Three

They walked across the scrubby terrain of the western half, rocks and grasses, heather and marshes; the soil squelching underfoot in places, like walking on sponge.

“Have you seen the dragons yet?” Bridget asked her daughter.

Merle shook her head, then looked around searchingly.

“Yes!” she cried. “There! Is that one? Yes! And there! And there!”

Suddenly, she was seeing the flowers on all sides.

“Which ones do we cut?” she asked.

“As many as we can,” said Bridget, putting two well-used wicker baskets on the ground beside them. “They won’t flower for much longer, and we can dry some and boil the rest. Here…”

From her pocket she pulled out a folding clasp knife, and handed it to Merle.

“It’s not a toy, Merle. It’s very sharp. Always cut away from you. Let me show you first.”

Merle took the knife and held it very carefully.

She knelt beside her mother as Bridget sliced one of the Dragon Orchids through its stem, quite near the base.

“There, you see? Like that. Away from you. Right, you try.”

Merle copied just what her mother did, and her mother smiled.

“Very good. But you can take a bit more of the stem. We can make different things from the stems. And from the roots, too, but they’re different again, do different things, and I don’t like to work with them.”

“Why not, Mommy? Are they poisonous?”

Bridget considered this.

“Yes,” she said, “in a way.”

Merle listened, nodded.

*   *   *

They cut flowers for an hour or so, then Bridget stood, stretching her back.

“I’m stiff,” she said. “Ow.”

“Poor Mommy,” said Merle, and then copied her mother, arching her back and sighing deeply. “Poor Merle. Ow.”

They set off for home, taking a different way back.

“I always prefer a walk that goes in a circle,” Bridget explained to her daughter. “Don’t you?”

Merle hadn’t thought about this before.

“I don’t know. I think I like there-and-back walks, too.”

As they came back to their starting point, Merle suddenly stopped.

“I thought you said no one lived here,” she said.

“No, you weren’t listening. I said almost no one lives here.”

“So who lives there?” said Merle, pointing at the huge building she had glimpsed through the trees.

The building was more like a church than a house, a single story of one massive pitched roof, with a tower of some sort on the end forming an impressive entranceway.

Merle’s eyes were wide. “Who lives there, Mommy?”

“A dragon,” said Bridget. “So just you stay away, because he eats small girls for his lunch.”

Merle squealed. They both ran, and got halfway up the hill home before they were too tired to run anymore.

*   *   *

At bedtime, Bridget tucked Merle under the sheets, but Merle still had more questions.

“Mommy?” she asked. “I don’t think it can really be a dragon who lives in that big house. So who does live there?”

Bridget smiled.

“He’s nearly a dragon,” she said. “He’s an old man, and he’s not very friendly. I don’t want you going there, all right?”

Merle nodded. “But who is he?”

“He’s an old man. That’s all. He’s a painter, or at least, he was. That’s what they say. And he’s very rich. Once he was the most famous painter in the whole land, but then something happened, and they say he hasn’t painted anything in years. After that he moved here, and had that house built, like a church all of his own. And I don’t want you going there. Now you sleep well and dream of your hare, yes?”

Merle nodded.

She closed her eyes and gripped her hare tight, but she already knew she was going to go the painter’s house, just for a look.