It was the third candle the abbess had confiscated, and Sable had nodded gravely each time and stolen another from the chapel stores. She kept reading by its unsteady light, hunched beneath her wool blanket in the scriptorium where the novices slept on straw pallets between the copying desks.

It was the bestiary that held her. Not the psalter, not the gospels, not the lives of saints with their wooden sufferings. The bestiary. Some brother at Lindisfarne had painted it two centuries ago, and his creatures had a quality she could not name, a weight to them, as if they had been observed from life rather than copied from pattern books. His lions looked hungry. His basilisks looked bored.

And his dragon, coiled in the lower margin of the forty-seventh leaf, looked like it was breathing.

She had watched it for six nights before she was certain. The movement was slight, a swelling of the ribs, a settling, barely more than the flicker the candlelight threw across the page. On the seventh night she held her breath and placed a finger beside its painted flank, and the parchment was warm.

\u201CYou could simply ask,\u201D the dragon said.

Sable jerked her hand back. The dragon opened one eye, yellow as egg tempera, and regarded her with an expression she recognized from the abbey cats: mild contempt for a creature too slow to be interesting but too close to ignore.

\u201CI am called Voss,\u201D it said. \u201CThough the brother who painted me called me several other things, mostly under his breath, mostly because I would not hold still.\u201D

\u201CYou are paint,\u201D Sable said. It came out less firmly than she intended.

\u201CI am gall ink and oak soot and gum arabic,\u201D Voss replied. \u201CAlso rabbit skin glue, which I find personally offensive. But I am not paint. Paint does not get stiff from two centuries of holding the same pose.\u201D He uncurled one leg and stretched it across the margin rule, his claws dimpling the parchment. \u201CYou, on the other hand, are trespassing. This page is not assigned reading for novices.\u201D

\u201CI am not a novice. I clean the scriptorium.\u201D

\u201CEven worse. A servant reading. The brothers would be scandalized.\u201D

\u201CThe brothers are asleep.\u201D

\u201CThe brothers,\u201D Voss said, \u201Care always asleep. That is the principal advantage of monasteries.\u201D He yawned, and his breath smelled of lamp-black and something older, something mineral, like a cave after rain. A thin red tongue uncurled and tasted the air above the page.

Sable leaned closer. In the candlelight she could see the crosshatching of his scales, each one laid down with a single stroke of the brush. The brother who painted him had not scrimped. Most bestiary dragons were outlines stuffed with vermillion, flat and heraldic. This one had shadow under its jaw. This one had a nick in its left ear.

\u201CWhat do you eat?\u201D she asked.

\u201CSilverfish, mostly. They get into the binding paste. Occasionally a bookworm, if I am feeling athletic.\u201D He cocked his head. \u201CWhy are you not frightened?\u201D

\u201CShould I be?\u201D

\u201CConvention demands it. A maiden, a dragon. There are expectations.\u201D

\u201CI scrub floors and empty chamber pots. I am not anyone\u2019s idea of a maiden.\u201D

Voss made a sound that might have been a laugh. It was dry and papery, like a sheet of vellum being folded. \u201CGood,\u201D he said. \u201CMaidens are tedious. They always scream at exactly the wrong moment. You, at least, have the sense to ask questions first.\u201D

He settled back into the margin, tucking his tail around the descender of a large Q. \u201CCome back tomorrow night,\u201D he said. \u201CBring a candle that does not gutter so badly. And if you can manage it, a bit of cheese. I have not tasted cheese in two hundred years, but I believe I would still recognize it.\u201D

\u201CCan you eat cheese? You are made of ink.\u201D

\u201CI am made of ink that remembers being alive,\u201D Voss said. \u201CThere is a considerable difference.\u201D He closed his eyes. The warmth under Sable\u2019s fingertips faded, and the dragon on the page was still again, just pigment and binder on stretched calfskin, exactly as lifeless as it should have been.

Sable sat in the dark for a long time after the candle burned out. Then she went to the larder and stole a piece of cheese.\u2026