Four

The very next day, Merle took her chance.

Bridget was busy in the kitchen with the flowers they had cut the day before.

“I don’t think you’re old enough to help with this part, yet,” she’d said to Merle, who had done her best to look sad about it, but was actually secretly glad.

“Don’t worry. I’ll go into the village and find someone to play with.”

Bridget nodded, distracted. There was a lot of preparation to do—they had picked more flowers than she realized and they needed to be cut and prepared today before their potency went. Then she would have to split and hang all the stems—pounding them would have to wait for another day.

“Be back for lunch,” Bridget said.

“When’s that?”

“When your tummy rumbles.”

Merle skipped out of the door and down the hill, then into a neighbor’s garden, crawled past the vegetable patch right underneath the kitchen window, and in two minutes was back on the lane to the western side.

“I’m going to see a dragon, I’m going to see a dragon,” she sang as she went.

At the bottom of the hill, she nearly forgot which path to take, but then she remembered they’d done a circle walk and not a there-and-back walk.

She set off to her left, and in two minutes there was the house again.

Merle stopped, listening for the sounds of the dragon sleeping, or snoring. Or eating small children; crunching on their bones. She shivered at the thought.

She was just wondering whether dragons only eat girls, and not boys, given the choice, when she saw the orchard.

To the side of the house sat a beautiful orchard of apple trees and some pear trees. The grass of the orchard was overgrown, almost touching the boughs in places. Here and there enormous weighty clusters of mistletoe, Baldur’s bane, clung to the treetops.

The orchard was heavy, ripe and bursting to deliver. Merle’s mouth hung open—she had never seen trees with so much fruit on them before. They hung with clusters of apples, their branches pulled low by the weight.

And though her tummy was not actually rumbling yet, she thought it might be a good idea to have an apple anyway, so that she could stay out for a bit longer than she otherwise might.

Merle looked at the house.

She could see no windows on the side that faced her, the front. Rather it had some kind of long gallery that ran around at head height, and there were windows in this gallery. But she could not see into the house itself, and neither could she hear anyone.

She walked up the path that led to the house, as quietly as she could, and then stopped again.

Still nothing.

She stepped off the path and went around the side of the house, walking through a gate that was so old and rickety that it had fallen off its hinges. She liked that; it made her feel less as though she was trespassing than if she’d had to open the gate.

There were apples on the ground already, many windfalls that lay rotting in the long uncut grass. But there were many, many more still in the trees, and she crept forward, reaching up her hand and sliding her fingers around one that was particularly red and lovely.

As she did so, there was a shout from behind her.

“Hey!”

She turned to see the dragon.

He was on the gallery that ran around this side of the house, too, and was waving a small stick at her.

He was angry, really angry.

“Hey, you! Get away from there! Go away!”

His voice was broken with anger and age, and terrified, Merle ran as fast as she could, tears already in her eyes.

It was only when she stopped running, halfway up the hill to home again, that she realized she had the apple in her hand.

She bit it.

It was delicious.

She sat on a rock on the Outlook, looking to the sea, and finished it, and by the time she had, her tears were finished, too.

In fact, she felt really happy.

She bounded in to the kitchen.

“Hello, Mommy, is it lunchtime yet?”