Rain & Fire by Chris D'Lacey

back, shaking his head. “No. That’s not a good idea.” Not here, he thought, with all these dragons looking on.
    Zanna grabbed him by the sleeve and tugged him forward. “The fact that you’re afraid of this only confirms you think it could happen. Do you want to know the truth or not?”
    David sighed and looked away. This is ridiculous, he told himself. It won’t work. It can’t work. A wishing dragon? It was the stuff of fairy tales. But knowing he’d get no peace until he tried, he touched his thumbs to G’reth’s smooth paws.
    â€œCareful,” whispered Zanna, “you’re making him wobble.”
    David steadied his hands and tried again. “I wish,” he whispered, “that I knew the secret of Gawain’s fire tear.”
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    Zanna, meanwhile, who feels oddly drawn to the clay egg, somehow manages to “kindle,” or awaken, it. These two actions result in an immediate response from the Universe.
    An evil sibyl named Gwilanna turns up, calling herself “Aunty Gwyneth.” She claims to be a relation of Liz and Lucy’s. She demands to see Liz, who arrives home almost at the same moment. Gwilanna has been “called” by the wisher, and is surprised to detect a powerful auma change in Liz, denoting that she is the equivalent of pregnant (“eggnant”?) because of the kindling of the bronze egg by Zanna.
    In theory this pregnancy should not be possible. Gwilanna believes that Liz’s auma is getting stronger, while, with all the other descendants of Guinevere (for that is what Liz and Lucy are) it is getting weaker, generation by generation, as expected. “Aunty Gwyneth” questions why this exception might be so. Getting noresponse from either Liz or Lucy on the subject, she determines to interrogate the wishing dragon instead. Gwilanna demands help from Gretel, another Pennykettle dragon, who belongs to her and is under her power.
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    G’reth gulped and swallowed a plug of smoke. Under normal circumstances, this would not have caused any problems for him. But the fact that he was hanging upside down, tail knotted around a thin wire coat hanger, which in turn was hooked around the lightbulb holder swinging precariously left and right, had brought on a dreadful bout of coughing, which only added to his predicament — and his fear.
    Aunty Gwyneth clicked her fingers.
    Gretel, sitting on the ledge of the wardrobe, opened her throat and released a jet of fire. There was a smell of burning and the green ground wire in the core of the light cord sizzled red-hot and duly snapped. The cord lurched, jerking G’reth another millimeter or two toward the mass of rubble littering the floorboards. Though his wings were bound (by Aunty Gwyneth’sindustrial-strength hairpins) he nevertheless managed to swing his head upward. All that remained of the electrical cord now was a strand from the outer sheath of white and the light blue neutral wire. With a whimpering hrrr? he looked toward Gretel. She blew a tart wisp of smoke and looked away.
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    Getting no useful information from G’reth, Gwilanna decides to take a sneakier approach and aid David in his quest to get to the Arctic, hoping that he will discover more on her behalf. To this end she fluences an editor to not only accept David’s squirrel book, but also to publish his polar bear saga. Zanna wins the essay competition, but David can now afford to pay his own way for the field trip, using the money due to him for writing his books.
    But what about Liz and the egg?
    Liz is semi-comatose while the egg is going through the hatching process. The boy that Liz has been told to expect turns out to be a male dragon, the first “natural” dragon to be born in modern times. Zanna reachesout to touch it, and is scarred by Gwilanna’s fingernails with three jagged lines which never heal. Under cover of this distraction, the dragon escapes through