It was the same pattern I’d seen in the wyrmling and in the dead drake that had arrived at our infirmary with milk-white eyes.
“Right,” I said to no one in particular. “That’s not terrifying at all.”
The barn-cats were worse. They’d been brought in by Thorven that morning, both of them yowling and spitting in a wicker carrier that shook with their fury. Familiar-adjacent creatures, he’d explained, not true bonded companions, but animals that had absorbed enough ambient magic from living on the estate to develop minor abilities. One could sense approaching storms. The other had an uncanny talent for locating lost objects. Now they huddled together in their shared cage, their fur standing on end as if they’d been rubbed with wool, throwing off sparks whenever they touched. The static charge had already given me three separate shocks, and my hair had escaped its leather tie, floating around my head in a crackling halo.
“You look like you’ve been struck by lightning,” Mrs. Crane said from the doorway.
“I feel like it too.” I reached for the calming draught I’d prepared: chamomile, valerian root, and a touch of moonwater for the magical inflammation, and the cats hissed in stereo. “Any chance you could hold Marmalade while I—“
The manor shuddered. Every windowpane in the sanctuary rattled in its frame. Dust sifted down from the rafters. The wards overhead flared brilliant gold, and then darkness. For one instant, I felt weightless. The cats yowled. Duchess shrieked. Somewhere deeper in the sanctuary, a creature I hadn’t yet examined let out a sound that was half-roar, half-sob.
Then the wards sputtered back to life, and gravity reasserted itself. I caught myself on the edge of the worktable. Mrs. Crane had gone pale.
“That’s the third time today,” she said.
“Third time today,” I echoed. “And it’s not yet noon.”
The cats had stopped hissing. They pressed against each other now, trembling, their earlier aggression forgotten in favour of terror. Even Duchess had gone still, her tongue flicking nervously at the air.
A door banged open somewhere in the main house. Thorven burst into the sanctuary, rain dripping from his beard and pooling on the flagstones. He carried something in his fist: a scrap of paper, sodden and limp.
“Messenger just came up from town.” He thrust the note toward me. “Wouldn’t wait for a reply.”
The paper was so wet it almost disintegrated in my fingers. I could make out perhaps half the words, the rest having bled into illegible grey smears.
“It’s from Maren.” I squinted at the cramped handwriting. “I think.” I tilted the paper toward the ward-light. “Right. She says... ‘Three dragons dead overnight. Bonded ones. Found stiff and cold in their beds—’”
“Their beds?” Thorven’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “Dragons don’t sleep in beds.”
“Their owners’ beds, presumably.” I kept reading, or trying to. “Silver veins spreading from... I think that says ‘hearts’. Deaths were quiet and sudden,’” I continued. “’No thrashing, no warning. One moment sleeping, the next—’” The ink dissolved into nothing. I turned the paper over, hoping for more. I found only a smeared postscript that might have been “Be careful.”
“Bees?” Thorven said.
“Be careful,” I decided. “She’s warning me to be careful.”
“A bit late for that, isn’t it?”
A fair point. I was standing in a sanctuary full of magically unstable creatures, married to a man with a curse eating him from the inside, in a house that couldn’t decide if it wanted to help me or trap me in endless corridors.
“The dead drake.” I set the ruined letter on the worktable, where it immediately began seeping water into my notes. “The one Father received before I came here. It had the samesymptoms. Silver veins. Milk-white eyes. That surprised expression, like it saw something before it died.”
“You think it’s connected,” Mrs. Crane said.
“Three bonded dragons in one night, all showing identical symptoms to a creature that died on the opposite side of the valley?” I laughed, but there was no humour in it. “Either it’s connected, or we’ve got two separate magical plagues occurring simultaneously.”
“Very unlikely,” Thorven said.
“I was going to say ‘cosmically unfair,’ but yes.”
Thorven leaned over my shoulder, close enough that I could smell the rain soaking his leather coat and the faint tang of dragonsmoke that clung to anyone who worked the sanctuary. His voice was low enough that Mrs. Crane, still hovering in the doorway, wouldn’t catch the words.
“I was in town yesterday evening. Picking up supplies from the chandler.”
I didn’t turn. Something in his tone made me want to keep my eyes on the ruined letter, as if looking at him would somehow make what he was about to say more real.
“I saw a carriage stationed near the alleyway behind Widow Marsh’s bakery. It had the Morvain crest painted on the door. It was lady Kelda’s.”
My fingers tightened on the sodden paper. “Widow Marsh keeps a bonded dragon. A little hearth-warmer. Orange scales, missing half his tail from a childhood accident.”
