udolpho. Sounds murderous.”

“That’s a novel.”

“I gathered.”

His expression was deeply pained as he crossed the room and took the book from me carefully, like it might contaminate the rest of the archive through proximity alone.

“The problem,” he said, already sounding tired, “is that I don’t know whether these were accidentally shelved here or intentionally stored alongside the records.”

“Why would anyone intentionally store novels in a records room?” I asked.

“Hiding things in plain sight. Proximity can be significant.”

“Ah,” I said. “You’re having historian feelings.”

He looked at me over the top of the book with profound offence.

Before he could launch into whatever lecture was bursting to get out, I added, “The records used to be kept in the old turret room upstairs, if that helps. This lot got moved down here a few years ago after there was a leak.”

That caught his attention instantly. “Leak?”

I shrugged. “Through the roof, I think. It was only noticed once it spread to the landing outside. My mother would have been furious it wasn’t picked up sooner.”

The words slipped out without intent, a simple statement of fact that normally I would have thought but never said. And for a moment, the room was filled with silence.

Ben’s expression changed slightly. Not pity, thank God, just the careful kind of attention he seemed to pay to everything.

“She worked on these records?” he asked after a second.

I shoved another book back onto the shelf harder than necessary. “She loved them. Used to disappear up there for hours. Said everyone else left the records alone, so it was the quietest room in the house.”

Unexpectedly, my throat ached as I remembered her saying that, drawing me into her confidence about her favourite hiding place. Making me feel special for knowing what no one else did.

I was somehow fiddling with a book, and I couldn’t remember if I’d been putting it on the shelf or taking it off.

“When they moved everything downstairs, people mostly just shoved armfuls of stuff into bookcases and hoped for the best,” I added. “I doubt anyone noticed if the shelves in here were cleared first.”

Ben looked down at the novel in his hands like this was personally distressing.

“So these may have been part of the original records,” he said. “If hidden writing was used to conceal dragon history from humans, where better to hide it than the margins and end papers of perfectly innocent books? No one would think to look there.”

“And how exactly are you planning on checking?” I asked. “Got a tame red dragon you can whistle up?”

“Ultraviolet lamp,” he said absently, leafing through the book he was holding as if he could find any hidden writing simply by staring at it hard enough. “Red dragons’ eyes pick up wavelengths no one else can see, and one of them figured out it was UV vision.”

He closed the book with the suspicion of a snap. “I’m going to have to examine every page of every book in this room now.”

I stared at him. “You can’t possibly mean that.”

He simply looked at me.