The Dragon Who Collected Lost Mittens

The cave sat halfway up Cindervale Mountain, behind a curtain of icicles that chimed like glass bells when the wind found them. Inside lived a small dragon named Pip, no bigger than a bread basket, with scales the color of wet slate and a snout that had never once made fire. He only ever managed a thin gray smoke that smelled of burnt toast and made him sneeze.

What Pip could do was find things. All winter he followed the scent of mittens lost in the snow and carried them home one at a time in his mouth, gentle as a mother cat, then arranged them along the walls in careful rows. Each one still held a little warmth, a ghost of the hand that had worn it, and that borrowed warmth was the closest thing to fire he had.

One evening Marta and her brother Ollo climbed the mountain path after a glove Marta had lost, breathless and pink-cheeked in the blue dusk. The cold had come down hard, and by the time they pushed through the icicle curtain their fingers had gone stiff and white with it.

Inside, the walls glowed with color, mittens sorted like a rainbow, and in the middle of them stood a small dragon with a thread of smoke curling from his nose.

Pip went still at the sight of them. For a breath he wanted to fold himself over the whole glowing wall and hide it. Then he saw Marta's hands, red and shaking with cold.

So Pip chose. He crossed the cave, lifted her own lost mitten from the row, the one with a snowman button, and pressed it warm into her fingers. He found Ollo's next and pressed that one back too. Then he went down the wall, picking out the warmest, until both children stood wrapped and glowing, holding more warmth than the cold had taken from them.

Marta pressed the snowman mitten to her cheek. "You've kept them warm," she said, understanding it all at once. "All this time. Because you can't make fire."

Pip lowered his head, sure now he would be scolded for a thief. But Marta only unwound her scarf, red and long, and looped it twice around his shoulders. Ollo set his own hat between the dragon's ears. What Pip had given away, they gave back, and this warmth was his to keep, not borrowed but his own.

The cave glowed with all its colors, and Pip curled small in the middle of it, Marta on one side and Ollo on the other. Outside, the icicles chimed low and slow. Inside, the rows of mittens shone like small banked coals, and the three of them went drowsy in the light.

Pip still could not breathe fire. Curled warm between them, his eyes slipping closed, he found that he did not need to.