Miss Percy's Travel Guide (to Welsh Moors and Feral Dragons) (A Miss Percy Guide Book 2) by Quenby Olson

Author:Quenby Olson [Olson, Quenby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The breathing of fire is not a commonality among dragons. Just as some are flightless, toothless, and others built for a life spent in the sea, variety is to be more greatly expected than any shared trait from one breed to the next.

— from Chapter Four of Miss Percy’s Travel Guide (to Welsh Moors and Feral Dragons)

It was Shakespeare who said something like, “True hope is swift, and flies on swallow’s wings.” Mildred had never quite understood what that line was meant to imply, and she had only read Richard III once (had she even finished it?) as her preference led her more towards Shakespeare’s comedies rather than the ones with kings and witches and killing people behind curtains without first looking to see who was lurking behind said curtains. But whatever his belabored definition of ‘hope’ was meant to be (irony being that the man who wrote “brevity is the soul of wit” struggled to convey a plain thought in anything less than five lines of monologue) he surely had never encountered a character like Miss Mildred Percy or her dragon.

She had hoped that Fitz running off with the Jewel of Penffynnon — a fancy name for a bit of gold and jet presented to the world in an egg-shaped form — was just some of his ‘usual mischief’, much like when he worried the heel of a shoe to shreds or left his unsavory deposits somewhere other than the newspapers and ragged linens they spread out in the corner of the room for that purpose. An offer of some bacon or a cavort in the fountain, she was sure, would be enough to coax him out again and then the situation would be brought to a swift and painless close.

But bacon did not work. Neither did a promise to let him loose in the fountain or in the kitchen or to even run about the grounds in order to — under careful surveillance — set things on fire. Instead, he found a perch at the top of a window in the parlor (drawing room?), tucked into the carved and gold-painted wooden thing — Mildred had no gift for the intricacies of architecture — that sat like a crown above the curtain rod.

He still had the egg with him. He had curled himself around it until Mildred could no longer see the glint of gold or the shine of jet from beneath his wings. Because he had unfurled one wing and hidden himself with it, so that he looked like a wad of dark tarpaulin lodged between the window and the ceiling.

“We could try a broom,” had been one suggestion, as if the dragon was a cobweb in need of clearing away.

“Should someone fetch a ladder?” someone else had asked, though no one really wanted to be the one to climb up the ladder — both Mildred and Mrs. Babbinton declared themselves absolutely finished with ladders for the rest of their lives — and attempt to fetch Fitz down when he so clearly did not want to be disturbed.

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