Chapter Eight
BEN
Unusually for me, I’d had problems getting to sleep last night.
It was a good reminder that I needed to tear myself away from the records room at least once a day for some physical exercise.
It had got to the point where I almost got up and went for a walk at midnight, but creeping around a strange family’s house when they were all in bed wouldn’t go down well if I were caught, even though I was a guest. And it was almost pitch black out there.
I’d probably fall down a hillside and break my ankle.
I did eventually sleep, but it was restless, filled with a brooding presence.
Sometimes it was Rhodri Bedwyr, demanding to know what I’d found out and threatening execution if I told anyone.
Other times, it was Dominic Bedwyr, whose presence was equally unsettling but in a very different way.
I woke up to the image of his eyes on mine, narrowed slightly as if he were trying to wrest something from me.
And it wasn’t a good feeling, though as I turned over in bed (in dry sheets, thanks all the same, Mum), my morning wood was very eager for some attention.
I was the only one at the breakfast table, perhaps because I was a bit later this morning.
After tea and toast, I headed for the records room.
I’d go out for a walk in the early afternoon, I decided, and maybe a quick one in the evening as well, before supper, just to make sure I’d sleep.
But until then, I had a clear run at the records once more—just as long as Dominic Bedwyr didn’t decide to interrupt me again.
I didn’t know what he’d been up to yesterday, but he’d been a damned distraction.
I hoped he wouldn’t come back because I’d actually started making progress yesterday afternoon.
Yes, I’d dived into a stack of papers to see what I was dealing with in the morning, to satisfy my immediate curiosity, but in the afternoon I’d forced myself to take a step back and start organising the paperwork.
The way the records were stored made no sense.
There were runs that were in chronological order stored next to another logical run—from a completely different century.
And that was without all the random pages that appeared to have come out of whatever collection they’d originally belonged to and were taking full advantage of their freedom.
I’d already found a birth certificate from the 1970s nestling inside a ledger of nineteenth century accounts.
It was going to take me quite a while to go through.
To my great joy I’d found some copies of Inquisition Post Mortem reports lurking amongst various land titles.
For those to exist, a Bedwyr had at some point rendered service to the sovereign and been rewarded by a grant of land.
And on their death, exhaustive details about their genealogy and their property had been recorded.
Those reports were a goldmine for any researcher.
Interesting that a Bedwyr had been prominent enough to have given service to a monarch during the twelfth century or later.
Dragons had dwindled in influence since the very old days, although many of us had managed to keep our wealth.
And some had grown even wealthier, adapting the dragon instinct to acquire and hoard to fit the human world.
Like Abimelech Mortimer, who’d become head of the dragons by virtue of the fact he was stinking, filthy rich and most of the government and media corporations were terrified of offending him.
With great riches comes great power or something like that.
I settled to work again, and after the first ten minutes or so, I stopped listening for footsteps approaching the door. I didn’t want to be disturbed, and I wasn’t sure why a tiny part of me seemed to be thinking otherwise.
* * *
I was lost in the depths of the thirteenth century when I blinked at what I was reading. An abbey on Bedwyr land? I hadn’t expected that. Dragons and the Church were an unusual combination.
The door opened sharply behind me, and I turned just far enough to see it was Dominic. He said nothing, so I went back to my paperwork.
Because God, this house was a treasure trove.
During the centuries when my family had hidden from other dragons, they’d passed down stories that were still being told when I was a dragonet.
About how a dragon family somewhere out there had a hoard of documents full of dragon history, neglected and undiscovered.
And most dragonets had dreamed of being the one to uncover the hidden cache and find all our secrets.
Maybe this house didn’t possess quite the hoard of imagination, but it was a stunningly comprehensive collection of records.
It had to be at least the equal of those kept by the Welsh humans, which went back to the fifth century.
The human records mentioned notable dragons, but gave no indication they were dragons.
As so often, I wondered when—and why—humans had started to believe dragons were no more than a fairy tale.
I understood, of course, why we didn’t reveal our existence now.
If we did, there’d be experiments and prisons and probably bombs in our immediate future.
That was why even our own records never mentioned the d-word.
Why shifts were referred to as transitions.
Why treasure was described as personal effects.
And those were just the records that had survived.
What little had been recorded had largely been destroyed by dragons scared that even coded history could betray them to humans.
It had kept our secrets safe. The problem was, even we now had an incomplete understanding of dragon history.
I forced myself back to the page in front of me. I couldn’t do anything about the records that had been lost. I needed to concentrate on those we did have.
Except it appeared Dominic had a different agenda.
My dragon stirred and I became aware Dominic was standing close behind me, leaning past me to read the papers on the desk in front of me.
Disconcertingly close, I could see the way his dark hair curled slightly at the ends, the tiny nick on his jawline that must be from shaving this morning, and there was his scent.
Even over the paper and dust of the room, I could scent soap, warm skin, and faint hints of dragon-smoke that had my dragon stirring, interested.
I could almost swear I could feel the heat of Dominic’s body.
Dragons run hotter than humans, but even so, it was improbable.
He tilted his head and met my gaze, amusement in those dark brown eyes, which deepened as I moved my chair away from him slightly.
“Find what you’re looking for yet?” he asked.
I couldn’t be sure, but I felt that was double-edged. I chose to answer the question and ignore any other meaning. Perhaps he was used to guys simply keeling over into his arms whenever he wanted, but I had no interest in being one of them.
“I’m not looking for anything specific,” I told him.
“You’re sure about that?” he asked, and that lazily amused smile was still in his eyes. Which I was going to stop looking into right now.
Unfortunately, I tore my glance away just in time to notice the way he hitched his hip onto the table. Right next to me, making it impossible not to notice his thighs or think about the fluid ease with which he moved. It was as calculated as everything else about him.
“You know,” he said, “I’m sure I could help you out.”
I wasn’t always the quickest to pick up when someone was flirting with me, but there was no mistaking the intent in his voice. It had lost its usual drawl, turning low and smooth.
“Can you read medieval Latin?” I asked him. “Because that would be helpful.”
He just looked at me, his lips tugging slightly at the corners. “Does Welsh work?”
“Oh, God, yes.” Because I’d already discovered the limits of my Welsh. Before I could stop myself, I was reaching for the document I’d had to put to one side earlier. “There’s this whole section here—”
“So what made you decide to start halfway through the records rather than at the beginning?”
My irritation at his interruption evaporated as I realised what he’d said. Surely he couldn’t mean there were even more?
“I haven’t found anything further back than these yet,” I told him.
He shrugged and moved away. To my relief.
“And you’re just hoping something turns up.” He leaned against the shelves like he had every right to be there. Like they’d been put up for that purpose alone.
“That’s the general idea.”
“So what happens when the thing you need to see is actually somewhere else?”
That made me pause. “If you have something to say—”
“I do,” he said, pushing off from the shelves.
Too close again. Deliberately so. My dragon stirred, low and uneasy as he reached out to the ledger in front of me and moved it slightly, just enough to be out of square. It took every bit of willpower not to correct it immediately.
Dominic glanced down at the papers, then back at me, as if weighing whether I was worth the effort.
“Come on,” he said.
I frowned. “Where?”
“You want older than this,” he said.
My attention sharpened despite myself. “What does that mean?”
He watched me for an instant, and I saw a flicker of satisfaction. He’d got me hooked, and he knew it.
“The castle.”
Phoebe had told me about it over supper. Only she’d said there was hardly anything left. “The ruins?” I checked.
“Unless you’ve found another one.”
“That land is disputed,” I said, but it lacked conviction. “If there are materials there—”
“There aren’t,” Dominic said. “Not like this. But there’s things you haven’t seen.”
“What things?”
He didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t.
“Your father—” I started.
“My father,” Dominic said, very mildly, “isn’t here.”
I hesitated. Rhodri didn’t like information shared without his consent.
“Come if you want,” he added, already turning towards the door. “Or don’t.”
Which was deeply irritating, because he knew I couldn’t resist. I closed my laptop with more force than necessary.
“If this turns out to be a waste of time—”
“You can come back and alphabetise something,” he said over his shoulder.
I stood up, because it was either that or hurl my laptop at his head.
Dominic didn’t wait. I caught up with him halfway down the landing, resisting the urge to say anything, if only to prove that I could. He didn’t look at me. Of course he didn’t. Just kept walking, unhurried, like he knew exactly how far ahead he could be without losing me.
“This had better be relevant,” I said at last, thinking of all the discoveries still waiting for me in the records room.
He gave no indication he’d heard.
We stepped out into the open air, and the change was immediate—warmer, brighter, the smell of damp earth and grass replacing dust and paper. I hadn’t realised quite how long I’d been inside until my eyes adjusted and the space seemed to open up around me.
Dominic didn’t slow. He cut across the grounds without hesitation, heading towards the rise beyond the house.
The path, if it could be called that, was uneven. I had to watch where I was placing my feet, which meant I couldn’t watch him. That was probably for the best.
“Are you going to tell me what I’m looking for,” I said, “or am I expected to simply know it when I see it?”
“You’ll know it.”
The certainty in his voice made me frown.
We climbed in relative silence after that, heading for the ruins that rose unevenly from the hilltop.
At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about them.
They were merely all that remained of a castle, their most interesting feature a tower jutting unsteadily but defiantly upwards.
I slowed slightly as we approached, taking it in.
One of the inner walls of what appeared to be a large courtyard had scorch marks that looked fairly recent.
Over the years, stones had been left where they’d tumbled from crumbling walls and now lay on short grass that was liberally sprinkled with rabbit droppings.
That explained why it was so neatly cropped.
But I couldn’t see anything that was worth bringing me away from my work. Although… I stood for a moment in the sun, face tilted up as I breathed in the fresh air. Dominic was infuriating, but I couldn’t completely regret coming out here.
He was still moving, and biting down my annoyance at the fact he just expected me to follow him, I trailed him through a gap in what must once have been an inner wall.
“Here,” Dominic said, from somewhere to my right.
When I first saw them, I thought they were random damage. A series of deep grooves cut into the stone—irregular, intersecting, and not following any of the natural lines of the masonry.
But the marks were too deep to have been made by bored teenagers carving their initials into the stone. Not to mention, these weren’t initials.
I reached out, then paused, my hand hovering just short of the surface. Something about them… I wasn’t sure I should touch them. They could be important.
But it was just as important to understand them, so I pressed my fingers lightly into one.
It was cool, and smooth in a way that felt somehow organic.
Not the result of a stonemason finessing their work for hours, but something that hadn’t needed smoothing.
It felt familiar. Like the scores made by dragon claws.
I drew my hand away and stepped back to take in the wider section. There, and there again. Repeating, so definitely not random.
“This isn’t structural,” I said, more to myself than to Dominic.
“No.”
I glanced over at him. He was watching me, not the wall.
“This wall’s different from the rest of it,” he added after a moment.
I looked back at the stone. The outer wall—the one that had collapsed—was rough, but consistent with all the other walls. This wasn’t. It had smaller stones, more unevenly laid. It was much older. And it looked almost as if the newer wall had been built to shelter it.
“From before the castle,” I said slowly.
Dominic shrugged, as if it didn’t particularly matter one way or the other.
I stepped closer again, studying the marks with renewed focus. They weren’t writing in any alphabet I recognised, and they were too unevenly spaced to be decoration. But they weren’t meaningless. Of that I was sure.
I could feel something, just out of reach. Like when something’s lurking at the edge of vision, but can’t be brought into focus. That was what I felt about this. I should know it. Part of me did.
I breathed out slowly. And tried to pretend I wasn’t aware of Dominic still watching me.