As the longest night of the year approached, those who wished to send their children to school prepared for lessons to resume. In the wintertime, few outside of the city would dare trust their children to the road in, so winter classes were always less frequented than summer classes. At the same time, the wood stove would be supplied and run as long as class was in session, so children of thrifty parents would look forward to school more than they might have otherwise. The dux might have been pleased to know how popular his public spending was, if he cared to check.

This year, the winter class was especially small, with only five commoner city children and one daughter of a noble servant. Presently, the latter was the only one who had arrived for the first day of school, and she was miserable.

Lucia was, by blood and technicality, a member of the nobility of Brostel, with fealty to the dux of Weave. However, despite the tremendous pride expected of the aristocracy in a country run solely by the nobles in the Council of Lords, noble pride did not feed families, servants, or educational milestones. And so, Lucia was brought for complementary schooling (supplied by the duchy) early, so that her father (who could not hire a nanny) could attend to his liege, a knight of common blood but martial distinction.

Lucia would gladly have traded the nobility of her blood just for her father to have a job that didn’t start before sunrise, or for the freedom to watch her house and walk to school on her own. But such a trade was impossible even for those with money and power, and Lucia had neither, so she bundled up in the cold schoolhouse whose stove hadn’t yet been lit for the day.

Later, the kindly old teacher would learn of her situation and begin coming to school earlier, but on the first day, she was on her own. Or so she thought.

She heard a muffled voice from the other side of the door. It sounded like some wild beast growling, and then a yelp of surprise.

“Huh? It’s open?” A surprisingly youthful voice breached the door as it swung inward.

A beautiful man of maybe twenty or twenty-five years walked peeked through before walking in. He had silky, long hair, blue like the evening sky. His face seemed to be slightly dry and scaly, like an old person’s, but with much fewer wrinkles. His boots and gloves were scuffed. He was definitely a commoner, but he seemed somehow familiar to Lucia. He was carrying something white in a wire mesh cage. He was a stranger, but he exuded an air of absolute harmlessness.

“O-oh, it’s not Katsk, huh? Nice to meet you. You’re sure early. The sun’s only rising now.” He pointed behind him. Indeed, the disk of the sun was only just beginning to peek over the buildings across the street.

Lucia closed her eyes and sighed. This man was talking to her like he was a boy her age! It kind of pissed her off. “I had no choice in the matter.”

The caged thing in the man’s arms let out a spirited high-pitched growl. The man looked at it in confusion and whispered something to it, causing it to growl again in return. The man sighed and took the cage to the back of the classroom, where he set it down.

“Well, I’m Waver, and this is Pentwec. Your teacher will be introducing her in a bit, but she’ll be the class pet, so please be kind to her.”

Waver... that name really was familiar, but she just couldn’t place it.

Now that Lucia got a closer look at this... Pentwec, she could see that it was a dragon; the type of dragon she’d occasionally seen pulling carts or milling around farmland. She didn’t know what they were called, and she’d certainly never seen one so small. Was it a baby? It had what looked like white fur, orange eyes, and asymmetrical antler-like spines on its back. Its eyes seemed to glare at her, but that might just have been the color; it seemed docile enough.

“I’m Lucia,” she said to it, as the man left her alone in the room with a caged dragon. “Your fur is pretty, I guess.”

“Yours is, too,” the dragon replied, in a high pitched voice.

Huh?

“My-” Lucia was incredibly flustered. She stood up suddenly and looked around into the corners for what ventriloquist was playing a prank on her. But no, she had seen its mouth moving. What in the world was going on?

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Over here,” the wingless dragonet said, rearing up on its hind legs and grasping the wire of its cage with its foreclaws. “I’m Pentwec the baize. By the way, I don’t really have fur, I just have long scales, but I can understand why you would make that mistake. And I know your fur is called ‘hair’, too. I just thought it would be funny to say the same thing back to you.”

“You don’t have to explain that!” Lucia protested. “Why is a dragon talking to me? Am I dreaming?”

“Hmm, I’m not sure,” the dragon says, in a teasing tone. “You should ask your classmates if you’re dreaming, when they get here. I mean, your other classmates. I’m sure they’ll have an answer, even if the answer is just to look at you like you just jumped on your desk and started growling like a bear.”

Lucia stared at the little dragon.

“What’s the teacher going to do when he finds out?”

The dragon unclasped her- that man had said “she”, right?- forepaws from the cage, and curled up at the bottom of it. “Good luck getting him to believe you. I don’t plan on saying a single word to him. Besides, you wouldn’t want to give away your friend’s secret, would you?”

“I already know I don’t have friends,” Lucia scoffed. “Don’t make fun of me like that.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Pentwec said simply. “We are, now, because I said so. So you’ll just have to let me keep you company until the others arrive. In fact, you don’t have a choice. You should be honored.”

Lucia smouldered at the dragonet’s imperious attitude, but smouldering felt warmer than freezing. Slowly at first, the two began to chatter idly until Pentwec heard the teacher’s footsteps outside and clammed up.

After that, it didn’t take long before more and more students began to arrive. One of them, it turned out, was sick and would be missing the first day of school, but the rest took their seats at separate tables one by one, glancing at Pentwec’s cage in wonder and confusion. Pentwec seemed to be sleeping, with the cute snores of any baby animal, but Lucia knew better now. She wondered if some wizard or fairy had cast a magic spell on her, to make her so different from other dragons.

“Good morning, class,” the portly teacher called out from behind the lectern, when everyone who would arrive had arrived. “I’m Katsk, and I’ve lived in Silfmont for just a few years. I come from Brostel’s capital. Does everyone know what our capital is called?”

“Carry,” a couple of the commoner children, a boy and a girl, said simultaneously. They glared at each other competitively. Lucia knew that, of course, but didn’t feel like standing out.

“That’s right, I’m from Carry,” Katsk said. “My full name is Werner Katsk. Now, let’s have everyone introduce themselves before I give you your first assignments.”

An hour later, the teacher left the classroom, saying he was going to pick up some more supplies. He had passed out wax tablets to everyone, with one left on the lectern for the missing student, and showed everyone a list of four symbols to practice drawing with them. Apparently the symbols were letters from a long-lost language, but now the symbols were used in ways that Lucia didn’t fully understand but had something to do with math.

Math they wouldn’t be learning any time soon. Lucia wasn’t sure about this new teacher.

Once Katsk was gone, the dragon finally spoke up.

“Hey, Lucia, could you bring me that last wax tablet? I want to try, too.”

A silent shock ran throughout the classroom.

Her alone undeterred, Lucia responded, getting up to retrieve the requested implement. “Can you even use the stylus?”

“You’ll see,” the dragon replied coyly. When Lucia slipped the tablet through the wire cage, she extended a single claw and began to draw messily on the wax with it.

Neglecting their own classwork, the four other students present gathered to the back of the classroom to watch. Slowly, they introduced themselves again, to each other rather than the teacher, and Lucia saw that Pentwec was taking note even while writing.

The competitive boy and girl were Rat and Rebecca, the two of the commoners who could already both read and write. Apparently, their parents both worked at the Temple, and they were twins. There was another girl named Wren, who was apparently the daughter of a stablehand. She smelled rather pungent and was fairly strong for her age, but she was curious and diligent about learning. Finally, Callen, a boy with shocking white hair and freckles. He was somewhat shy, but apparently he was the son of the miller. There was something fragile about him that reminded Lucia of the man who’d brought the dragon into the classroom.

Pentwec properly introduced herself again, too, and reiterated that she had no intention of making her presence known to the teacher, but that she’d love to be friends with all of the children. When asked about why she could talk...

“Are you sure other dragons can’t talk?” she replied cryptically. “Have you asked them?”

“More importantly,” she continued, “if you lot don’t get to work, I’ll get better at writing than you. Wouldn’t it be annoying to be outdone by some beast?”

That got everyone a little bit fired up, and the whole class including the pet - and even Lucia! - continued to chatter lightly about their lives while practicing their symbols until the teacher returned. Luckily, Pentwec remembered to wipe her tablet and replace it with nonsense scribbles before he arrived.