Flax couldn’t sleep. She was curled up in a tree, which was where minch-wiggins had bedded down since the beginning of time. But it wasn’t the right sort of tree.

It smelt wrong.

It felt wrong.

It even sounded wrong. The wrong sort of birds were singing up the dawn. The wrong sort of frogs croaked in the distance.

Flax sighed and looked up at the gradually lightening sky. It was too big, and too far away, and it made her feel small and lost—

No, not that sort of lost. Minch-wiggins always know exactly where they are.

But there are other sorts of lost.

When you are far from home, for example, and everything around you is strange.

Or when you have been imprisoned for many years and see no chance of escape …

What? No, of course Flax was not imprisoned. I never said she was. I was just – thinking aloud.

‘We’re going home,’ Flax reminded herself. ‘Today I’ll turn us due south, and hope the pup’s too busy talking to notice. And I’ll lose Rose along the way somehow.’

It wasn’t kind, to lose someone on purpose. But it wasn’t kind to make a minch-wiggin go chasing after a dragon, either. Or to leave the Floating Forest without its only surviving Spellhound.

Flax turned over and tried to get comfortable.

She wriggled her toes.

She yawned.

Her eyes closed.

Oh good, she thought. I’m going to sleep at last—

Her eyes sprang open again.

The world had fallen silent. The birds in the hedge had stopped twittering. The distant frogs had stopped croaking.

Flax grabbed her satchel and sword, and slid down the tree trunk.

‘Pup!’ she hissed.

The pup snored on.

She was just about to pinch his ear when a quiet voice said, ‘Flax? Can you smell – um – scorching?’

She spun around. Rose was staring up at the sky.

A dreadful chill touched Flax’s heart. She looked up, too – and up and up and up.

She began to tremble.

High above their heads, something was flying north.

Something huge, with spiky wings.

Rose gasped. ‘It’s – it’s a dragon!’