If I hear one more person say, “But what good is it?” I think I am going to throw something, Penelope decided, opening her eyes to scan the room for likely projectiles. In the whole of her small, slightly cramped, low-ceilinged Journeyman apartment, she could find very few items that she would be willing to risk throwing: her spare pair of boots, perhaps, or an extra stylus. Everything else was far too fragile, or too precious. The shelves on her walls were taken up in equal parts with books and dragons—the latter in the form of sketches, sculptures, and the occasional more detailed drawing or painting. Most of them she’d done herself, using the descriptions and sketches in the books she could find on the subject as references. She found it simultaneously relaxing and inspiring to trace the powerful yet graceful lines of a dragon’s shape in charcoal, or in clay. The creatures’ economy of form had a strong aesthetic appeal. For all that they were the dangerous, savage beasts that Gwenneth had described earlier, there was a beauty to dragons.

“Maybe that’s just what I need now,” Penelope observed to the empty room. A bit of drawing might help her put her frustrations at the gathering downstairs out of her mind. She unlaced the front of her overdress, pulling it up over her head and off, and draped it over her desk chair. Her ivory blouse joined it a moment later. It wouldn’t matter as much if her linen underslip got smeared with charcoal; it already bore a few ink stains that the laundress had been unable to extract. She unlaced her boots and set them on the floor beside her bed, and then sat down on the thin mattress with one leg curled under her and the other bent in front, providing a makeshift easel on which to prop her sketchbook. Flipping the book open to a blank page, she took a stick of charcoal from her bedside table and began to draw, glancing up now and again at one of the clay sculptures on the shelf to her left.

She started with a few basic ovals and arcs, finding the right proportions for the chest, hindquarters, and neck. The head and tail came next, loosely outlined in the same basic shapes. Details would come later. Almost lovingly, Penelope sketched in the ovals that would form the creature’s shoulders, and the large muscle groups that would support the wings. Each stroke of charcoal formed the skeleton of the animal, the muscle and bone that underlay the structure of its body. With enough precision in these anatomical details, one would be able to see how the creature moved—the arc its wings would make on the downbeat, the way its rear legs would bunch under it, muscles tensing like a coiled spring. These were the details that made charcoal and pressed paper fibers seem alive.

As she continued to draw, filling in more and more details, Penelope began to realize that something wasn’t right. The curve of its horns, the pattern of the scales, they were all too… general. It wasn’t any particular dragon that she was drawing; it was merely the idea of a dragon. A specific dragon might be missing the tip of one of its horns, or have a tear in the leathery membrane of its wing. It might have a scar along its flank from a territorial battle with another dragon—assuming that dragons did fight over territory, which was merely speculated about in most of her reference materials. What color were a dragon’s eyes? Few of her sources could agree. It seemed very likely to Penelope that few, if any, of the scholars who had written about dragons in the past had ever actually seen one of the beasts firsthand. She had never seen one firsthand. But that would soon change. That was the purpose of her upcoming journey: research—real research, so that she could write an accurate natural history, with solid facts and sketches of particular dragons. And it would earn her the title of Master, never mind what her yearmates thought of her topic.