What the Neighbours Knew

What Ivy knew about her grandmother turned out to be less than she had thought.

Her grandmother's name had been Elsa. She had lived alone in a cottage on the edge of the village for forty years. She had kept a large garden that people talked about because things grew in it that should not have been able to grow in that climate, flowers from much warmer countries, herbs that nobody could identify. She had been quiet and polite and private and had never talked much about where she came from or what she had done before she arrived in the village.

"That is not very much," Maya said.

"I told you," Ivy said.

"What about the neighbours? Old ones who would have known her a long time?"

There was one. Mr. Beckett, who lived three doors down and was very old and spent most of his time in his front garden doing things to his roses. Ivy's mother had always said that Mr. Beckett and Ivy's grandmother had been friends of a sort, the kind of friends who did not spend much time together but understood each other.

They went to see him that evening, the egg wrapped carefully in Ivy's school jumper and carried in her backpack.

Mr. Beckett was in his garden as expected. He was a small thin man with a lot of white hair and the careful slow movements of someone who has learned not to hurry. He looked at them over his rose bushes and then he looked at Ivy's backpack and something happened in his face. Something shifted, very quickly, that was not quite surprise because it was too controlled for that. It was more like recognition.

"You found it then," he said.

Ivy stared at him. "You knew about it?"

"Your grandmother told me, years ago. She said one day someone would find it and it would be time." He set down his pruning shears very carefully. "You had better come inside."

His kitchen was small and warm and smelled of tea and something herby. He put the kettle on without asking and they sat down at his table and Ivy took the egg out of her backpack and put it on the table between them.

Mr. Beckett looked at it for a long moment. In the warm kitchen light the surface of the egg seemed to have a faint pattern in it, dark lines running through the grey like the veins in a leaf, barely visible.

"Your grandmother found it a very long time ago," he said. "Before she came here. She never told me exactly where. Somewhere cold and high, I think. Mountains, maybe. She said she heard it before she saw it."

"Heard it?" Maya said. "What did it sound like?"

Mr. Beckett thought about this. "She said it sounded like something very far away trying to get closer," he said. "She said she followed the sound for two days before she found it."

"What is it?" Ivy asked. Though she had already decided she knew.

Mr. Beckett looked at her steadily. "You already know," he said.

"I want someone else to say it," Ivy said.

Mr. Beckett nodded slowly. "It is a dragon egg," he said. He said it the same way he might have said it is a robin's egg, plain and factual and without any drama. "Your grandmother kept it safe for thirty years. She was waiting for it to be ready."

"Ready for what?" Maya asked.

"To hatch," Mr. Beckett said. He looked at the egg again. The faint dark lines on its surface were definitely more visible now than they had been a few minutes ago. "I think," he said quietly, "that it may be getting close."