Heather Fawcett

“You don’t have to stay. I’m perfectly content by myself.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed.”

“You don’t have to stay long. You’d rather sit here with your nose in a book?”

“Vastly,” I said, and he shook his head at me, not in disgust but utter bemusement.

This was Bambleby, after all—my only friend. (God.)

“What does it look like? You and your hairy accomplice ravaged my cloak.”

dog hung his head in abject embarrassment until his tormentors deigned to relieve him of this woollen pillory, and he spent the next hour pointedly ignoring me.

Are you hurt?”

“No.” I don’t know how I made myself speak. I have seen Wendell angry before, but this was something that seemed to surge through him like lightning, threatening to burn everything in its path.

“Em,” he said. “My dear dragon. Here I thought I would have to make amends somehow. I’ve made a start, I’m afraid.”

Of course I guessed that you had concocted some scheme in the night, which you would no doubt carry out with your usual reptilian efficiency,

I say half, because I was mostly just watching you, observing the way your mind clicks and whirrs like some fantastical clock. Truly, I have never met anyone with a better understanding of our nature, and that anyone includes the Folk. I suppose that’s partly why—

Ah, but you really would kill me if I desecrated your scientific vessel with the end of that sentence.

Now, I have never been shot before, so we will have to add it to the list of pleasures I have experienced since making your acquaintance.