He repeated himself to a shocked silence in the room, and then added: ‘The information is out in the public domain, so ConStuff have no advantage. The deal is dead.’

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ remarked Wizard Moobin.

‘Well, I did,’ he said, taking a deep breath. ‘You can newt me if you like, but Dragons are noble creatures – my conscience is clear.’

‘I’ll make you wish you’d never been born!’ screeched Lady Mawgon, and pointed a long bony finger in his direction. Tiger didn’t even blink.

‘I’m a foundling,’ he said simply, ‘I often wish I’d never been born.’

Lady Mawgon paused, lowered her finger and then strode from the room with a loud cry of ‘Foundlings, bah!’

The others filed out soon after as there was nothing more to be done, and they all glared daggers at Tiger as they went, until only he and I were left.

‘That was a stupid thing to do,’ I said, ‘stupid, but brave.’

‘You and me both, Miss Strange. You were going to resign over it, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.’

He stared up at me with a look of hot indignation, and a clear sense of right and wrong. Mother Zenobia had been right. This one was special. But I couldn’t be angry with him, and couldn’t go without punishing him either – it should have been put to a vote, despite my personal viewpoint.

‘I’ll deal with you when I get back,’ I said, picking up my car keys and whistling for the Quarkbeast. ‘Keep an eye on the phones and stay away from Lady Mawgon.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To find out what we’re dealing with here.’

‘ConStuff?’

‘No – Dragons.’

William of Anorak

William of Anorak

I headed for the local library to try to find something that might tie Dragons and magic together in some sort of Grand Unified Wizidrical Field Theory. I had a strong feeling that the loss of one might mean the loss of the other, and I wasn’t going to sit back and let matters unfold unhindered. I read as much about Dragons as I could find, which wasn’t much. No one had ever done a study, and apart from one blurred photograph of a Dragon in flight taken in 1922, no one had any idea what one looked like. I thumbed through a book of zoology and discovered that they weren’t a protected species; indeed, no one had even bothered to classify them at all. According to naturalists the Dragon belonged to the animal kingdom for certain, almost definitely to the vertebrates, and was as likely as not a reptile. Other than that – nothing. In many ways the dragon was a non-creature. There seemed to be more information on Shridloos, Bworks, Buzonjis and Quarkbeasts, and only the Shridloo had been studied at length.