At the end of the corridor was a wide flight of shallow steps. Celie could feel chill air moving down the stairs, as if a window at the top had been left open. Like many of the stairs in the Castle, these were oddly proportioned. Celie almost needed to take two steps on each riser, but they were only a few inches high, and it was awkward. Fortunately there were only eight of them, and then she was stepping through a stone arch into a circular room with no roof.
The pale late-winter sun was shining down into the open room, and Celie stumbled as she walked forward, staring up at the thin wisps of clouds. The floor of the room sloped towards the middle like a bowl. In the middle of the bowl was a nest of moss and twigs, and in the middle of the nest was a gleaming orange egg. It was the same orange as a ripe pumpkin, and just as big as one.

a dragon. And when the egg in question is the size of a pumpkin, and almost as orange, not to mention burning hot, you know that you’re far more likely to get a dragon than a chicken. So when Celie found the egg – large, orange and too hot to touch – lying in a nest of oddly vine-like moss in the new tower, she was convinced that it held a baby dragon. Where it had come from and what would happen when it hatched were two questions that she wasn’t sure she wanted answered.
It was a Wednesday, so Celie didn’t expect to find any new rooms in Castle Glower. The youngest of the Glower children, Princess Cecelia – Celie, to nearly everyone – knew the Castle better than any person living there, and thought she knew what to expect from it. The day before had been exciting enough, with the room with the bouncy floor being moved to the opposite end of the Castle and a long room filled with exotic armour appearing just off the portrait gallery. One no longer had to climb through a fireplace to get to the bouncy room, though the door was inconve niently located in her father, King Glower’s, study. And the Armour Gallery, as it had already been dubbed, was in the perfect place for such a thing, though the maids were nearly in revolt at the idea of having to clean and polish so many strangely shaped items.
As she left breakfast and went up the spiralling stairs to the schoolroom for her lessons, Celie wasn’t thinking of finding anything more interesting that day. She was mostly hoping that she would be able to get a look at some of the new armour after her lessons. Her eldest brother, Bran, newly home from the College of Wizardry and now instated as the Royal Wizard, had assured the maids that they would not have to clean the Armour Gallery, because he didn’t want anyone to touch the contents. At least some of the weapons had proved to have magic powers, and he wanted to figure out what everything did and how dangerous it was first. But Celie was sure he’d at least let her look at some of it, if she could get out of her lessons before dinner.
The schoolroom wasn’t at the top of the spiral staircase.
Celie looked around. She was in a long corridor that she had never seen before.

are a lot of things that can hatch out of an egg. A chicken, for example. Or a dragon. And when the egg in question is the size of a pumpkin, and almost as orange