We’ve a board near the Pub where everything from when Chasing Dragonfly will be playing next to tasters being wanted by Bjorn, our brewmaster, are posted.
And then there’s a sheet of parchment that really gets an argument going, any time the board decides to let it turn up again — an exquisite anatomical study of a dragon, rendered in the style of Leonardo da Vinci and with his signature scrawled at the bottom. Labeled ‘Anatomia del Draconis’, it catches a lot of eyes. It’s not uncommon to come in and see a knot of people studying that one – some swearing it’s genuine, others equally convinced it’s a fake.
Some of us are convinced that board is aware in some fashion or another. Or that there’s a spell on it, since its been up or the last few centuries. Or Moth and Peaseblossom are up to one of their Fey tricks again…
It’d been well over fifty years since it last showed up, so we decided this time to have a da Vinci expert, one of the most respected in the world, flown here at our expense to look at it. (We had removed it from the board before he got here and placed it in a protective sleeve. We didn’t want him to have a coronary when he saw it there.) So he arrived and proceeded to examine it.
It is, he said, either authentic or the best forgery of a da Vinci that he’s ever seen. Either way, it’s quite valuable. And at that point, it disappeared yet again. So we got to explain that it was a magical item, something he rejected, claiming we’d done a parlour trick on him. So we paid him his fee, drove him to the train station, and all agreed that next time we’d let missing dragons be.
