Lucy tripped off. I heard her shoes tap down the stairs.
I laid my palms flat on the dressing table, still empty despite Lucy’s arrival. There was mud under my fingernails. I closed my eyes.
You are awake,Yuánchi thought.Good. I am hungry.
“Oh,” I said again. I opened my eyes.
Who first, Yuánchi or Darcy?
Yuánchi. I had used the pulleys to open the boathouse gate before I left. Presumably, the rump of a dragon was now on display for any passing boat.
Darcy swung the dressing room door wide, yawning within a thick maroon robe. “Good morning.”
“Oh,” I said, mentally reordering my conversations.
“I have been considering our meeting with the War Secretary.” Darcy grimaced and rubbed his unshaven chin. “Wellington’s goals are straightforward enough. But the Secretary is a politician. How does one influence a politician?”
I thought about it. “Other politicians? Or important personages. Perhaps we should host a ball.” That last was a joke, as Darcy abhorred large social events.
He ran a finger under the thin muslin covering my shoulder, and I touched his wrist, watching our wedding bands gleam in the looking glass. I wore a goldfede ring with interlocked knots to honor our Beltane ceremony. Darcy wore the posy ring my father had worn, plain gold but inscribed inside with verse.
“A ball seems drastic,” he said. “Our London acquaintances are already curious. They would poke into every nook and cranny.”
“Nooks and crannies?” I said, not understanding.
“A ball at Chathford.”
I held up a warning finger. “No.Notat Chathford!” Darcy looked surprised, so I summoned my well-crafted reasons for stuffing a dragon into our boathouse. “Last night—”
Lucy popped in the other door. “No laundress yet, but we put it in to soak. I’m to tell you that the cook is sorry, but it will be a half hour before you can bathe. The stove is not drawing properly, so there’s no warm water.”
“The trials of a new home,” Darcy said cheerfully. “I will walk the grounds first.”
“Yuánchi is here!” I cried.
“He looks bigger,”Lucy said.
“It is an illusion,” I said uncertainly, while fastening a button on the thick pelisse I had thrown on. “I think. From being inside.”
The peak of Yuánchi’s back, sheathed in neatly folded wings, was a few feet shy of the boathouse rafters—certainly taller than the gate. The air roiled with a vital scent like cooking cloves. His faceted eyes, each larger than my fist, gleamed gold, green, and blue from a shadowy mound of neck and shoulders. It was difficult to tell what connected to what.
Like wyverns and firedrakes, Yuánchi was two-winged and two-legged, although his sinuous shape was more reminiscent of the smaller firedrake. But, sinuous or not, the question was…
“How did youfit?” I exclaimed.
I curl up to sleep.
Scales chimed and flashed scarlet in the dusty light as his torso straightened and lowered… slightly. His long neck unwound until his nose was a foot from mine.
“Well, it is good you managed,” I said. Then I remembered something. “May I see your teeth?”
Yuánchi’s head cocked in human-like bemusement. Then his jaws stretchedwide. Heat deep in his gullet lit my skin as if a hearth had opened. Lucy hastily stepped back.
His obsidian-dark teeth were four or five inches long and slightly back-curved. The front of each was rounded and a half-inch thick. The backs were knife-edged with gleaming serrations. His tongue was also black and had sharp scales pointing down his throat like barbs. I had not known that.
I wiggled the tip of a tooth between two fingers. “Do you ever lose them?”
His head withdrew a yard. The jaws closed with a snap that blew my curls back.
