probably the best place to start.”
Finnegan rested his hand on hers, stopping her movement. “Wait,” he said. “I have a better idea.”
He took her downstairs and through the door into the palace’s private wing. The rooms beyond were far smaller than she would expect for royalty, but bursting with personality—books open spine-up on side tables, fluffy rugs, shelves full of knickknacks that seemed to have more character than value. Some rooms had big windows, overlooking the street or interior gardens, while some were lit only by skylights in the ceiling. There was no corridor, no sense of order, just room after room, thrown together in some unfathomable system that would break the spirit of even the most determined thief.
Finally, Finnegan opened a door and gestured for her to go ahead of him. She walked through, somewhat nervous of what she would find.
Books. Everywhere, books, covering all the walls except one. That one was floor-to-ceiling windows, letting morning light cut patterns on the wooden floor. Staircases spiraled up the sides of the bookshelves, stopping at balconies every seven feet or so, before twisting upward again. They went up, and up, and up, beyond the ceilings of the other rooms, beyond even the ceilings of the rooms above, right to the roof of the palace itself. And every shelf was full, every space bursting with paper, with stories and knowledge.
“Finnegan—”
“I know. Impressive, isn’t it? Even I don’t know all of what’s here. There are too many books to get through in twenty-one years. Too many books to get through in two hundred years. I’m sure there’s something in here that can help. Even the Institute’s resources can’t compare to this.” He headed straight for one of the spiral staircases along the side of the room. The steps turned so tightly that Aurora’s head spun by the time they reached the first platform. “This is the duller stuff,” he said. “About plants, mostly. Edible plants, healing plants . . . useful if your kingdom’s not a wasteland.” He continued up the staircase, past the second balcony, and the third. “Now here is information on creatures. Much more interesting. Unicorn legends are somewhere over there, phoenixes, too; the lower alcove has the more mundane creatures, and this,” he said, as they stepped onto the highest platform, “is all that we have on dragons.”
“All of it?” There were only four shelves of books here, and half of them were empty. Aurora walked to the nearest one and ran her fingers along the spines. The older ones all had mystical titles—The Legend of Dragons, The Day the Dragons Died—while the newer volumes contained history, anatomy, maps of their domains.
“We know three things about dragons for certain,” Finnegan said. “That they exist, that they hate water, and that they kill us. Everything else is guesswork. No one gets close enough to dragons to learn about them and lives to write a book.”
Aurora twisted her dragon necklace between her fingers. “But some people must have got close,” she said. “To get dragon’s blood.”
“But they didn’t live long enough afterward to write about it. Or to do much of anything, in most cases. They might have gathered a few theories, but no facts. No proof.”
“If you have dragon’s blood,” Aurora said, “that must mean you know how to hurt them. Why haven’t you fought them before?”
“Because we can’t hurt them,” Finnegan said. “Not really. We tried to fight them, when they first returned. It didn’t work well. First it was cannons and spears, but these things seem to eat metal. They weren’t affected at all. Then some genius tried to make spears and arrows out of ice, thinking that would cut them and melt their magic. Well, they did cut them, but then the weapons melted, and they were left with very angry dragons irritated by minor wounds. The men gathered a little blood for further research, but that was all that they ever achieved.”
“And this hard-won blood was put in a necklace?”
“It was a gift for my grandmother,” Finnegan said. “They thought it would honor her. She was less than impressed.”
“A gift you just happened to have with you in Alyssinia when you met me?”
He laughed. “You are far too suspicious, Aurora. I had it sent to me after your first hint of magic. I wanted to see how its magic responded to you.”
She ran her finger along the rough edge of the dragon’s wing. She tried to picture the blood inside it, how it had once pounded