A Boy and His Dragon by R. Cooper

training.
    A Boy and His Dragon
    57
    It could have been the house itself. Bertie kept treasure in here; maybe there were wards around the house itself, letting him know when someone entered it. Of course, that didn’t explain how he knew to time the boiling water to Arthur’s arrival, but he hadn’t gotten everything right at least. Arthur would have preferred coffee over tea—not that he was going to object.
    He had his choice of tea and picked the darkest one he could find before heading out to the table in the main room to set up his ancient laptop. Only then did he look over at the stacks of books and sigh.
    Maybe another scone would revive him, but at the moment all he could think of—apart from the tantalizing idea that Bertie was keeping an eye on him, watching him even now, making sure he was fed and cared for—was that he wasn’t ready to lug any books around today.
    He spotted the stack of notes he’d discovered so far and looked around once more. There was still no hint of Bertie, and his note didn’t say anything about when he’d return.
    The notes were by the couch. The couch that looked incredibly warm and soft and inviting. Arthur fell into it with a long moan.
    He’d been working for Bertie less than a week and already he was going to miss it when he was gone and the work was over. The tea was hot enough to make him prickle with sweat and the couch was velvet, or something close enough to it that he almost put his cheek on it.
    He was seriously tired if he was thinking about rubbing his face all over his employer’s couch. His very expensive couch. He slurped down his tea quickly so he wouldn’t spill it and so he’d wake up a little, and then he put it on the table and reached for his laptop and all those notes.
    If he typed them all up, he might be able to put them in some kind of order, maybe even figure out what exactly Bertie had to say about lost red dragons and King Arthur. Of course, that was assuming there was any order to be found.
    R. Cooper
    58
    A lot of professors were touchy about their unpublished work, but he should ask if he could look over the outline or whatever was written so far. It might give him a better idea of what to look for.
    In fact, as he typed up scribbled notes written on napkins and legal pads and one business card for that same herbalist, he was definitely going to need more to go on. For a history book, many of the notes seemed to be about romance. A few were from hero cycles. Arthur had never seen “Beowulf” in the light that Bertie must have. It was clear he had contempt for the way the story played out, and yet there were hints that he was using it as an example of another trend in early cultures; the word “vilifying” had been used more than once.
    Arthur made a note to reread the text. Then he added a note to look into the idea that Beings and humans had once lived together in peace; the human stories about the subsequent shift in behavior in dragons that had necessitated the Beings being heroically murdered might have some dark motivation. There were other stories of mythical creatures being helpful, even dragons or serpents, if you went back early enough. He never noticed it before, but Bertie was right: at some point that had changed.
    He thought about it as he typed and squinted at a misspelling or two and had another hot, hot cup of tea, frowning at the screen until his vision went blurry and the world was spinning.
    He saw himself in a harsh realm with a sword in his hand, desperate to prove he was master of his fate, of the world, and woke up with a cry of confusion.
    The room around him was dark. Really dark. Much too dark for it to still be morning or even afternoon.
    For a moment he contemplated whether or not Bertie had ever come home, because the lights weren’t on, and then he became aware of the velvet crushed under his cheek and the thick comforter that had been thrown over his shoulders.
    His laptop had been taken out of his lap and