Continuity: Second-Hand Dragons

Append-only facts established in the draft. chNN | fact.

Ch	Fact
01	Aldevar pawned on a Thursday (first frost), in a coal scuttle, for eleven crowns. It bit the ticket.
01	Master Fennick died a fortnight before ch1; carried out of the house on Ferrier Street. Aldevar has said nothing since, until ch1.
01	Aldevar's eyes have been failing for thirty years: light and dark only. It knows people by smell.
01	Dragons are the size of their fire; once barn-sized, now "a large and disappointed cat". Scales the colour of old pennies; bellows-with-a-hole breathing. Teeth still very good.
01	"The noise": the sound a chimney makes just before it catches.
01	Smells: Mrs Fennick = lavender, damp, faint pipe (lavender goes sharp when she lies); Mrs Hobb = brass polish; Tansy = ink, soap, being cold. Tansy chews her pencil, moves with small quick steps.
01	The shop bell is thin and cracked. Counter is cold glass. Back room through a moth-smelling curtain; the stove there has been cold for years (ash hard as pavement).
01	Mrs Hobb calls Aldevar "it"; Mrs Fennick calls it "he". Aldevar refers to itself as I.
01	Pledge terms: redeemable before Midwinter for eleven crowns plus interest; then the Reckoning. Forty-two days to Midwinter on day one (Tansy counts, then recounts: her own date).
01	Quill: owl, eleven years on the shelf; Tansy warms his water in her hands.
01	Tansy asked "May I?" before lifting the scuttle: the first person ever to ask. Once carried by a bishop.
01	Aldevar's first words in a fortnight: "Fire is not a thing one lends." Tansy: "everything in it is for something"; "You're stock now. So am I, more or less."
02	By day Aldevar's scuttle sits on the front shelf behind the counter, under the window, between a carriage clock and a box of spoons (Mrs Hobb: a pledge that is looked at gets redeemed).
02	Woman tried to pledge her mother's hearth-coal in a tin; Mrs Hobb refused ("fire doesn't keep on a shelf"). Mr Abel (smells of horses, cold room, "colder wife") paid a penny; the coal went cold, then grey, in his palm. Mrs Hobb lent threepence on the tin (a kind lie: "good tin").
02	A live given coal makes a tiny breathing tick; it stops when sold.
02	Lamplighters' Guild: charter to sell fire for forty years; lamps hiss "like a cat asked to leave"; a lamp in your room is two shillings an hour. Mrs Hobb has one Guild lamp at the counter, for reading hallmarks.
02	Dragons smell of hot pennies. A lamplighter sniffed at the shop window at dusk; Tansy wrote something down.
02	Aldevar's fire is a little lower each night (about a candle's evening), unused; it tells no one.
02	Aldevar claims to be older than the city; "I was there when it started." Tansy doesn't quite believe it yet.
03	second Thursday: bell rang nine times, no Mrs Fennick. Mrs Hobb: "Thursdays are always slow."
03	At night Aldevar sleeps in the back room; Tansy carries it every night and always asks first.
03	Tansy's room is over the shop; the stair creaks on the fourth and ninth steps. Her ink froze (last time: when she was nine, says Quill).
03	Next door on the left: a cobbler (old man, unnamed); his back room shares a wall with the back room.
03	The ritual: "Can you spare a light?" / "Gladly." / "Thank you kindly." / "Pass it on, love." (First of three "Can you spare a light?")
03	Tansy put the given candle between Quill's shelf and the scuttle: "Now it's nobody's, so it's everybody's."
03	The Founders' Fire: a ford, a few huts, a dragon on the hill; it lit their first hearth for nothing because they asked, in a hard winter; nine hundred years ago. Every child knows it as a story. Aldevar: "I was in it."
03	Tansy has noticed Aldevar is lighter each night ("about as much as a candle burns down"); "I notice what things weigh."
03	Next morning a card on the mat, lamp oil and starch: "The Lamplighters' Guild presents its compliments."
04	Third Thursday (day 15; twenty-eight days left): Mrs Fennick visits, sits on Tansy's crate, talks about her husband.
04	Master Fennick: cherrywood pipe with a chipped bowl, smoked forty years, never cleaned; the house on Ferrier Street smells of it ("like living inside his coat"). Bad jokes told twice. Hummed the same three bars of a song he never finished. Put his feet on Aldevar's back to warm them.
04	Mrs Fennick once heard Aldevar answer her husband through the study door.
04	Tansy starts calling Aldevar "him" (Mrs Hobb: it; Mrs Fennick: he).
04	Tansy: "Will you redeem him?" Mrs Fennick: "Not yet." Tansy echoes Mrs Hobb: "Everybody says that."
04	Aldevar's organ voice: once stopped a battle on the river, once told a king what it thought of him. It chose not to call her back (pride; can't bear the pipe-smelling house and his empty chair).
04	Noon: a Guild boy brings a letter. The Guild will bid at the Midwinter Reckoning and will send an agent to inspect. Mrs Hobb put it in the drawer under the counter, with the strongbox.
04	That night Mrs Hobb turned far back in the ledger, wrote something short, and rubbed it out.
05	Monday after the third Thursday (day 19): Edwin Strand of the Lamplighters' Guild. Wipes both boots; very good leather gloves, folded one inside the other; lamp oil and starch. Says "May I" but means "where is it".
05	Strand lifted Aldevar's wing bare-handed without asking and put a thermometer under it; didn't flinch at the noise. Reading: "about the same as a cat. A tired cat." Tansy: "You might have asked him."
05	Strand's theory: lamps are cold because the flame is "a copy of a copy", worn thin; light from the source = warm lamps. Sincere.
05	Guild reserve: two hundred crowns. Clause: "The creature, and all fire arising from it, shall become the sole property of the Lamplighters' Guild." Envelope kept in the drawer with the letter.
05	Mrs Hobb paid the coal merchant on Friday with a silver christening cup from the window; the landlord knocked on Saturday. Two hundred crowns would pay both for three years. She neither refused nor agreed.
05	Strand: the Reckoning list is posted on the first of the month; magistrates "particular this year"; "Every unredeemed pledge is to be listed. Of every kind."
05	Second "Can you spare a light?": Tansy, kneeling, asks Aldevar to light Tallow Lane before Midwinter. Aldevar: "No." She doesn't argue; does the accounts.
06	Wednesday: Mrs Hobb paid the coal merchant in pledges (brass candlesticks, a clock that doesn't go, a fur tippet); got two sacks of coal with nothing warm to light it.
06	Quill was pledged eleven years ago "in the year of the great flood" by a stage magician, the Great Ambrose, who said he'd return on Tuesday. Three moults, two roof leaks, "the incident with the ferret"; a suit of armour redeemed by its owner's nephew. "I call it a career."
06	Quill: "The girl and I are of the same year." Small Tansy sat under the counter writing letters on the backs of old tickets. First time Aldevar hears Tansy laugh.
06	Tansy's bed brick: warmed nightly at the cobbler's hearth for nothing. She gave it to Quill ("You've only got the one owl"); she has three cardigans. Aldevar could have warmed it and didn't; didn't sleep.
06	Old ledgers are kept on shelves at the far end of the shop. After midnight Tansy found Quill's entry, then read "One girl. Aged five."
07	Fourth Thursday (day 22). The ledger line, in an old thick brown-ink hand (Mrs Hobb's father ran the shop then): "One girl, aged five. Pledged against four crowns, by her mother, who made her mark. Redeemable at any time. Interest waived." Between silver sugar tongs and a mantel clock. No names, the mother's mark an X.
07	Tansy has a key to the counter drawer (keeps the accounts). Reckoning list in Mrs Hobb's hand: "Lot nineteen. One girl, aged sixteen, pledged eleven years ago against four crowns, unredeemed." Due on the first; magistrates want it early.
07	Mrs Hobb: "It's the law at sixteen. An unredeemed pledge of a person must be listed when the person comes of age. I've no say in it." Tansy: "Of course."
07	Mrs Fennick visited briefly at eleven, smelling of salt (had cried).
07	First night Tansy carried Aldevar without asking. "What am I, then? Stock." Aldevar: "you were very badly priced… I should have asked for nine at the very least. Mrs Hobb's father was a fool." Once worshipped by a village for a fortnight. Tansy laughed, then cried.
07	Tansy's list: every house on Tallow Lane, given hearth or cold. Cobbler lit (until now), Mr Abel not, the tin woman not. "If one warm hearth can light two more…"
07	Tansy had kept her candle lit nightly from the cobbler's hearth. The cobbler ran out of coal on Tuesday; his fire is out. Her hands blue.
08	Same night as ch7, a little after midnight (Friday, day 23): Aldevar, unasked, breathes a flame onto Tansy's dead candle. First flame given since the founders' hearth ("not since a hill above a ford and eleven huts").
08	Cost: a part of its fire went out; it got smaller ("a week's worth, perhaps more"); greyer at the edges; breath "a bellows with two holes"; can't hold its head up long.
08	"It is mine. That is rather the point. You can't give away a thing that isn't."
08	Tansy filled an iron scuttle from Mrs Hobb's coal cellar and relit the cobbler's hearth from the candle. Cobbler: "Pass it on, love." Tansy: "I will. I promise I will."
08	The back room is colder now: Aldevar had been quietly warming it. Quill's water iced over. Mrs Hobb saw, said nothing, counted the coal (one sack and a half left) and didn't write it down.
08	First snow on Greyhithe (Friday morning).
08	"Don't you ever do that again… I'm not worth a week of you." / "I shall do as I like. I am a dragon."
08	Aldevar asks for something for the first time in nine hundred years: to be taken to see Mrs Fennick, tonight.
09	Friday night (day 23), nine o'clock: Tansy carries Aldevar to Ferrier Street, the scuttle wrapped in her third cardigan. Mrs Hobb: "Bring him back before morning" (her first "him"). Pledges must never leave the shop (a rule).
09	Route: Tallow Lane, nineteen Guild lamps to the river (Tansy counts), the Corn Bridge, wider streets beyond. Given hearths' smoke smells of supper; bought ones of pennies. Snow squeaks "like a mouse being stepped on".
09	Ferrier Street: gutter at the corner, a closed baker's, number seven (the Fennicks'), whose third step rocks. Aldevar lived there sixty years.
09	The house: church-cold; lavender, damp, his pipe in everything; the tall hall clock has stopped, nobody wound it. Mrs Fennick uses a Guild candle.
09	Aldevar lit the Fennicks' grate forty years ago on their wedding night as a wedding present ("very rude about it"). It went out the week he died; she let it.
09	"It wasn't for the rent." She pawned Aldevar because it smells of his pipe. Neither of them ever asked what came after the three bars.
09	Aldevar offered to light the grate; she refused: "Not if it costs you… Not on me."
09	Tansy: the Guild's two hundred crowns would pay the landlord, coal merchant and roof man. Aldevar: "Then I suppose I'm useful." Tansy stopped dead in the snow.
10	The week after Ferrier Street: Tansy passed the cobbler's light to the house across the lane, then two more: three warm houses on Tallow Lane, twelve still cold. Mrs Hobb's coal nearly gone.
10	Aldevar weakening faster since the gift; weighs "about the same as a loaf"; can barely lift its head. Dragons glow faintly when their fire is low (fire showing through worn scales; not a warm light).
10	The Guild took back its counter lamp on the Monday (Mrs Hobb couldn't pay).
10	Sixth Thursday (day 36, a week before Midwinter): Strand's reserve signed. "If no one bids higher, the creature is ours at noon on Midwinter Day." Mrs Hobb: "You don't know anything about it, Mr Strand." She stood a long time in the cellar.
10	Ledger margin: the same few pencil words in Mrs Hobb's hand, written and rubbed out about eleven times; Tansy reads "for sale"; the short first word is rubbed through to a hole. She reads it as "for sale every year".
10	Tansy first calls Aldevar "Al".
10	Aldevar faces the lie: in a Guild cage its fire will end with it and warm nobody.
10	Coldest night in Greyhithe for forty years: river frozen at the edges to the Corn Bridge; window frost met in the middle; Quill's water froze solid. Tansy packed her bag (two cardigans, stockings, a hairbrush). Aldevar made up its mind, unasked.
11	Midwinter morning: Mrs Hobb pushes a handcart of unredeemed pledges (boots, wedding ring, carriage clock, Aldevar). Tansy carries her bag with the old given candle in it. Quill stays: never listed, because the Great Ambrose paid three years' keep in advance and vanished. Quill: "Bring her back."
11	Auction hall: far side of the Corn Bridge; hundreds of Guild candles in iron rings; hard benches. The auctioneer's voice "like a cart going over cobbles".
11	Guild bench at the front: eight or nine lamplighters, poles under the bench; Strand with a full purse. Lot nineteen chalked on the board by the door.
11	Lot six: wedding ring, bought back for nine shillings. Lot ten: carriage clock, unsold. Lot twelve: Aldevar, reserve two hundred crowns.
11	Bids: Strand 200; Mrs Fennick 205 (she sold Master Fennick's library yesterday); Strand 210. She stops: "If I buy you, you're bought… I'd rather you were given. To someone."
11	Sold to the Lamplighters' Guild for two hundred and ten crowns. Possession at noon, nine minutes after the gavel. Aldevar was once stolen briefly by a baron; never sold before.
11	Third "Can you spare a light?": Aldevar to Tansy, meaning "will you take mine". It breathed everything it could spare, and more, into her old candle: "It's yours… It's given." The hall smells of warm wax for the first time in forty years.
12	After the gift Aldevar would fit in a teacup; grey all over; can't lift its head.
12	In the hall: Tansy relights a woman's bought candle (she'd been outbid on a shawl); it turns warm; it spreads bench to bench ("like spilt tea across a cloth"). People carry bought candles in winter as habit. The child with the cold stops coughing.
12	Tansy runs over the Corn Bridge; first house is number seven Ferrier Street; Mrs Fennick went with her; the grate lit. Then all twelve cold houses on Tallow Lane; the tin woman put a given coal back in her tin. Nobody paid, so all of it was warm.
12	Noon: Strand's thermometer under Aldevar's wing doesn't move. A lamplighter lit his pole from Aldevar's scales: white, bright, no heat. Strand: "It was never the flame. It was the paying… telling them it was the weather." He let his gloves fall unfolded.
12	Strand gives Aldevar back to Mrs Hobb for nothing. Mrs Hobb keeps the two hundred and ten crowns ("It would only go cold").
12	Lot nineteen called; Tansy absent (her bag left on the bench). Mrs Hobb: "Withdrawn… By me. Never you mind how." She carried the scuttle home herself (first time), without asking. Every chimney on Tallow Lane smells of supper. Tansy not back yet.
13	Midwinter night: Tansy returns late with the flame still burning (a given flame doesn't shrink for being shared); fire spreading past the walls. Mrs Hobb waited six hours in her coat on the crate. "He's your dragon."
13	Tansy relit the back-room stove (last half sack of coal) from her candle; set Aldevar inside on the warm coal, asking first; Aldevar said yes aloud.
13	Next morning: Mrs Hobb tore up Tansy's pledge ticket (her half; the mother's half never returned): "You can't buy back what was never mine to sell." Wrote "Given" in ink in the ledger margin. The pencil said "not for sale", every year since Tansy's sixth birthday.
13	Quill left the shelf ("decided, on reflection, to redeem himself"), lost three feathers, knocked over the box of spoons, settled on the stove pipe.
13	Thursday: Mrs Fennick sits by the stove; her grate is warm. Aldevar hums a made-up fourth bar of the song ("dreadful"). She comes every Thursday since.
13	Frame, a few winters later: Aldevar lives in the stove, small and dim, still gives fire to customers with cold hands. Tansy does evening rounds with a candle and a list. Ends on the bell ringing for her coming home.
rev	Revision after reader test (2026-10-18): Aldevar named in ch1 by Mrs Fennick ("Aldevar the Undimmed, if we are being formal"); Tansy's "Al" in ch10 is explained as the first scrap of the name. Ownership passes at noon (ch10, ch11): whatever fire is left in Aldevar at noon is the Guild's, which is why it gives everything. Rule clarified in ch2: only paying for the flame kills it; coal and candles can be bought. Mrs Hobb's father kept the shop until the winter after the flood (ch7). Quill unlisted because Ambrose paid three years' keep (now in ch6). Only the ticket holder can withdraw a pledge (ch12); a pledge with no ticket is no pledge (ch13). Mrs Fennick told Mrs Hobb to keep the surplus (ch13). Ferrier Street house is number seven; lot ten is the clock; bell rang nine times in ch3; "a few huts".
rev2	2026-10-19: "I want it on the record that…" changed to "Let the record show that…" in ch03, ch05, ch07 and ch10 (listen-check; af_heart blurs "want it"). The catchphrases in ch01 ("I would like that on the record") and ch09 ("I want that on the record") are unchanged.