Adelie

The hoarding over the shopfront was ornately carved, swirls of dark wood suggesting the shapes of cats and flame, framing cursive text reading PURE DARKNESS. Adelie glanced at Phoebe as she pulled the Subaru's handbrake. It was hard to read her mood, beyond the obvious worry for Soot. Her phone had beeped its default notification sound a few times on the way here and that seemed to be where her eyes were drawn right now. Concern from her mysterious backers?

"This is the place, right?" Phoebe nodded towards the building. It was old, a rambling house heaped over and around the shop itself, set back from the road and cut off from the neighbourhood by a tall, thick, coarse hedge of evergreens.

Adelie nodded and undid her seatbelt. Not quite sure why she felt the need to ask, she said, "Do you want to come in?"

No question about it – Phoebe definitely looked down at her phone in its holder by the wheel. Then she shrugged, "Do you need me? You're a big girl, Adelie, you got this."

"I was just asking, I'm fine either way." Adelie shot her friend a look, but Phoebe didn't notice. Turning away, Adelie opened the door and stood. The air was damp with cold, suspended rain, and she hurried towards the shop.

The door was as fancy as the sign, engraved with vine and forest-fruit patterns so detailed that Adelie almost felt she could pluck and eat the berries. A cheery sign, much plainer, in the small oval window proclaimed 'Come on in – we're open!' Taking one long breath, Adelie turned the handle and entered.

Dense, spicy air greeted her from the gloom within. The lights were dim, yellow, and high on the walls; across the bare boards of the shop floor, aisles of dark wood shelves huddled, and there were as many antiquated glass jars as modern plastic sachets on their racks. The counter on the far side of the room was a little better-lit, the wall behind also covered in shelves carrying larger glass urns and bottles, with a few framed pictures scattered among them.

"Eyyy, how can I help you?" The man who approached her was tall, and made taller by the enormous curl of blonde hair rising from the crown of his head. He wore extravagant sleeves that started white and trailed away to purple, and his upper body was swallowed by an absurd noise of ruffles, feathers and bat wings. Above his shoulders, a dim halo of violet and fuschia flames flickered, framing a face with a wide mouth that hinted of cruelty, lips stained purple, and sharp, piercing eyes.

Adelie had met sorcerers before, and wasn't terribly intimidated. "Hi, I'm tending a racing drake and he's having allergy trouble, he can't hold food down. I'm looking for something to get the symptoms under control while we figure out what he's reacting to."

The sorcerer blinked and tilted his head slightly to one side. "One second." He looked over towards the back of the shop. "Purity! Customer for you!"

Scuffling noises answered, and then a hat emerged from a doorway behind the counter, the brim bending downwards as it squeezed through the frame. Under the brim, the underside of which was a sumptuous turquoise, a round face peeked out from behind dense blonde bangs. The woman's shoulders were occupied by a creature that definitely wanted to be thought of as a cat. Adelie found her shoulders tensing slightly.

"Purity's the one who knows about dragons, she'll help you," said the sorcerer as the witch approached.

"Yes, I will," she said, waving him away. Then she focussed her attention on Adelie. Her eyes were the same colour as her hat's lining. She probably wasn't any taller than Adelie, but the hat loomed over them both. And that cat… Her voice was kindly, though, with a deep accent Adelie couldn't quite place. "Something about a dragon?"

"Yes, uh. He's sick, um, we think he's allergic to something, he's not keeping his meals down."

"It's just the stomach? No trouble breathing?"

The question was businesslike enough that Adelie could set aside the looming power of the witch – Purity? That had been the name the sorcerer had called, right? "No. And he's drinking plenty of water."

Purity frowned at her. "Are you sure it's not bacterial?"

"I don't think so. He's not lost his appetite or anything, it's just every time he eats, a few hours later he throws it up again."

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"Part digested?" The witch waited for Adelie's nod. "Yeah it's not the food then. But allergies don't just come on out of nowhere."

Adelie bit the inside of her lip and took a breath, sharply conscious again of the cat's unblinking attention. "We only recently started looking after him."

Two pairs of eyes narrowed under the hat, in perfect sync. "Hatchling?"

Almost every way of coming into possession of a dragon, of any age, was basically illegal. Adelie tried not to think about what Phoebe might have been doing all those months away up north, but she knew too much about dragons now to believe that Soot had ever been wild. Trying not to give too much away, she mumbled, "Drake. He's nineteen."

"Any allergies should be documented in the owner record." There was a faint but significant emphasis on those last two words that sent a chill through Adelie.

It was odd that Soot's chip didn’t have anything, Adelie had checked it twice. And the fact that he was chipped had to mean there was some legitimacy to Phoebe's ownership, right? How would whoever had been keeping him have missed something this severe… "Wait, would it matter if he was relocated recently?"

"Oh, you brought him here for the race season?" Had the witch's lips moved at all as she said that? "Where from?"

Adelie tore her gaze away from the black well of the cat's fur again and met Purity's eyes. "Up north."

"Oh he's a lunar, riiiiight," her whole tone and demeanour softened. "That'll be it. If you've only managed solars and stellars before, they don't have this problem."

Adelie held her tongue. Probably better not to say Soot was her first charge as a dragon vet.

The silence drew another slight frown from the witch, but she went on. "They don't like our bugs, you have him on a sand bed?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, you'll need to mix in some dried tintwhistle and woodseats powder, there's a sand mite you need to drive off. Smells a bit, but it'll stop the reaction long-term." Purity turned and started to walk to the end of the shop, then grabbed Adelie's sleeve when she hesitated to follow. "Come on, let's get you what you need."

If anything it was even gloomier in the corner they went to. Here, the bottom shelves were stacked with bigger pouches, like kilo bags of sugar but plastic-wrapped, with handwritten stickers that probably named the contents if you could read in this light. Purity picked up two and handed them to Adelie, who almost dropped them, surprised at the weight. More like flour than sugar, then.

"How big is the barn?"

Adelie almost flinched, but of course any dragon would be stabled in a barn. "Uh, twenty by fifty. Metres."

"Yeah, because you'd be keeping a racing dragon in a hundred square feet," snipped the witch. She picked up two more bags and stacked them in Adelie's arms. "You must be taking it seriously with a barn that size, though, good. That's the tintwhistle, that's the main thing, make sure you spread it thoroughly, turn over all the sand if you can." She bent down and picked up another packet and added that to the pile. "Woodseats powder, you want to use it sparingly. Smells. Hm. Let me give you some mottram to cover that, that's behind the counter, what else?"

How much was this going to cost? Was she going to need to go out to the car and get Phoebe to pay? "Uh-"

Purity didn't give her time to speak. "Oh, right, something to help his stomach settle, because it'll be a few days before you really get rid of the bugs." And she was off again to a different part of the store.

Adelie followed, trying to rearrange her arms under the load. She already felt like she was about to drop it. Why did this stuff have to be so heavy? "Um, how often..?"

"Whenever you clean in there, like properly turn the sand over." Purity didn't look round. "Shorten that cycle if you can. Three weeks or so." Then she ducked into another aisle and returned with a punnet of mushrooms and a smaller sachet of herbs. "Here. Turton bottoms and simmondley. The mushrooms go in his meal, he'll love them – don't try one yourself, wash your hands after preparing them – and the simmondley is a tea, you can just brew it up, add a cup to his water supply every morning. Delicious stuff if you don't mind feeling a bit light-headed after."

Still bustling, the witch tossed the packets onto the counter and swung around behind it to face Adelie. "There was something else, right? Oh, right, mottram." She turned to the jars on the wall shelves, muttering.

The witch's movement drew Adelie's eye to one of the picture frames, and she blinked, startled. It was a pastel-toned photo of an elfin face framed by platinum-blonde hair and striking purple wings. A face she recognised instantly. "Hey, is that Mynah Darling? I love her music, are you a fan?"

Purity made an indistinct noise, one hand raised and a jar levitating off a high shelf in response.

"That photo looks, er, she looks so young, is that an early promo shot? I've never seen that one before, you must have been following her right from the start of her career, right?"

The jar landed on the counter with a heavy thunk. It wasn't a high counter but the jar was tall enough to hide the witch's face outright. On her shoulder, the yellow shapes that were supposed to look like cat's eyes, if you didn't look too closely, visibly rolled. Adelie decided to let it drop.

Somehow, Purity managed to reach high enough to pull a bundle of herbs out of the jar. These were handled much more carefully, but the witch didn't speak until they were wrapped. Then, as the jar floated back up towards its shelf, she said, "You'll be needing most of this again in a few weeks, we can open an account and arrange delivery if that's more convenient for you?"

"Uhhhh, I'll need to check with, uh, the team manager. Can I call back later?" Could Phoebe even set up an account here?

"Sure, sure, you can just pay for these now. Can always sort it out next time you need the stuff, too. But don't take too long, you know? Three weeks at most."