The Dragon Charmer by Jan Siegel Page A

world. It’s over, Will, long, long over. The witches and the goblins have gone back into the shadows where they belong. We’re in the real world now—for good—and I’m getting married on Saturday, and you can’t stop it even if you call up Azmordis himself.”
    “From the sound of things,” Will said quietly, “he’s coming anyway.”
    “If I didn’t know you better,” Fern said, ignoring him, switching the glare to her friend, “I might think you’d been primed.”
    Gaynor, absorbing the accusation with incredulity, opened her mouth to refute it, but Fern had turned away. She bent down to the socket, the sock ball still crumpled in one fist, and flicked the switch on and off with impunity. “Well, well. Seems perfectly normal to me. On, off. On, off. How unexpected. And the plug—plug out, plug in, plug out. What do you know. If you’ve finished with this farce I’m going to have my bath. I told Maggie we’d be there at seven; please be ready promptly. Let’s not add bad manners to everything else.”
    And to Gaynor: “I thought better of you. I know you don’t like Marcus—”
    “I
do
like him,” Gaynor said, speaking faster than she thought. “But I’d like him a lot more if you were in love with him.”
    “Love!” Fern cried scornfully—but for all the scorn hervoice held an undertone of loss and suffering that checked Gaynor’s rising anger. “That belongs with all those other fairy tales—in the dustbin.”
    She ran out and downstairs: they heard the bathroom door slam. Gaynor had moved to follow but Will held her back. “No point,” he said. “If there’s trouble coming she can’t stop it, not even by marrying boring Marcus.”
    “But I still don’t see what her marriage can have to do with this?” Gaynor said in bewilderment, indicating the television set. “Why is everything getting mixed up?”
    “I
think
,” Will said, “it’s all to do with motives. Her motives for getting married.”
    “She’s in pain,” said Gaynor. “I heard it in her voice.”
    “She’s in denial,” said Will.
       It was not a scene that augured well for the forthcoming dinner party, but although the three of them walked down to the vicarage in comparative silence, once there the warmth of the Dinsdales’ welcome, the aroma of roasting chicken, and copious quantities of cheap red wine all combined to bring down their hastily erected barriers. Will relaxed into his usual easygoing charm of manner, Fern, perhaps feeling that she might have overreacted earlier on, made a conscious effort to unwind, appealing to her friend for corroboration of every anecdote, and Gaynor, too generous to nurse a sense of injury, responded in kind, suppressing the bevy of doubts and fears that gnawed at her heart. By the time they were ready to leave, their mutual tensions, though not forgotten, were set aside. They strolled homeward in harmony, steering the conversation clear of uncomfortable subjects, admiring the stars that had chosen to put in an appearance in the clearing sky, and pausing to listen for night birds, or to glimpse a furtive shadow that might have been a fox, slinking across the road toward the river. For Gaynor, a city girl like Fern, though more from career necessity than choice, the country held its own special magic. The belated child of a flagging marriage with three siblings already grown up, she had never really felt part of a family, and now, with Fern and her brother, she knew something of the closeness she had missed. The wine warmed her, the night bewitched her. She would have subordinated awhole catalogue of private doubts to preserve that feeling undamaged.
    “Perhaps we’ll see the owl,” she said as they drew near the house.
    “I thought that was a dream,” said Will. “Riding on the back of a giant owl… or did you see a real one?”
    “I’m not sure,” Gaynor admitted. “Maybe it
was
just a dream.”
    “I’ve heard one round here at night,” Fern said, and a