Chapter 2 Squatter’s Rights

“No,” I said.

The man in the curtain tilted his head. “No?”

“No. You can’t have it. It’s a bookshop. It’s mine.” I stopped. “It’s rented. It’s mine and the bank’s. Mostly the bank’s this week. But it is definitely not yours.”

“Hoard,” he said calmly, as if correcting my grammar. “It is my hoard.”

I hit him with the broom again.

He stood there like a man waiting out the rain.

Over the next hour, I tried everything.

I tried the broom. I tried shouting. I tried boiling the kettle and holding it up like a weapon, which went badly, because Aunt Odette raised me, and my hands made the tea on their own.

“Is that for me?” he asked.

“No.”

He looked so disappointed that I gave him a cup. He held it in both hands, sniffed it, and closed his eyes.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s good.”

“It’s the cheap one.”

“It’s good,” he said again, with great seriousness, and drank it.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. It came out before I could stop it.

“I do not think so.” He rolled one shoulder and winced. “The ceiling was harder than it looked.”

“It’s wood. Wood is supposed to be hard.”

“Where I come from, ceilings are rock. They are honest about it.”

I opened my mouth, found I had no answer and shut it again.

Footnote came out from wherever he’d been hiding. He walked straight up to the stranger, looked at his feet, and sat on them. Another traitor.

So I went for the pamphlet.

The Hollybrook Tenant’s Handbook lives under the till next to the account book I don’t read. I carried it back to the ruined Poetry corner and read aloud by candlelight, in my best official voice.

“‘Chapter Nine. Unwelcome Guests. Step one: ask the occupant politely to leave.’”

“Please leave,” I said.

“No,” he said, just as politely.

“‘Step two: call the Watch.’” I looked up. “The Watch goes home at midnight.”

“I do not think they would help.”

“‘Step three.’” I flipped the page. “There’s no step three. There’s an appendix.” I squinted. “‘Appendix F. Dragons.’”

He went very still.

“‘A dragon who has claimed a hoard is bound to it, as ivy is bound to a wall. He may not be removed by persuasion, by force, or by legal notice. The removal of the hoard removes the dragon. The removal of the dragon is not recommended.’” I shut the pamphlet. “That is a very strange thing to put in a tenant’s handbook.”

“Hollybrook was a dragon town, once,” he said. “A long time ago.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read it,” he said, and looked away.

I would think about that later. At the time I was too busy being furious.

“Fine. Prove it.” I marched to the front door and threw it open. Cold air rushed in. “Go on. Out.”

He walked outside barefoot in a velvet curtain, in the middle of Marrow Lane, at three in the morning. I watched him go. He made it as far as the lamp post.

Then he stopped.

It was like watching someone walk into a rope. His shoulders went tight. His face went carefully blank, the way people do when something hurts and they don’t want you to see.

“It gets heavier the farther I go,” he said, without turning around. “Past here, I can’t breathe right.” He walked back to the doorstep, and the tightness went out of him all at once. “It is not personal. I’m sorry.”

I closed the door behind him, slowly.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Idris.”

“Idris what?”

“Idris,” he said again.

He was dodging. I let him. “Marnie Quill.”

“Marnie.” He said it slowly, as if trying the taste. I decided I did not like how that sounded, or how much I liked it.

“You’re from the Mountain Court,” I said. Nobody else has gold that warm.

“Yes.”

“That’s a long way from home. Do they know where you are?”

His face closed like a door. “No.”

“Are they looking for you?”

“Probably,” he said, and drank the last of his tea.

By four, we were sitting on either side of the counter, the way a person sits across from the tax collector.

“Why my roof?” I asked.

“It looked soft.”

“Soft.”

“I was tired.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed, and said nothing more.

His eyes dropped to the counter. The notice was still there, crumpled under Footnote’s paw. He slid it out, smoothed it flat and looked at it for a long time. Longer than the notice deserved, honestly. It was only a few lines.

“Thirty days,” he said.

“You can read that from there?” I asked. “It’s tiny print.”

He put it down quickly. “I heard it. From the sky. The crier has a good voice.”

“He does,” I said bitterly. “It’s the worst thing about him.”

He almost smiled. Almost. It changed his whole face, and then it was gone, as if he’d caught himself doing something forbidden.

“Why are they purring?” I asked.

“I do not know.” He looked almost shy. “They do that around me, a little. They always have.”

“Books don’t purr at strangers.”

“Perhaps I am not a stranger to them.” He shrugged, and the curtain slipped, and he caught it with a muttered word in what I assumed was dragon.

The purring went on. I could feel it through the floor, through the counter, through my own ribs. In twenty years I had heard a cookbook scream and a poetry anthology cry for three days after a bad customer. I had never, ever heard four thousand of them go warm all at once.

And that was the trouble. I’d been alone in here for a year and a half, and the shop had been so quiet. Now it was humming like a hearth, and I was a girl with thirty days left, and I didn’t have a single good argument.

I took a breath.

“Fine,” I said. “You can stay.”

His eyes flared gold. “It is my—”

“Don’t. You can stay as a tenant. Not a dragon. Not a hoard-claimer. A tenant. Tenants fix roofs, and tenants pay rent.”

He considered this. “I can fix the roof.”

“Good. No setting things on fire. No eating customers. No flying through the ceiling.”

“The ceiling is already open.”

“Then no flying through the new ceiling.”

“That seems fair,” he said gravely.

“Good.”

“What is rent?”

I stared at him. “Money. For living somewhere. Four silver a week.”

“I do not carry silver.”

“Then you’re not a tenant, you’re a squatter, and I’m going to find a very large stick.”

He put a hand into the curtain. Somewhere in its folds. I chose not to think about it.

When it came out again, it held a coin.

“That’s not silver,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “It is better.”

He set it on the counter without a word. It was thick and gold, as heavy as a small stone, and it landed with a soft, solid click.

I picked it up.

It was warm.

Not warm like a coin that had been in a pocket. Warm like it had a heartbeat. Warm like something had been holding it very tightly for a long time.

I turned it over under the candle. A crest was stamped into the face. A mountain, ringed by flame, with a single open eye above the peak. I had never seen it before in my life.

I looked up at the man in my curtain.

Whoever he was, he wasn’t just a dragon.

He was someone’s.