“That’s almost as bad as nothing wrong with him,” Isobelle observed. “Oh, Gwen. I’m not Hilde, not swept up in the romance of finding a perfect match. I know nobody gets a fairy-tale ending. But are we really meant to . . .” She trailed off, for what else was there to say?

Gwen was doing everything she could to save her from the Sir Ralphs of the world, who’d treat her like a prize without a voice of her own. To save her even from the Orsons, who would, like Theo, be kind.

Gwen was putting everything on the line to protect Isobelle from those fates, so she could write her own happy ending one day—whatever it might be.

But what would become of Gwen’s ending?

Before Isobelle could begin to answer that question, a ripple went through the crowd. Like flowers toward the sun, everybody turned toward an old man who was rising to take his place by the fire. He was ancient, with the sort of wiry build that looked like he could live forever, and a face made craggy by wrinkles.

He walked all the way up to the fire, studying it in silence as his audience watched. It was only when he turned to make his way back that Isobelle saw one side of his face was a mass of scars.

“The thing about your stories up at the castle,” Gwen whispered in Isobelle’s ear, setting her skin prickling, “is that they’re all about knights fighting the big dragons. The ones who were foolish enough—or enormous enough—to attack the castles. Our stories are about what happened after. Who had to deal with the rest of dragonkind in the generations that followed.”

Her words were enough to yank Isobelle out of her contemplation of the sensitivity of her earlobes. “The rest of them?”

A young man carried over a crate for Bertin—for this must be he—and the old man eased down to sit on it with a groan. He made a great show of reluctance, but when he spoke, his tone and cadence were those of a seasoned storyteller.

“I suppose, what with it being dragon bonfire night, you’ll be wanting to hear about the night I got this,” he began, tapping gently on the scarring that knotted its way down the side of his face.

Around them the crowd gasped and whispered, and Isobelle gasped too, willingly letting him draw her into the tale and away from her own thoughts and questions and complications.