Page 1 of Unexpected Magic

Chapter One

Nettleford Grange, Cheshire, 1810

On the morningthat changed everything, Cordelia Nettleford was woken by a cacophony from the henhouse. The sound of panicked hens squawking blue murder suggested that a fox or a stoat had somehow managed to enter the enclosure, despite the protection charm that should have prevented any such invasion.

Delia groaned, and reached for the clothes at the bottom of her bed. The hens were her special charge—or one of her special charges. No doubt everyone else in the manor was snuggling back down under the blankets, smugly content in the knowledge that it was not their problem.

“And I shall be blamed if this means fewer eggs,” she grumbled, as she dressed any-old-how under the covers, left the bed, wriggled her toes into an extra pair of socks, grabbed a warm wrap, lit her lantern with one of the fire spells that waited on the mantel, and hurried downstairs.

The hens kept up their noise as she pulled on a coat, boots, mittens, and a knitted cap, and let herself out the back door, first grabbing the wooden club that rested in the umbrella stand. Were there fewer hens? It sounded like it. She hoped they had not been massacred. Probably they had not. Probably some of them had taken to the high perches out of the way and were hiding there, pretending to be feathered statues so the fox—or, as it might be, the stoat—did not come after them.

It was so early that dawn had barely touched the edges of the sky above the hills, though a full moon gave sufficient light for her to see beyond the lantern’s reach. Not enough for the other person out this morning to seem more than a darker shape within the shadows under the stable eaves. Delia froze in place, peering into the gloom with no success.

The voice was a relief. “Miss Nettleford? Are you going to check the hens?”

It was Millie Pickard, the stable girl, carrying her own club. She was a workhouse brat, taken on when she was twelve to work in the stable. Delia had been teaching her to read, though not where Delia’s mother could see. In Mama’s view, the daughter of even such an impoverished manor should not associate with stable hands.

Delia, on the other hand, felt the need to do something useful beyond the manifold duties that her mother had abdicated onto her slim shoulders, duties for which Mama nonetheless still took credit.

Marriage was clearly not going to be an option. She was, after all, twenty-three years of age and those gentlemen who had seen her at local assemblies had long since ceased taking an interest.

By teaching Millie, she was making a difference to one other person, and it was an accomplishment all her own. Not something Mama would claim as her work.

As to why Millie was here with her in the dark, no doubt Millie’s fellows had decided it was her job—an orphan, and a girl at that—to leave the warm rooms in the loft above the stables and find out what the noise was all about.

“Yes. That protection charm was only applied a week ago. It must have something wrong with it.” Delia kept walking to the henhouse, and Millie fell into place beside her.

“It was one of Madam Greensmith’s charms,” the girl objected. “Her charms are famous.”

“The hens are complaining about something,” Delia pointed out. Though as they walked it sounded like fewer and fewer of them, and when they came through the orchard gate only two or three of the eighteen hens that should be there still raced, flapping their wings and squawking, up and down the run, chased by something Delia could not quite make out.

“Not a fox,” she said. It was too small for a fox. Too small for a stoat, too, she thought, but moving so fast it was hard to make out.What is it?

In a dozen more paces she was standing by the run, and the little creature had stopped, mainly because it had caught, and was ripping the throat out of, another hen. “Millie,” she said. “Run and get the carry cage for chicks. I’m going to have to try to catch it.” Clubbing the beast was not an option. Not given what she now recognized.

“Miss Delia,” said Millie, in the heat of the moment forgetting that the correct form of address wasMiss Nettleford, “is that what I think it is?”

“It is. It’s a dragon,” said Delia.

*

There had, indeed,been a massacre. From the evidence in the nesting box, the dragon had hatched, eaten some of the other eggs, slept, grown, shed its skin, eaten the rest of the eggs, slept and shed again, and woken to go on a rampage through the flock.

Only three hens survived. The little dragon was clearly an efficient killer, even though it was still only the size of a half-grown kitten.

“It was part of the clutch under the bantam,” Father explained to Mama when she demanded that they complain to Madam Greensmith. “Nothing the charm could do to stop it. It was inside the protective circle.”

“Sir Arnold Nettleford,” said Mama. “That creature never came out of an egg. Look at the size of it!”

“Dragons are like that,” Father explained. He had already exclaimed it was the first dragon he had ever seen, but Delia’s father loved to read, so she supposed he had learned about dragons in one of his books. “They hatch out the same size as all their brothers and sisters, whether it is a bird’s egg or a reptile’s, and then they eat everything in sight and start growing. They can double in size several times in their first day, or so I have read, though they slow down a bit after a few days.”

“Well, I never,” said Mama. “How big will it grow?”

But Father shook his head. “I do not know. By what I have read, dragon lords can be enormous, but then, they are were-dragons, so not the same thing at all. Born human just like any other, and then, when they come into their power, they turn into dragons, or so it is said. Not that there has been a dragon lord in our part of the world for a thousand years. No, no, dragon lords have nothing to do with the common dragon, such as ours.”

“Then why,” Mama asked, “are you talking about dragon lords, Sir Arnold? And how on earth shall we feed the beast?”

Papa looked down his nose at Mama, in the way he had when he had become lost in his own thoughts and she interrupted him. “It does not matter. We shall not be keeping it.”