People said the old field was cursed, and nobody had yet tried to build there.

Of course, people had also said such things of the manor on the hill, and people had come to inhabit that without incident. And even now, it was a far gloomier place than the field had ever been. It was just that nobody had really had a pressing need to use that field.

Not enough to deal with the rocks strewn across it, anyway.

But Alan wanted to try growing something new. Nobody wanted to turn away from the tried-and-true with one of the already-worked fields, so that meant he needed a new field. And the soil up there was good and rich. So he’d fenced off a patch, cleared the big chunks of rock out of it, and now his team was pulling a plow along, while he followed and watched for any signs of difficulty.

There were still some rocks in the soil, but they were all little things that the plow turned up to the surface without a problem; he snatched them from the just-turned earth and tossed them over the fence. It seemed that the rock littering the surface had simply fallen across the land.

Come to think of it, some of these bits and chunks were oddly regular. Maybe there had been a building here, once upon a time?

Alan didn’t have much thought to spare for such matters, though. He just moved the bits of rock aside as he found them, and guided the oxen along, one furrow at a time.

And then one fit his hand that felt different from the others.

The rest had been, well, rocks; rough grey things with edges here and there in no particular order. What first caught his attention was that the one he’d picked up just now was smooth – perfectly smooth, shaped like a hen’s egg but as long as his spread fingers. As his thumb stroked over the stone and cleared the soil away, it revealed a shock of bright colours.

Curious, he rubbed at the stone some more, idly leaning over to kick other stray rocks out of the furrow as they turned up. It was fairly heavy, as befit a rock that size, and the colours played over the surface in vibrant swirls that seemed to shift as he turned it in the sunlight. If it was an egg, he couldn’t imagine what manner of beast had laid it.

No, it was probably a keepsake of some kind. No egg had ever had a surface that hard.

Still, it had a certain beauty to it. He tucked it into his apron, determining to take it into town for the jeweller to look at, and turned his full attention back to his team.

The next day, while his new field was drying, he took the stone to a jeweller, who referred him instead to a sage. That sage spent some minutes with a glass lens and with his tomes, and finally said, “My word. It seems that you’ve unearthed a genuine dragon’s egg.”