Free A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan Page A

damn about, knowing all the while that my one opportunity to see true dragons has come and gone, leaving me behind.”
    My words exhausted, I stood, panting, staring at Jacob’s white face. That face blurred alarmingly, and I could not think of anything to say in the aftermath of my tirade, anything that would begin to atone for the anger I had just shown him. A lady, quite simply, did not speak so to her husband.
    There was nothing I could say. Nor could I bear to remain there in silence.
    Turning sharply, almost stumbling over my chair, I fled the room.
    Jacob did not pursue me, nor did he come to my bedchamber that night. (We had slept apart since my miscarriage, that I might not trouble him with my restlessness.) I rose at my usual hour the next morning, but dressed slowly, not eager to go downstairs and face him after my outburst of the previous night. My state was not helped by my uncertainty as to how I felt about that outburst. I did not know whether to regret it or not.
    My cowardice eventually lost out to my will, and I went down, only to discover that Jacob had gone riding, and the servants could not tell me when he would return. This did nothing to improve my mood.
    I sat down to answer correspondence, but my handwriting was atrocious, a reflection of my feelings that day, and I soon gave it up in disgust. The day being fine, I went out into the garden, but as I have said before it was a small place, and not one that could keep me occupied for long. At length I went down to the shed where I kept my sparklings and my notes, though I was not much in a mood to work.
    Once inside, I sank onto a stool and gazed sightlessly over the neat ranks of my vinegar-soaked sparklings. Each stood on a card labeled in my tidiest handwriting, recounting when and where it had been collected, its length, its wingspan, and how much it weighed. They were organized into categories based on my research, grouped according to the subtypes I was beginning to identify. One stood on my working-table, submerged in a jar of vinegar, awaiting my latest effort at dissection. I picked up the surgeon’s scalpel I had been using for that task, and put it down. Hardly a pastime for a lady.
    Yet it was the closest thing I could arrange to the work I truly wanted to be doing. My childhood obsession, buried for years after the incident with the wolf-drake, had put up shoots during the tour of the menagerie, and now those shoots had burst into full flower. I wanted both to see dragons, and to understand them. I wanted to stretch the wings of my mind and see how far I could fly.
    I wanted, in short, the intellectual life of a gentleman—or as close to it as I could come.
    I picked up a sparkling, my fingers gentle despite my frustration, and studied the minute perfection of its scales. The tiny head with its ridges, no less fierce for being so small, and the elegant wings. They did not look precisely like dragons, but they spat infinitesimal sparks: the origin of their name and, I thought, a means of attracting mates, much like a firefly’s glow.
    That thought made me lower than ever, and I put the sparkling down, turning to a book I had left open. It showed an anatomical drawing of a wyvern, which I believed might be a larger relative of the sparkling—a notion which, if true, would make them not insects at all.
    A shadow fell across the page, obscuring the diagram.
    It might have been a servant, but even before the silence stretched out long past the time when a servant would have announced his business, I knew it was not. I recognized my husband’s step.
    “I thought I might find you here,” Jacob said after a brief silence.
    “You almost didn’t,” I replied, my voice pleasingly steady despite the turmoil inside. “I was about to go inside and make another attempt at answering letters.”
    I heard Jacob move a few steps around the interior of the shed, and suspected he was studying my shelves. “I had no idea you had collected so