Eleven magical creatures. One failing boarding house. And a licensing statute with no category for "retired."
Wren Halloway inherits her great-aunt's house with eleven pounds to her name and no idea that the lodgers are a griffin with bad hips, a lake-monster nobody is frightened of any more, and a dragon whose fire went out forty years ago and who has never told a soul.
They were all, once, the most dangerous thing in somebody's story. Now Meriwether needs a ramp he will not admit to, Sorrow needs somebody to row out on a Thursday, and the roof needs about nine hundred pounds nobody has.
Then the renewal notice arrives.
Under the Hazardous Beasts Act, every occupant must be reassessed against the description under which they were first classified - and a creature who can no longer do the terrible thing it was registered for isn't reclassified. It's a paperwork error. And paperwork errors get relocated.
Wren spent nine years writing those assessments for the Crown Office. She knows exactly how the machine works, which is the only advantage she has, and it is not going to be enough.
A warm, funny, quietly furious cozy fantasy about growing old, being written down wrong, and the enormous difference one column on a form can make. No chosen ones. No dark lords. The roof gets fixed.
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