It was an unromantic fact that Uncle Parry would never be able to afford a dragon of his own, no matter how passionately he researched their legends. Uncle Parry couldn’t even afford to send any of his daughters to Bath for a season, much less equip them with the most stylish – and outrageously expensive – accessory that any young lady could carry on her shoulder nowadays to attract a husband.
Like everyone else in the nation, Rose had seen plenty of sketches of those pet dragons in the newspapers’ society columns ever since they had been famously rediscovered a few years ago. They were always sketched exactly where they belonged – in dazzling, high-society ballrooms surrounded by flashing diamonds and haughty aristocrats, not hiding behind broken furniture in a sad, dark little room packed full of her extended family’s unwanted belongings. Her uncle and aunt hadn’t the heart to dispose of even their most useless old possessions; much like Rose, every item in this room was housed as an act of charity.
“Now you’re being maudlin.” It was her younger sister’s tart voice Rose imagined this time. Harry – short for Harriet – had always been the best at piercing Rose’s occasional moments of melodrama.
Shaking herself free of the descending fog, Rose took a deep, restorative breath and sank to her knees on the dusty floor to peer into the shadows. It was a warm and sunny summer morning outside, but the leaded window at the far end of the buttery was almost entirely blocked by a stack of broken chairs that had been piled haphazardly atop an ugly and old-fashioned chaise longue. Only faint and narrow streams of light escaped around the gaps or filtered in through the doorway from the room next door: enough to outline every jumbled piece of clutter on the floor, but nowhere near enough to pierce the thick darkness that lay behind that hulking armoire.
“Hello?” This creature had to be a cat to move so swiftly; that was the only plausible explanation. Remembering various felines she had known in her first village, Rose shifted back to give it space even as she clicked her tongue in enticement. “If you’re looking for food, puss, you’ve come to the wrong room. There’s nothing to fear, though. Beth would have spoiled your heart out if you’d only given her a pitiful look.” No one in this family would ever turn away a hungry stray. “You should come out and let me show you to the others. Just wait, within a week you’ll be the roundest, happiest house pet imaginable.”
Something shifted in the darkness, as if the creature was actually considering her promise. As casually as possible, Rose laid her hand beside the gap between the armoire and the wall and tapped her fingertips lightly against the dirty floorboards in a ripple of temptation. “Why don’t you come and introduce yourself properly, so my poor cousin doesn’t have to worry about impossible monsters anymore?”
Something scraped against the wall behind the armoire. Rose blinked. That hadn’t sounded like cat fur.
Claws scratched gratingly against the floorboards ... and then in a sudden, frantic rush, before Rose could think better of her unprotected position, that long form exploded out from the gap and landed in front of her, panting with unambiguous terror.
Golden eyes stared up at her from a small, rectangular, wine-red face framed by two crooked horns. Small, clipped wings fluttered about the creature’s long and glittering back but couldn’t possibly lift its body from the ground. A sinuous, forked tail stuck out through the open doorway in a straight line of panic.
Rose swallowed hard as she gazed down into the dragon’s shining, impossible eyes.
“Perhaps,” she whispered, “Beth wasn’t wrong about everything after all.”
Chapter 2
As Rose stared into the dragon’s golden eyes, wild possibilities flooded through her, full of magic even more sparkling and implausible than those gorgeous wine-red scales or ...
“No!” Sucking in a breath, she shook herself so hard that the poor dragon startled backwards with a nervous clicking sound in the back of its long throat. Still, it didn’t run back into the shadows of the armoire ... probably because the little creature was too worn out and hungry to flee any longer.
Rose squared her shoulders and nodded down at it. “No more dreaming,” she promised. She hadn’t let her imagination spin so far out of control for well over a year. She wouldn’t allow herself to be so lax again. “You need food. That’s all we’ll worry about for now.”
Day to day, minute to minute, and moment to moment was the only way that she and her sisters had survived the first six terrible months after their parents’ unexpected death in a carriage accident, thirteen months ago. The shock and grief of that loss would have been more than challenge enough – but those simpler emotions had been combined with terror when the parish council had descended to explain exactly where their father’s own wild dreams had left them: penniless and untethered from the futures they’d expected, with all of their family’s savings – including their own dowries – invested in a wildly unlikely scheme whose fraudulent operators had vanished, taking with them every penny of those ‘investments.’
It had taken a full half-year after those terrible revelations – six months of fighting the parish council for the right to stay in their family home until they found another and struggling to source every meal along the way – before they’d finally unearthed a scattering of relatives who were willing to take them in, one sister apiece. Rose had only managed to keep hold of her courage across those bleak six months through the absolute refusal to be overwhelmed by any problems further away than the next moment in time.
Now, reminding herself of that strategy, she took a deep breath, released it, and then reached out, palms upward. “May I carry you?” Dragons in newspaper sketches were always riding proudly perched atop their elegant mistresses’ shoulders.
Apparently, this creature hadn’t seen any of those sketches. Its clawed feet scrabbled desperately against the wooden floorboards as it skittered backwards, shivering convulsively.
“Never mind.” She stood and brushed the dust off her skirts. “You can follow me to the kitchen instead.”
Fortunately, her aunt’s cook-housekeeper, Mrs Davies, was enjoying a well-deserved afternoon off. Otherwise, Rose had to admit, she might not have dared such a raid. Her late mother had taught her to always aim for what was right, regardless of personal cost – but Mrs Davies’s savoury rarebit had been the first food to cut through Rose’s fog, in an astonishing explosion of flavour, after she’d moved across the country seven months ago. The bara brith that Mrs Davies – in her very sunniest moods – occasionally deigned to make as a cake to accompany the family’s afternoon tea was a mouth-watering miracle of fruits and spices and the unmistakable taste of hope.
The threat of losing access to those life-giving delights was far more intimidating than any of Beth’s imagined monsters. And even Mrs Davies, who put up with so much eccentricity from Rose’s family, would certainly put down her foot at the sight of a small red dragon tracking dirt across her clean kitchen floor ... not to mention a few distressing traces of more unidentifiable muck among those footprints. As Rose slid that trail a guilty glance, the dragon arched its long neck and raised its snout as high as it could to sniff hopefully towards the fragrant bunches of herbs and slabs of meat that hung from the ceiling.
Rose snorted. “Dream smaller. We can’t let her find too much missing when she returns!”
It wasn’t Mrs Davies who discovered them a few minutes later, though, as Rose knelt on the floor, carefully wiping the tiles, and the dragon created even more mess with its face happily buried in a leftover meat pie.
“There you are! We’ve been—good God.” Georgie’s easy, trousered stride came to a dead halt in the entrance to the room, with Beth half-hidden, peeping over Georgie’s lean shoulder. “Well!” Georgie blew out her breath as the dragon leapt backwards, folding its wings defensively ... and then snaked its long, red neck forwards in one swift move to snatch and gobble up another large bite of food.
Beth made an incoherent squeaking noise. Georgie said, “I owe Serena a shilling. I was certain Beth had made it all up out of shadows!”
“I beg your pardon?” her younger sister demanded with sudden, haughty clarity.
Georgie ignored the interruption, her wide-eyed gaze fixed on the dragon. “Serena wagered there’d be some animal to blame, but I doubt she expected this one.”
“How could she?” Rose shrugged helplessly as she sat back, setting down her cleaning rag and looking up at both cousins. “It must have escaped or been lost somehow, but where could it have come from in the first place?”
“Nowhere local, that’s for certain.” George strode across the room to crouch by Rose’s side while Beth, her dark eyes wide with both fear and fascination, hovered by the door, one hand clapped to her mouth. “If anyone nearby had acquired a dragon—”
