The Dragon Who Collected Lost Mittens

The icicles across the cave mouth rattled, and Marta came through with Ollo behind her.

Marta stopped. She could hear it breathing in the dark, and she said so.

Pip flattened himself against his mittens, and smoke got out of his nose anyway.

"That's a dragon," said Ollo.

Marta said she could see that. Ollo said dragons make fire.

"Not me," said Pip, and came out where they could see him. "I make smoke. It smells of burnt toast and makes me sneeze."

Marta looked past him. Mittens hung on pegs from the floor to the roof, sorted by color.

Marta asked how many he had.

"Four hundred and six. I counted this morning."

"Those are ours," Marta said. "The red one on the end is mine."

"It was under the snow by the third fence post," said Pip. "Nobody came back."

She said it was hers anyway.

"Then take it. But I'll tell you what happens first." Pip laid a claw against the red one without lifting it. "A lost mitten keeps the warmth of the hand that lost it, and it keeps it right up until somebody claims it back. The day you claim it, that warmth comes out of my wall and goes home in your pocket. It doesn't come here again."

Ollo took a hand from under his arm and held it up. The fingers had gone white to the knuckle.

Ollo said her name.

She had already seen them.

"I can't do my buttons."

Marta crouched and breathed on his hands, and nothing came back.

"The path's ice from your door to the bottom fence," she said. "We can't get him down like this. Which one is his?"

The blue one with the sheep on it, Pip said. Dropped off the ferry rail.

Pip went up the pegs and brought the blue one down in his mouth and put it in Ollo's lap. Above them a patch of the rows went dull, like a window with the lamp taken out.

Ollo said it was hot.

"It's yours."

"One won't do it," Marta said. "He's cold all the way through."

Pip knew.

He went up the pegs and down and up. He brought the yellow pair, the green one with a hole in the thumb, and the long white ones somebody's grandmother had knitted, and laid them over Ollo's arms and knees and boots. The rows behind him lost their color as he went, until the cave had gone dim.

"Mine too," said Marta, and put out her hand.

Pip lifted the red one off its peg himself and pushed it onto her fingers. Only pegs were left then, in lines all the way up.

She told him he would be cold in here.

"I'll be cold in here."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the one I've got."

Marta unwound her scarf, red and long enough to go twice around a dragon, and put it twice around him.

"I can't keep that," said Pip. "It isn't lost."

"No. It's given," she said. "You don't get a say in given."

Ollo set his hat between Pip's ears.

Outside, the icicles knocked once and stopped. Ollo went to sleep first, the blue mitten under his chin.

Marta went next. Pip put his chin on the scarf and closed his eyes. The cave was warm, and nothing in it was lost.