A spout of water swirled up from the river like an unraveling thread pulled off the fraying hem of a piece of cloth. The water poured into the headmaster. His human shape changed. I suddenly understood that his human form was nothing more than an elaborate illusion. The body absorbed the water and grew into a glistening dragon, one with a mouth large enough that it could eat me in one gulp. The slippery texture of its black scales swallowed light. Its head had a whiskered muzzle, and a shimmering crest ran down the length of its spine, waving like grass in the wind. Its body tapered into a flat tail more like a fish’s than a bird’s. Yet despite the creature’s perilous aspect and daunting size, it waddled in a remarkably ungainly way down the sloping ground.

A roil of movement stirred the river. Creatures surfaced.

“They’re mine!” Bee’s face had the shine of a mother’s smile. “Don’t you recognize them?”

She ran outside.

I halted in revulsion by the garden door. Eleven silvery-white eels the size of children humped up onto the shore, blowing and wiggling as they snuffled along the grassy bank. They were the ugliest things I had ever seen, except for their startling gem-like eyes. The dragon huffed a smoky breath that stopped them in their tracks and compelled their attention. Every pair of glowing eyes fixed on him.

A twelfth grub squirmed unremarked onto the shore farther down the bank, beyond a small wooden pier to which a rowboat was lashed. A hawk dove down to investigate its movement. The stray hatchling’s sapphire eyes tracked the hawk’s flight as the bird settled on the bare branch of a tree. The raptor and the grub studied each other. Then the hatchling lunged forward. In the time it took me to suck in a shocked breath, not sure who was going to devour whom, it changed.

As if the tide of a dragon’s dream swept its unformed body, it molted its ungainly larval form and rose as a large hawk, beating for the sky. The true hawk followed.

I dragged my gaze away from the birds to see the eleven hatchlings molting their ugly grub forms. They transformed into smaller versions of the scaled beast. The air around the headmaster shivered as if rippled by a blast of heat. The shining black body of the beast turned in on itself and became that of the man we knew, thankfully in his clothes. A brief circle of dense rain splashed around him, as if he were raining away the water he had earlier absorbed.

In a frenzy of imitation, the grubs also changed, although they did not change size.