A Crown of Dragons by Chris d'Lacey

Author:Chris d'Lacey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Paranormal, Action & Adventure, Fantasy & Magic, General
ISBN: 9780545608848
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2016-05-10T10:13:35+00:00

When I got there, Josie was sitting at the dining table. She was wearing the crown and asking Harvey where he’d gotten it. He was sitting opposite her, looking relaxed. The space next to him had been reserved for me. He flapped a hand and said, “Oh, I was passing a thrift store and saw it in the window. Cost an absolute fortune.”

Josie laughed and fluttered her lashes. “A princess only expects the best.”

“Precisely what I told myself,” Harvey said. “Let Michael take a look.”

“Not now,” said Mom. She picked the crown off Josie’s head and put it aside. “It’s time for our appetizer.” She put a tureen in the center of the table.

“Soup?” said Josie, turning up her nose.

“Chicken broth,” said Mom. “You don’t have to have any if you don’t want to.”

Harvey opened a napkin and spread it on his lap. “Well, you can count me in. Chicken broth? Very warming on a night like this. I bet those dragons would go for it.”

“Dragons don’t eat chicken broth,” scoffed Josie.

Harvey broke a bread roll in half. “Quite right — a dragon would take the whole chicken. Raar!” He made a snatching motion across the table. Josie jumped and giggled like a five-year-old. Even I twitched in my seat. Mom, on the other hand, snorted like a dragon and had to pause with the ladle in her hand.

“Oops,” said Harvey. He threw Josie a wink.

“So what do dragons eat?” she asked.

“Do we have to talk about silly dragons?” Mom said.

“Oh, and like school or the weather is better?” moaned Josie.

Harvey backed her up. “Nothing silly about dragons, Mrs. M.”

“Don’t encourage her,” Mom laughed, serving him first.

They smiled at each other.

Puke alert.

“I mean it,” said Harvey, who refused to be discouraged. “They’re fascinating creatures. I’m sure Michael would agree?”

Mom raised an encouraging eyebrow and ladled some of the broth into my bowl.

Here, I supposed, was my chance to be “nice.” “Um, yeah,” I grunted, throwing in a shrug for good measure.

Well, it was a start.

“If the myths are to be believed,” said Harvey, “dragons are the most highly evolved creatures in the universe.”

Really? Now he’d gotten my attention.

Josie wiggled her nose. “What, more than us?”

“Oh, way more than humans,” he said. “Not only can they fly and breathe fire, they have no known predators. I wouldn’t believe all that nonsense about knights slaying them. It would be a brave man who stood up in front of a dragon, wielding nothing but a sword. Even without fire, their range of powers is extraordinary.”

As he said this, I began to feel deeply uneasy. I’d noticed a sudden shift in his tone. He’d moved away from the idea that dragons were creatures of myth and legend, to the point of view that they were real, as if he’d experienced their “powers” firsthand. I was about to test his idea on predators with a dragon-versus-nuclear-warhead question, when Josie got in front of me again.

“Yeah, but I bet they can’t play the flute.”

Fair point on the “highly evolved” argument.

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