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recognition, no wonder in her eyes.  Her mother was a good woman, a fanciful and wonderful woman.  Her mother deserved to see dragons.
    The lady on the steps was smiling at her.  It was the same sly, knowing smile.
    Taryn turned away.  The weight of Aisling in her arms was too great for his size.  Dead weight.  A premonition.  She had come all this way, and why?
    Her car was sitting in the sunlight, waiting for her to climb back in and drive home.  Taryn looked at it but didn ’t move.  She had driven through the night, and underneath this veneer of anxious fear, she knew she was exhausted but she wasn’t ready to give up yet.  She had come all this way, all right.  She had come all this way because once upon a time, there had been dragons, and the lady who had taken care of them might just know how to take care of a griffin.
    ‘ There were no dragons,’ her brain insisted furiously.
    Aisling needed her and she needed help, and that was why she ’d come here.  If she got back in that car and let it take her home now, that would be it for Aisling.  She couldn’t let that happen.  She had to have help.  And the lady with the dragons was the only person in all this wide world Taryn could think of who might possibly be able to help her.
    ‘ There never were any dragons,’ her inner self groaned.
    “ Yes, there were !” Taryn shouted, and heard it roll up the stairs to the library’s doors and back down again.  She swung back before her head could get the better of her, her voice rising sure and strident in the early air.  “There were dragons!  I saw them, they were real!  There were dragons in your hair and on your shoulders and everywhere around you—”
    The lady on the steps gazed up at her with her secret smile as understanding slowly took hold on Taryn ’s face.
    “ And there still are,” she said softly.  “Aren’t there?”
    The lady threw out her arms, laughing.  All around her, dragons exploded into sight, churning around her in a storm of chirping, singing wings.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    7.  The Lady and the Dragons
     
    “I knew, aye.  I knew.”  The lady on the steps picked up another square of paper, metallic green, and began to fold.  Her hands did this deftly, unsupervised.  Her eyes were on Taryn, glittering with good humor, and her dragons were nestled in her hair.  “I knew thee was coming.  The wind told me. The rain.  I did not know who, but I knew there was one seeking me.  What need is it that brings thee?”
    “ I have…a terrible problem.”  Taryn looked down at the pack in her arms, paced away, and then returned in an agony of trust.  “Who are you?”
    “ They call me Romany, for I go where I will,” the lady said proudly.  Her eye lit on Taryn’s pack and gleamed.  “What treasure, love?  What precious penny?”
    “ The most precious,” Taryn admitted, every word a stone.  Her heart in her throat, she reached into the pack and brought Aisling out into the light.
    She watched the smile fade from Romany ’s face, to be replaced by an awful shock.  It was the one expression, the one outcome to this spur-of-the-moment trip, that she had never expected.  Seeing it, she suddenly knew she had made a terrible mistake.  The strength left her legs.  The warmth left her blood.  She tried to back away and fell, landing with a bruising thud on her butt in the shadow of the great grey library.
    “ Peace, thee,” the lady whispered.  Romany touched her nimble fingers to her lips, still staring gravely at what Taryn held.  “I will not harm thee, nay, thee has but caught me all a’swim. Such a treasure you bear. I thought them lost to this world.  Where found thee this unfledged pearl?”
    “ In the woods.  In a caved-in den.  In the rain.”  She didn’t seem to be capable of stringing words together any better than that.  Every breath hurt.  “Fifteen years ago.  An egg.”
    Romany looked up