“So … I hear Bing and Jane are back together,” she says, when I fail to fill the silence.

“Yeah. It’s great.”

“Uh … do you need a book, maybe?”

“No. I … I noticed something. In Wickham’s video.”

“Oh?” she says, suddenly very interested in her shelving.

“Yeah. There’s this wallpaper. It has a distinctive pattern.”

She’s still not looking at me. “Really?”

“I’ve seen it before. At your house. At the party.”

She turns away to put a book on the shelf. “Lots of houses have wallpaper like that…”

“Darcy.” I touch her hand, and she brings her gaze to meet mine, almost against her will. “Did you post that video of Wickham?”

She shrugs, embarrassed, and nods.

“How did you even get it?”

“Wickham used to be friends with my stepbrother. They both auditioned. I actually copied the files to use against Phillip, who is basically the worst. But when I saw what Wickham had done to Lydia…” Her eyebrows draw together in anger. “He had to pay.”

We stand there for a moment in silence, me still with my fingers resting on her hand. I take a deep breath.

“Darcy, I owe you an apology. I was wrong, what I said to you. That you would do this for Lydia—”

“You weren’t wrong, not completely. I’m really sorry for what I said at the Fall Formal – I wasn’t happy here, after getting kicked out of boarding school, and I was taking it out on everyone around me. And … I didn’t do this for Lydia, not completely. I mean, what Wickham did to her was wrong on so many levels. But…”

My heart is in my throat. “Yes?”

“But I was really thinking of you. How sad you’d be, seeing your friend in so much pain.”

The lump in my throat is growing, and I am determined not to cry. I smile even though my eyes are glistening a bit, and she smiles back.

“Darcy?”

“Yes?”

“Do you want to go to a movie with me?”

She turns her hand over underneath my fingers, and takes hold of mine.

“That would be very nice. I would like that very much, Lizzie Bennet.”

You must know the legends: that once, dragons stalked the world, called upon by gods of land and justice to restore a balance tipped by men.

It was a time of reckoning.

The dragons are long gone, of course: underground or dead. But I have for you a tale of heroes who took up the dragons’ code. It starts not, as you’d expect, in Chrull, where we spent the summer in-game, rolling dice, pressed against imaginary rain-black buildings, sheltering from oil-slick seas and filching secrets from the rich and careless, nor in the towering halls of government we hope to infiltrate next game night. But out-of-game, in September, on an ordinary street beside an ordinary school. Our first day as sixth-formers.