The First Dragon (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, The) Read Free

the stack on the table. “I got this.”
    “Actually,” Jack said, “the proper way to say that would be ‘I’ve got this.’ The way you say it makes you sound . . .”
    “Uneducated? Like a wildling, maybe?” Laura Glue replied.
    Jack frowned. “I was going to say, it makes you sound less intelligent than you actually are.”
    Laura Glue frowned back. “ ’Ceptin’,” she said, deliberately using Lost Boy slang, “you knows I be intelligent as all that, and I knows I be intelligent as all that, so what be the problem, neh?”
    “The problem,” Jack said, now in full professor mode, “is that no one else who heard you speak that way would know how intelligent you really are.”
    She shrugged and smiled at the Caretaker. “Why should I care what anyone else thinks? I know, and that’s enough.”
    “She has you there, Jack,” John said, clapping him on the back. “Best just shut up now and help her move the boxes.”
    “Nah,” Laura Glue said, waving one hand at them as she hefted another stack of boxes with her other arm. “Like I said—I got this.”
    “An’ I gots some munchies,” the badger Caretaker Fred announced as he strolled into the room, carrying a large basket filled with fruit. “It’s midafternoon, and you missed lunch, so I thought I’d better bring something up.”
    “Thank you, Fred,” Jack said as he selected a bunch of grapes and sat down. “Anticipating a need is the mark of an excellent Caretaker.”
    “Don’t go quoting Jules, now,” said John. “Especially regarding anticipating our needs.”
    “That’s not entirely fair, is it?” Houdini asked as he examined some pears a moment before selecting a peach. “He hardly could have anticipated a crisis like this one.”
    “He seems to have anticipated every other kind of crisis,” John grumbled, “including an entire alternate timeline set into motion by Hugo Dyson closing a door at the wrong time, which, as I recall, was partially your fault. So why didn’t he anticipate this? Where’s the backup plan for the backup plan?”
    Jack stood and sidled around one of the tables to move another stack of scrolls and parchments, which he dropped onto the floor next to John’s chair. “Perhaps we have gotten too accustomed to hisbeing our deus ex machina,” he said, sitting heavily in the wingback chair next to Laura Glue. “We count on his always having the answers, because before we knew how many strings he was pulling, he always seemed to have all the answers. And then, even after we found out just how many events he was manipulating, we still allowed it because it always seemed to work out. It was only after something finally went terribly wrong that you took matters into your own hands and stepped into the role yourself.”
    John scowled. “You are referring to the role of Prime Caretaker, I hope,” he said with a hint of irritation, “and not Jules’s predilection for meddling with time.”
    “What’s the difference?” Laura Glue asked as she selected an apple from Fred’s basket and bit into it. “Isn’t that precisely what the job be, neh?”
    “That’s the problem in a nutshell,” John said with a sigh. “It really is, but it shouldn’t be.”
    At that moment, Nathaniel Hawthorne stuck his head around the corner. Before he could speak a word, he exploded with a violent sneeze, then another, and another.
    “You would think,” he said as Fred handed him a handkerchief to blow his nose, “that Basil Hallward could have painted some version of my portrait that left out my allergy to dust.”
    Jack chuckled. “That’s not how it works,” he said blithely, referring to their resident artist’s technique for preserving life by painting portraits of Caretakers who were about to end their natural life spans. “As you were in life, so you remain in Tamerlane House.”
    “That’s slender consolation sometimes, Jack,” Hawthorne grumbled as he wiped his nose. “You’ll understand when you