Chosen: Book 1 in the Dragon Queen series

I ran two steps forward, my arms reaching for him, a smile lifting my cheeks. Pa didn’t move. I slowed. He’d never been one for shows of affection. My hands fell to my sides. “It’s good to see you well again, Pa.”

He looked me up and down as though I were a piece of property he was being offered – and not one he was eager to acquire. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

Cold gripped my insides. He didn’t sound fearful I might not return, more angry that I had. “I went to get you a cure. I was always coming back. Ma Fowler should have told you.” When I spoke her name the curtain behind the counter twitched. He was back to health, and yet she hadn’t returned home. My heart clenched, unease twisting my guts.

“She told me you’d gone. I was the one left to see what you’d taken with you. You appear to have ransacked the place before you left,” Pa said coldly. “I’ve found a number of items missing. Was there a reason for that?”

All my joy at seeing him restored to health gathered in my throat, forming a lump that threatened to choke me. “I had to get to Muirland City. I thought the mages could provide a cure. I needed to pay – and to have money to get there and back.”

Pa’s lip curled. “You gave my money to mages?”

“I thought they could cure you.” I fell silent at the expression on his face.

“I didn’t need a cure, only good care, which Ma Fowler provided.” He stepped closer. His eyes glittered with an expression I’d never seen in them before. At least – never when he’d looked at me. “Strange how I got better the moment you left.”

Ma Fowler pushed through the curtain and stood at his shoulder. They adopted identical poses, arms folded, glaring at me disapprovingly. I didn’t expect to see affection in Ma Fowler’s expression, but it was a shock to find Pa so cold.

I swallowed, but the lump in my throat stayed there. “It was magic that cured you. It must be.” Now I saw him, I understood – Dragon had been nosing around Pa before we left. She must have touched him and provided the cure I’d thought was miles away with the mages. I wanted to explain it all to Pa, but I couldn’t mention Dragon or the egg she’d hatched from while Ma Fowler was listening.

“Magic!” Pa scoffed. “It wasn’t magic that ailed me. More like poison in the water.”

I went quite cold. He couldn’t be suggesting… He couldn’t seriously think… My addled thoughts began to work again. “It’s because of the…” My words trailed off at Ma Fowler’s sharp expression. I looked Pa straight in the face. “Something particular happened right before I left, it’s why I had to go so suddenly. That’s why you were cured.” I looked straight at Pa, willing him to understand. He must have seen that the dragon’s egg wasn’t here anymore.

“Ah yes, you hurry me on to my main concern. The chief treasure that you took with you – I assume you’ve brought back uncounted wealth in its place.”

“It wasn’t … as you left it.” I tried to communicate what I meant, but it was impossible with Ma Fowler’s hard gaze boring into me.

“I brought a dragon’s egg into this house,” Pa snapped. “And it wasn’t here when I woke!” My jaw slackened, my gaze sliding to Ma Fowler, who showed no surprise at that statement.

“I – you –” My eyes darted backwards and forwards between them. There was no way Pa would have told her what he possessed, not that possession.

“Oh, I know all about the dragon’s egg,” Ma Fowler told me, a smug smile wreathing her face as she set her fingers possessively on Pa’s arm. Several rings glittered there. I recognised them from the shop’s stock. Pa must have given them to her – if she’d stolen them she wouldn’t be inside the building, let alone pawing at my father as though she owned him. “We have no secrets,” she crowed.

“But—you—”

“It’s not here any longer. Can you account for its absence?” Pa demanded.

Very well, if there were no secrets I wouldn’t try to keep them. “It hatched. I had to act. I couldn’t hide a dragon here.”

“I was told it would lay dormant for years. Did you crack it to make it hatch?”

“No, I—” My fingers reached for my throat and I forced them down. “It just hatched and I had to act.”

“That egg was the pinnacle of my trading. It was worth the contents of the shop ten times over.” His harsh gaze skittered over me again, finding me lacking. “There’s no way I’d have trusted you to make a bargain for such a creature, so I can only suppose you’ve made a lamentable mess of the transaction.”

My heart felt like it was fracturing into pieces, but his disdain straightened my shoulders and lifted my chin. If I’d done badly, then it was because he hadn’t taught me better. “All dragons belong to the mages,” I pointed out. “You know the law.” Pa’s mouth opened. I hurried on. “I thought I could persuade the mages to cure your illness in exchange.” I looked at him, a man I scarcely seemed to recognise any more. “I would have done anything to make you better. It seemed like a fair swap.”

Pa’s expression twisted. When he spoke, his voice was low, and colder than I’d ever heard. “You exchanged the beast for a bottle of med—”

“No! That was my intention. I didn’t get the chance. The fae stole the dragon, although they would say they liberated her. The mages torture dragons. They don’t deserve to have possession of magic.”

“They don’t deserve to have possession of my dragon!” Pa raged. He strode towards me. I backed away instinctively, then reminded myself this was Pa. He was angry; he’d lost something precious, of course he was cross. But he wouldn’t hurt me.

He grabbed my shoulders, his eyes burning into mine. “That dragon would have made my fortune.”

“All our fortunes,” Ma Fowler chirped up. I wished she’d go home, but she was standing behind the counter of Pa’s shop with Pa’s rings on her fingers. The thought turned my stomach cold: she was home. I’d opened the door, and she’d stepped right inside.

“Our fortunes,” Pa echoed, his fingers pinching my bones. “And instead, you let the fae walk off with it.”

“I didn’t let—” I bit my lip to hold back the tumbling words. It was foolish to argue with Pa, not when he was in a mood like this. I’d explain later, when I got a chance to talk just me and him.

He shook me. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I—” The whole story could come brimming out of me if I let it, but I couldn’t fool myself into thinking the man I’d returned to would be interested. Pa had turned into a stranger. I swallowed. “I do have a dragon’s scale. We could sell that.”

“A scale? A single scale?” he spat, his expression creasing with fury. “I had a dragon! What use is a scale to me?”

“It contains magic. It’s not nothing,” I said, quiet but stubborn.

“It’s not a dragon!” Pa roared back. His chest heaved with fury. My heart beat hard, urging me to run away. But I couldn’t run; I was home.

“I’m sorry,” I said in the end, because I had to say something.

Pa pushed me away so abruptly I staggered. “I want a full inventory,” he said. “That’s your job. I need to know exactly what you’ve taken.”

“I can tell you what I took. There was five shillings from the till, and then—”

“Enough!” Spittle flecked my cheek. “I said, I want a full inventory.”

I turned to look at the shop. It was more jumbled than when I’d left it, but the displays were still clear. It wouldn’t be hard work to inventory everything; just time-consuming. “Of course, if that’s what you want.” I’d make myself useful and Pa would calm down and we could talk properly. This awful moment would fade and become something we laughed about.

Ma Fowler bustled out from behind the counter and pressed a cloth into my hand. “Make sure everything sparkles,” she snapped, as though she’d made herself the boss of me.

I looked down at the cloth, then at Pa, who hadn’t said a word to back me up. “I always do.” I turned my back on them both and set to work.

I stepped over and between items until I reached a corner. I’d start in one spot and work my way out; methodical like any competent shopkeeper would be.

Pa followed me. “What about the beast’s shell? That would have been worth a handsome penny.”

“I took it with me, thinking I could sell it.”

He sneered. “I suppose the fae took that, too.”

Fire burned in my chest. I spoke through clenched teeth. “No, we were set upon by thieves in Muirland City. It’s okay, though, we only suffered a few bumps and bruises – it wasn’t until the mages got hold of us that we were properly tortured.”

He huffed, as though he didn’t believe me – or didn’t care. Whatever had happened to him while he’d been sleeping, it hadn’t improved him any. My attention snagged as the curtain moved, Ma Fowler spying from the kitchen. It probably wasn’t what had happened to him while he’d been unconscious. It was what was waiting when he’d woken up that had turned him against me.

“You don’t do anything more important than cleaning from now on,” Pa told me. “I can’t trust you not to make a mess of everything. You leave the business to me.”

As though I’d had a choice! The fire burned harder. “You were asleep for six months, Pa.” I knew anger would get me nowhere, but I couldn’t help it. He didn’t understand what it had been like. And he didn’t seem as though he wanted to understand. “You slept on and on, and no one in the town could help and I was all on my own.” Tears pricked and I fought them back. Anger wouldn’t help; crying would make matters worse. “I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I couldn’t just wait.” I gasped a breath and glared at him. “What would you have done, if it had been me lying there unconscious for weeks on end?”

“I’d have left you lying and got on with my business.” He turned his back, striding back behind the counter. I saw the curtain twitch and longed to throw a rude gesture at Ma Fowler. I looked at the stuff around me, all the tat that had seemed so important before I’d left Besserton behind and travelled across the country in search of a cure. I’d found so much more than that.

And I’d thrown it away to return home for the sake of a father who could hardly bear to look at me, he considered my quest an abandonment – even, a theft.

The curtain twitched. Pa strode out. “You said you had a dragon scale,” he announced. “Hand it over, then.” He stood, hands on hips, expecting my immediate compliance. My jaw clenched. Why had I told him about that? Because I loved him. Because he was my Pa. What else could I do?

“Very well.” I walked forward, expecting him to get out of my way.

Pa moved so I couldn’t get past him. “Now.”

“It’s tucked in my stocking,” I told him. “I’ll have to take it off to get it.”

He sneered. “So take your stocking off.”

I glanced at the window behind me. The street wasn’t busy, but anyone passing by might see me.

“Come along, girl.”

Next to Pa, a statuette of a willowy-looking female stared at me, her face at the height of my knees. She was made of glass, a faint sheen of metallic green escaping from her heart. Her lips were curved in an elegant smile, her eyes as wide as those of a doe facing a hunter, while her slim, delicate hands gripped a dress, pulling it away from her body to swirl around her ankles as though she were about to step onto a ballroom to dance with a prince. I wanted to kick her at Pa, shatter her into a hundred pieces and then stomp on the bits. I wanted to take a stick and smash everything in the shop. See how Pa felt when he’d really lost everything.

My fingers tightened and I forced myself to breathe slowly until the desire to destroy passed. “Fine.” I reached beneath my skirts, unfastening my garter and stripping off my stocking. It was well past time they were changed anyway. I handed the sliver of dragon scale to Pa and simply dropped my stocking to the floor.

Pa brought the scale close to his face. “It’s probably fake,” he announced.

“It’s definitely not,” I countered. He looked at me, daring me to argue. “It was given to me by a fae shifter, tugged from his own skin.”

My conversation with Gollan flooded my thoughts. He’d told me Dragon had chosen me for her companion, a position the fae would fight over. But she’d been persuaded otherwise. I wasn’t sure I could blame her. If Dragon saw me now she’d be thanking the maker for her lucky escape. I didn’t belong with dragons, I belonged in a crappy secondhand shop, spending the rest of my life making amends to my father for daring to think I could do something remarkable.