What the Dragon Needed

By morning they had established several things.

The dragon was very hungry. It had eaten an entire packet of uncooked chicken from the fridge, three apples, and what appeared to be a significant portion of Ivy's pencil case, though it spat the pencils back out with an expression of profound disappointment.

The dragon could not yet fly. Its wings were still damp and soft and when it tried to spread them it looked rather like someone trying to open an umbrella in a strong wind, all ambition and no result.

The dragon was very attached to Ivy specifically. It followed her around the room with its copper eyes and when she moved too far away it made the low rough sound again and shuffled after her on small unsteady legs. When Maya tried to pick it up it allowed this politely but looked at Ivy the whole time as if to say I am tolerating this.

"Your grandmother must have been the last person to touch the egg," Maya said, watching it follow Ivy to the window. "So it thinks you are connected to her somehow."

"Or it thinks I am her," Ivy said.

"Does that bother you?"

Ivy looked at the dragon. It looked back at her with its steady copper gaze. She thought about her grandmother standing in the garden at night looking at the sky. She thought about the cellar, locked, the key on the hook in the kitchen where anyone could have found it, waiting.

"No," she said. "It does not bother me."

They went to see Mr. Beckett again that afternoon. Ivy carried the dragon in her backpack, which it accepted with dignity and a certain amount of rearranging.

Mr. Beckett opened the door before they knocked, which was slightly unsettling. He looked at the backpack and nodded slowly.

"Last night," he said. It was not a question.

"Yes," Ivy said. "What do we do now?"

He made tea again. The dragon sat on the kitchen table and examined everything with great seriousness, sniffing the sugar bowl, touching the teapot carefully with one claw and then pulling back from the heat.

"Your grandmother," Mr. Beckett said, wrapping both hands around his mug, "believed that the egg had been separated from its family a very long time ago. She did not know how or why. She spent most of her life trying to find out where it had come from."

"Did she find out?" Maya asked.

"She found a direction," he said. "North. High ground. Somewhere beyond the far range of mountains, she thought. She wrote it all down." He stood up and went to a drawer and came back with a small notebook, dark blue, its pages thick with handwriting. "She left this with me. She said whoever found the egg would need it."

Ivy took the notebook. She opened the first page.

The first line said: If you are reading this, it has hatched. That means it is time to take it home.

The dragon looked at the notebook. Then it looked at Ivy. It made its low rough sound.

"Home," Ivy said quietly, looking at it.

The dragon blinked its copper eyes once, slowly.