Page 4 of Lachlan

The date and name inside the front covers claimed they had all been written eight hundred years ago by the same nun, a Sister Agnes.

Most of the journals’ contents were mundane to say the least. But in the journal with the first date, the one that dealt with the nun’s life before she entered the convent and shortly after, Sister Agnes had written that dragons really did exist.

At least she’d claimed they had existed eight hundred years ago.

The nun wrote that three of them had been living in the Highlands of Scotland at that time. And the reason the woman knew this was because she claimed the magnificent creatures had spared her life when her family and the other people who lived in the village near the dragons’ mountain had left her tied to a tree and naked as a sacrifice so that the magnificent beasts would take her and protect the villagers from other predators, men as well as animals.

Even more miraculously, the woman claimed they had all landed as dragons beside her, before they shifted into large and lethal-looking human warriors with swords strapped to their broad backs, which they had used to cut the strips of leather tethering her to the tree.

Instead of the killing or ravishing she’d feared would follow, those men had covered her nakedness with a cloak before flying her, once again as dragons, to a convent many miles away from her home in Scotland.

She’d written she had been taught to read and write there, which in turn had allowed her to write these journals of her life. Most especially, of the time she had met those Highland warriors who could shift into dragons.

Belle wasn’t sure about that last claim. It seemed a bittoofarfetched. But the dragon part she really wanted to believe and prove, if she could.

Aged twenty, she was in her third year of studying mythology at university, with the intention of teaching it once she had attained her initial degree and then going on to take a master’s degree. Possibly even a PhD.

Finding the journals, most especially the one that had also hinted at the general area where the dragons had been living eight hundred years ago, had offered the perfect opportunity for Belle to prepare and present a unique end-of-year paper. One she would hopefully be able to use later as the focus for her advanced degree.

The language in the journal was as archaic as the time Sister Agnes made those notations about. The writing was also very small, as if the nun had been trying to conserve paper. Which she perhaps had. Paper would have been scarce in the thirteenth century.

It had taken some time for Belle to translate enough of the tiny writing and to then go online and discover that the place Sister Agnes claimed the dragons had taken her to was now called the St. Francis convent, and it was situated in Worcestershire.

She’d contacted the Mother Superior immediately and been permitted to visit for an afternoon.

Once there, Belle had also been allowed to search through the convent’s records, after promising to take very good care of them.

From those often badly written records, Belle had been able to establish that there had been a Sister Agnes living in the convent at the time the journal claimed she had. Those internal records went further and revealed that Agnes had been Mother Superior of the convent from the age of forty until her death at the age of eighty-two.

There was nothing in those other records, written by a number of different nuns over the years, to ever indicate or imply that Sister Agnes had been in the least deranged.

Which must surely mean that the female sacrifice, who had later become a nun and in charge of a convent, must have at leastthoughtshe had been in the presence of real dragons.

Belle had hardly been able to restrain her excitement at the possibility of dragons having once existed. That those magnificent creatures weren’t a part of mythology at all, but had once been very real.

The nun’s claim that the dragons she had met had the ability to change into human men was something Belle was willing to overlook as the woman’s hysteria after thinking she was about to die.

Belle’s only interest was in finding evidence, any evidence, that would confirm dragons had once existed.

With that in mind, she had decided the next step would be to arrange for a visit to Scotland during her Easter break. The weather would, hopefully, be milder and the snow all melted by then.

Ben McGregor’s invitation for her and the other four students who shared their house to join him and his family in the Highlands for a traditional Scottish New Year had been fortuitous. Even more so when Belle discovered the McGregor family lived in one of the villages very near to where the nun had claimed to have been rescued by the dragons who could shift into men.

Belle had spent Christmas alone, as she usually did, having no family of her own to spend it with. After which, she’d excitedly boarded the train that would take her up into the Highlands for the New Year.

She’d brought that one journal with her, of course. She’d been carrying it around in her backpack since she’d managed to translate it and realized its importance.

To her, at least.

No doubt, if someone else had bought that box of books, they would have simply decided the journals were of no value and then thrown them out.

Her stay at the McGregors’ home hadn’t gone quite as smoothly as she had hoped it would.

After escaping the NewYear revelries the evening before, she had returned from using the bathroom down the hallway to find Ben stretched out on her bed waiting for her. He left her in no doubt he was expecting to share her bed for the night.

Something, once Belle had recovered from the shock, she had very quickly disabused him of.

She didn’t know him any better than the other two boys and two girls her fixed budget allowed her to share accommodation with. Ben had definitely never shown the slightest interest in her when they were in London. Not that he wasn’t good-looking, because he was, but the two of them had absolutely nothing in common.

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