A Natural History of Dragons

This is the first book in the Memoirs of Lady Trent series, set in a fictional world resembling Victorian-era Europe, where dragons exist as real creatures studied by natural historians. The story is framed as a memoir by Isabella, Lady Trent, the world's foremost dragon naturalist, recounting her childhood and first foreign expedition.

Isabella grows up as the only daughter among six children of Sir Daniel Hendemore, a country gentleman in Tamshire. At seven, she finds a dead sparkling, a tiny creature then classified as an insect but later recognized as related to dragonkind, and preserves it in vinegar, naming it Greenie. She begins collecting natural specimens in secret. After she dissects a dead dove and is caught, her father gives her a book on avian anatomy, deepening her curiosity about how organisms function. Her brother Andrew smuggles books from their father's study, and Isabella becomes captivated by Sir Richard Edgeworth's A Natural History of Dragons.

At fourteen, Isabella disguises herself as a boy to join a hunt for a wolf-drake, a rare lesser cousin of dragons. The creature attacks her directly, preferring female prey; a young estate worker named Jim shields her and is badly wounded, while Isabella fires his gun and grazes the beast before its claws tear her shoulder. Her disguise is exposed, and her father warns that such behavior will ruin her marriage prospects. She reluctantly promises to reform.

Two suppressed years follow, which Isabella calls "the grey years." She redirects her energy toward horses and drawing, developing skills that later prove essential. At sixteen, her father provides a secret list of eligible amateur scholars, and Isabella travels to Falchester for a Season, the formal social period during which young women of good family seek husbands. At the king's menagerie, she identifies three captive dragons as runts, attracting the attention of Jacob Camherst, the twenty-three-year-old second son of a wealthy baronet and one of the men on her father's list. Over the Season, Jacob proposes, explaining that Isabella is the first woman to value his intellectual interests over his wealth. She accepts.

They marry when Isabella is seventeen. Nearly a year later, she miscarries and sinks into months of depression. Jacob encourages her to resume collecting sparklings, sparking the Great Sparkling Inquiry: She fills a shed with specimens, identifies multiple breeds, and attempts captive breeding. The research restores her, and through it she meets Maxwell Oscott, Earl of Hilford, a naturalist planning an expedition to Vystrana to study rock-wyrms, a local breed of dragon. Isabella engineers Jacob's friendship with Lord Hilford, then declares she wants to join. After a bitter argument in which she confesses her terror of being left behind and her need to see real dragons, Jacob relents. Lord Hilford agrees to bring her, though his assistant, Thomas Wilker, views her with disdain.

The party travels by steamship to Chiavora and then overland into the Vystrani highlands. On their final day, a rock-wyrm attacks their wagons, snatching a driver. They arrive in the remote village of Drustanev shaken and without their local contact, Jindrik Gritelkin, the razesh (local agent) of the boyar, the nobleman governing the district. Gritelkin has gone to warn them of dragon troubles, and without his guidance the expedition stalls.

One sleepless night, Isabella follows a stranger into the woods and is captured by Stauleren smugglers, descendants of stranded Eiverheim soldiers. She recognizes their dialect of Eiversch, a language she studied as a girl. Their leader, Chatzkel, questions her, and Isabella's enthusiasm about dragons convinces him she is harmless. The smugglers, who have also suffered attacks, agree to share their knowledge of dragon lair locations in exchange for help stopping the attacks.

The expedition hunts a rock-wyrm for anatomical study. Isabella draws the carcass in detail, discovering tiny hinged scales on the wing membrane whose function as aerodynamic valves she later confirms under a microscope. That evening, she and Jacob watch a dragon fly in at sunset, and Isabella articulates her need to understand these creatures, comparing herself to a dragon that cannot be caged. By morning, the carcass has vanished, carried off by other dragons.

During a religious festival, a young villager named Astimir guides Isabella to nearby Draconean ruins, relics of an ancient dragon-worshipping civilization. She finds a raw firestone, an immensely valuable gemstone, and falls through a concealed opening into a smugglers' cache, twisting her ankle. Upon returning, the villagers greet the expedition with noisemakers and prayers, convinced the ruins are haunted by Zhagrit Mat, a legendary Draconean king transformed into a monster. Burned footprints begin appearing around the village, and the priest insists on ritually purifying the expedition by immersion in an icy mountain stream.

Meanwhile, Isabella and Jacob notice that the known dragon lairs form a circle on their map. They hike to the center and discover an enormous cave containing the remains of their hunted dragon, carried there by its fellows. Deeper inside, older bones have been preserved by the cave's mineral-rich environment. The discovery reveals that dragons transport their dead to this graveyard, suggesting unexpected social complexity.

Isabella realizes the haunting is a hoax. She traces sulfuric acid, labeled in Chiavoran, to Astimir's house: He has been burning footprints into the ground, recruited by forces connected to the boyar's lodge to frighten the Scirling expedition members away. When she presents the evidence, Astimir flees and the haunting ceases.

A peremptory invitation from boyar Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff brings the party to his hunting lodge. That night, Isabella and Dagmira, the local young woman assigned as her maid, pick the lock on a cellar and discover a chemical laboratory run by Khirzoff's Chiavoran companion, Gaetano Rossi. The cellar holds a pile of dragon bones preserved by Rossi's chemical process. Rossi has been killing dragons to harvest bones stronger than wood and lighter than steel for industrial sale. Dagmira finds Gritelkin's university ring, confirming that the operation killed the missing razesh. Rossi discovers them and draws a knife; Jacob rushes downstairs and is stabbed in the gut. Dagmira knocks Rossi unconscious, and Isabella seizes his research notebook as proof before the party flees.

The three-day flight through the mountains is devastating. Jacob, drained by his wound, collapses at the ruins and dies, urging Isabella to be strong and to stop Khirzoff and Rossi. Driven by grief, Isabella explores the smugglers' cave with Mr. Wilker and discovers it conceals a firestone mine that Khirzoff has been exploiting illegally, defrauding the tsar. Khirzoff and Rossi arrive with armed men. Isabella spots a dragon and, hoping gunfire will provoke it, taunts Rossi and runs. The soldiers' shots draw two dragons into a devastating attack. A dragon snatches Rossi and carries him to his death; Khirzoff is also killed.

The party returns to Drustanev, where Jacob is buried. Isabella and Mr. Wilker study Rossi's notebook and recognize that industrial demand for preserved dragonbone could drive dragons to extinction. They agree to keep the process secret. The expedition publishes its findings under Jacob's name. Isabella discovers she is pregnant and gives birth to a son she names Jacob, though she struggles with depression during this period. Months later, Lord Hilford invites her to join a future expedition to the Erigan colony of Nsebu to study swamp-wyrms. Isabella takes Edgeworth's A Natural History of Dragons from her shelf and curls up to read, suggesting the dragon within her heart is ready to fly again.