The oatmeal pot boiled over for the third time, sending a thick cloud of starchy steam rolling across the long wooden table where a dozen village hands reached for their bowls, and Nedra Fennwick caught the ladle mid-splash before it could strike the iron range. The granary smelled of wet straw and woodsmoke and the particular sweetness of overcooked grain, all layered beneath the sharper tang of the iron tools hanging from the walls where she'd been repairing the morning's heat-lances. Barnaby's clatter of ceramic plates announced his arrival at the far end of the table, where the pastries sat in a neat tiered arrangement, still warm from the hearth's edge, their tops dusted with a fine powder that caught the grey morning light filtering through the single window. It was the window that ruined everything. The glass did not crack. It did not fog or tremble. A line of blue so pure it was almost white tore through the pane in a single diagonal slash, and the explosion of shards scattered across the flagstones in a crystalline spray that chimed against Barnaby's boots. The window frame groaned, split, and sagged open to the morning air beyond, and through that ragged hole, the creature came. Blue fire left the sky in a short, sharp streak, the way a struck match leaves the flame in a sudden gust of breath, and it was already here before anyone's eyes could follow the arc. It was not large. That was the thing that made the sound from the patrons wrong, a wailing that came too late, as though their brains had not yet accepted the scale of what landed on the table. The dragon hit the oatmeal pot squarely, belly-first, with a wet, sputtering thud that sent porridge erupting in a brown fountain over the scattered bowls and up Barnaby's apron. Its scales caught the light in shifting bands of copper and violet and a green so deep it looked almost black, and the tail, coiled tight behind it like a brass spring wound past its breaking point, unspooled across the tablecloth with a metallic hiss against the wood. Barnaby's tray went. Not dropped. Went. The tiered arrangement of pastries, still steaming, tumbled free of his grip in a slow, glistening cascade that struck the floor in a wet staccato, butter and sugar pooling around his boots. His mouth opened. His mouth stayed open. The pastries did not care about his silence; they simply landed, one by one, in the oatmeal that was now spreading across the flagstones in a dark, adhesive tide. "STAND FAST." The voice came from the upper shelf, the raised dais where Sir Pounceworth had been performing his midmorning inspection of the granary's ceremonial banners, a task he conducted with the gravity of a man descending from a throne. He did not draw his sword. He did not reach for the etiquette journal pinned to his belt. He stepped backward, one slow, deliberate pace, his polished boots scraping the wooden shelf, until his spine met the far wall and his chin rose to its full, proud height. The banner behind him, the faded crest of the ruling house, whipped in the draught from the broken window and flapped against his pauldrons. "By the order of the household," he announced, to no one in particular, "I am not in a position to engage until I have assessed the geometry of this intrusion." His fingers worked the laces of his gorget, tightening them, an unconscious gesture. The small dragon on the table had hauled itself out of the porridge in three quick, shuddering movements, steam rising from its flanks in thin white threads that smelled of scorched sugar and iron. It shook itself, sending a fine spray of oatmeal grains skittering across the floor, and it stood no taller than the handle of Nedra's hammer. Its eyes, when they found the room, were the flat, unblinking amber of a coin held to the light, and it fixed on the nearest patron with an expression that, in any larger creature, might have been called curiosity. Nedra had not moved from the range. Her hands still gripped the ladle, the wooden handle warm and slick with grain, and her jaw worked silently, twice, three times, before she set the ladle down on the iron with a careful, deliberate click. The blue fire that had carried the dragon through the window was still visible beyond the broken glass, a thin thread of it trailing back into the grey sky like a kite string, and she watched it thin and vanish. Then she turned. Her eyes found the dragon on the table. The dragon found her eyes back. "Right," she said. One word. The voice of a woman measuring a distance. "Right." Cinder was the last to stop screaming. Not that she had screamed at all, strictly speaking. She had made a sound, a short, sharp intake through her teeth that the other children in the back of the granary were still echoing, their wails overlapping in a thin, reedy chord. Now she stood in the gap behind the table, small and ash-dusted, her bare feet bare on the cold stone, and she was looking at the dragon with an expression that was not fear. It was the look of a person who had been waiting for something, not knowing what, and finding it in the most undignified way possible. The porridge on her knuckles glistened where the spray had caught her. She licked it off slowly, methodically, the way a cat might groom a paw, and her gaze never left the small scaled creature. "It's small," she said. Fast. Two words, thrown out like a stone. "It is not a matter of size , child," Sir Pounceworth replied from his shelf, descending the first step with the controlled, measured gait of a man who considered gravity a personal slight. "It is a matter of provenance . I shall require a formal statement of entry, or I shall be forced to log this incident as an unregistered breach of granary protocol, which, I remind you, carries a fine of twelve silver stivers and a three-day ban on communal porridge service." "Sir Pounceworth." Nedra's voice carried across the table without effort, warm and low, the tone she used when addressing the heat-lances on the wall, steady and unhurried. "The man is not here to hear you read the rulebook." "The man," the knight corrected, pausing mid-step, his hand still resting on the shelf's rail, "is not in a position to hear anything until he has been formally identified. I am the ceremonial guard of this establishment. It is my duty ." He drew the word out, tasted it, and set it back down with exaggerated care. "I simply do not have a suitable category in the journal for 'fire-breathing feline the size of a teapot.'" On the table, the dragon made a sound. It was not a roar. It was not a hiss. It was a small, reedy puff , a burst of blue-white heat that curled upward from its snout and set a single puff of porridge on the tablecloth smoldering, and the scent of it reached the table and beyond: sharp, clean, like the air after a lightning strike on summer grass, nothing like the woodsmoke and wet straw that filled the rest of the granary. The smoldering spot on the cloth grew, a slow orange ring eating into the weave, and the nearest patron, a broad-shouldered woman in a flour-dusted coat, yanked her sleeve free and stamped on the ember with her heel. "Someone put it back outside," she said, flat, to no one in particular, her hand still raised, the sole of her boot blackened and steaming. "Before it sets the table." "I will not," Cinder said. She had not moved from behind the table. She had, however, shifted her weight, leaning forward, and her chin was near the edge of the wooden surface, close enough that the dragon's small, ridged nose was a hand's breadth from her knuckles. The steam from its scales reached her, and she inhaled it, eyes half-closed, a flicker of something not quite pleasure crossing her rough, soot-streaked face. "I won't put it back. It just landed. It's cold. You can tell by the way its tail's doing that thing." She jerked a thumb toward the coiled spring of a tail, which was indeed trembling, slow and rhythmic, the brass-wound tension releasing in a low, metrical hum against the table's edge. "It's shivering." "It is controlling its thermal output ," Sir Pounceworth corrected, having descended the shelf and now standing at floor level, his boots caked in a thin film of oatmeal that he was not, in fact, acknowledging. "A sign of a well-regulated species. I would not anthropomorphize." "It's a cat , sir." "It is a dragon , and I will not have its taxonomy disputed by a child who has been in this establishment for four seconds." Barnaby, who had been on his knees since the tray incident, slowly hauled himself up by gripping the table's edge, his apron now a dark, glistening mess of porridge and pastry crumble, and he looked at the dragon with the wide, earnest expression of a man processing a situation that did not correspond to any of the scenarios he had rehearsed for the morning. "Right," he said, in the way people say it when they are not right. "Right, so. The window's gone." He pointed at the shattered frame. "And the pot's done. And I've got a croissant in my boot." He wiggled his toes. The pastry, half-submerged in the oatmeal tide, did not budge. "The lot is looking a bit, well." He gestured at the table, the floor, the smoldering cloth, the steam curling off the dragon's flanks. "The lot is looking a bit porridgey ." "The porridge can be swept," Nedra said. She had crossed the table's length in three strides, her hammer still in her hand, though she had set it down, resting it against her hip. She stood at the dragon's right flank, close enough that the heat of its scales washed over her forearms in a thin, pleasant tide. She did not flinch. Her eyes, steady and dark, tracked the small creature's movements with the patient focus of a woman watching a forge. "The window can be mended. What I need to know," she said, and her voice had changed, lost a degree of its warmth, gained a flatness that the other three had learned, over twenty years, to respect, "is what you are, and why you are here, and whether you intend to stay." The dragon looked up at her. The blue-white fire in its throat pulsed once, slow, like a heartbeat seen through skin, and the small, ridged teeth behind its lip parted, and it made another sound, a low, resonant vibration that was not quite a word and not quite a hum, that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than its chest, from the coiled spring of its tail, from the brass-wound tension that had carried it through the glass. The sound settled into the granary's beams, into the iron of the range, into the heat-lances on the wall, and for a moment the whole building hummed with it, a low, sustained note that the patrons felt in their molars more than their ears. Then the dragon blinked. Slowly. Once. And it sat down, all four paws, on the far edge of the table, and tucked its head beneath its front legs, and closed its eyes, and the coiled tail wound tight against its side, and the blue fire in its throat dimmed to a faint, steady ember, and the room exhaled, all of it at once, in a long, collective sigh that smelled of burnt sugar and wet straw and the particular, stubborn sweetness of porridge that will not, under any circumstance, be swept up cleanly. Barnaby looked at the dragon. He looked at the shattered window. He looked at his boot, still squelching. He looked at Sir Pounceworth, who was standing very still in his oatmeal-creaked boots, his hand on the leather cover of his journal, his jaw set in the rigid line of a man trying to compose a sentence that would begin with I, the undersigned, do hereby... The dragon's tail twitched. Once. The coiled spring unspooled a single coil, and the tip of it, thin as a wire, dangled off the table's edge and ticked, softly, against the flagstones. Tick. Tick. Tick. Nedra Fennwick picked up the hammer from her hip. She weighed it in her hand, felt the familiar, lived-in balance of the head against the haft, and she set it back down. She did not pick it up again. She crossed her arms, leaned against the iron range, and watched the small, sleeping dragon with an expression that was not anger, not quite, and not relief, not yet. It was the face of a woman who had kept a single fire burning in an empty village for twenty years, and who had just found, in the middle of the oatmeal, a very small, very new, very cold thing that did not yet know how to be warm. The morning light, grey and thin, came through the broken window in a long, dusty shaft that landed on the dragon's flanks, and the iridescent scales, now dry, shifted from copper to violet in the slanting sun, and the ember in its throat pulsed, slow and steady, and the whole granary settled into a quiet that was not peace. It was the quiet before a decision. The quiet before the kettle is set to boil. The quiet before the last hearth in Embermoss decides whether to take in a guest. Sir Pounceworth cleared his throat. He opened his journal to a fresh page. He uncapped his quill. He wrote, with the careful, slanted hand of a man who had read The Etiquette of Ceremonial Presence forty-three times and still needed to see the words on paper to remember which was which: Incident Log, Day 4,117 of the Embermoss Oath. Granary breach. Entity: scaled, feline proportions, thermal signature blue. Status: sleeping. Disposition: unknown. I am, at present, out of protocol. He underlined out of protocol twice. Then he looked up, over the rim of his journal, at the dragon, and the dragon, in its sleep, let out a small, blue-tinged snore that set a fine crackle across the tablecloth, and Barnaby's second croissant, the one he had finally wiggled free of his boot, slid off his toe, struck the floor, and split into two pale, glistening halves. "Blimey," he said, softly, and he did not pick it up.
counted the cracks in the tablecloth, because counting was what his hands did when his brain was busy being somewhere else. He had counted seventeen of them when Nedra Fennwick came down the ladder from the loft with a heavy iron pot in both hands, and the smell of oats and something like burned sugar came down with her, and he remembered that his grandmother had always said you could smell a winter by what stuck to the bottom of a porridge pot.
"Breakfast, then," Nedra said, in the voice she used for facts that were not up for debate. Her face was drawn, the kind of drawn that comes from a night of arithmetic and no answer that added up right. She set the pot on the table, not seeing what was on the table, because what was on the table was, at that precise moment, very small and very still and pretending with great conviction to be a lump of croissant.
Barnaby opened his mouth.
Nedra picked up the long-handled ladle.
The dragon, with a motion so liquid it seemed to have been poured rather than moved, slid off the stack of napkins, across the tablecloth, and into the porridge pot without a sound but a soft glop.
"Miss Fennwick," Barnaby said.
Nedra put the ladle in. She stirred.
The dragon's head surfaced between two slow rotations of the ladle. It wore a cap of oats. A single oat clung to one ear like a small grey hat. Its eyes, the exact color of molten copper pennies left too long in a forge, fixed on Nedra Fennwick with the focused malevolence of a creature that has been deeply, personally insulted by the entire concept of breakfast.
"That," the dragon said, in a voice like a kettle just before it sings, "is not how one welcomes a sovereign."
Sir Pounceworth's quill stopped mid-letter.
Barnaby made a small sound that he would later describe, if pressed, as a respectful cough.
Nedra did not flinch. Her hand did not jerk. The ladle continued its slow circle, and the dragon continued to be carried around the pot like a very small, very annoyed figurehead on a porridge ship.
"Well," Nedra said, after a moment. Her voice was the same voice, only quieter, the way a hearth gets quieter when the wind changes. "So it's speaking, then."
"I," the dragon said, drawing itself up with great dignity despite being covered in oats, "have always spoken. The hearing is the part that has been in question."
"That'll do," Nedra said.
She lifted the ladle. The dragon, with the offended grace of a bishop being asked to leave a bench, climbed onto the bowl of the ladle and stood there, dripping, with its wings folded tight against its sides and its chin raised. An oat slid down its brow and lodged in the corner of one eye. It did not blink.
"Sir Pounceworth," Nedra said, without looking at him, "put that journal down before you wear a hole through the page."
"My lady, I am recording for the historical record."
"Record that I am about to do something unrecorded."
Sir Pounceworth closed the journal. He did not, however, remove his hand from it.
Nedra set the ladle down on the table. The dragon stood on it, very small, very damp, and looked up at her with an expression that, on a cat, would have meant I will remember this when you wish me not to.
"Hungry, are you?" Nedra said.
The dragon's tail lashed once, scattering oats.
"My condition," the dragon said, "is sovereign. My appetite is my own affair."
"Right," Nedra said. She had not yet moved to wipe the oat from its eye. She had not yet stepped back. She stood with her hands at her sides, and her knuckles were pale, and Barnaby could see, because he had known her twenty years and had watched her hands more closely than he would ever admit, that she was not deciding whether to feed the thing or fight it. She was deciding what to call it.
The granary was quiet. The hearth behind her ticked softly, the way a heart ticks when it has been beating a long time and is thinking of stopping. The grey morning light shifted on the floor in a slow pale stripe. Somewhere outside, a rooster that had no business crowing at this hour tried once and thought better of it. Barnaby could hear, very faintly, the creak of the windmill down the lane, and beneath it, the smaller creak of the frost working at the window frames, and beneath that, the deeper almost-sound of the embers in the pit behind Nedra shifting in their sleep.
"Cinder," Nedra said.
The dragon blinked. Both eyes, in sequence, like two small shutters being drawn against a draft.
"You'll be Cinder," she said, as if the matter had been settled at a council she had not invited anyone to. "Every cold thing in this village has had to be warmed up by someone, and I am out of names that don't end in numbers. So. Cinder."
The dragon opened its mouth, considered, and closed it again. The oat finally slid from its brow and plopped, with great ceremony, onto the ladle between its feet.
"Cinder," the dragon repeated, tasting the word. Its throat ember flared once, a single pulse, and the oat burst into a brief, tiny flame and was gone. "It will do. Provisionally."
"Sir Pounceworth," Nedra said. "Bread. Butter. Whatever is left of the honey, if the honey has not, in fact, gone off in sympathy with the rest of the village."
"My lady," Sir Pounceworth said, with the air of a man who had been waiting his whole career for an order he understood, "I shall attend to the larder with all due haste."
He stood. He tucked the journal under his arm. He walked, with dignity, to the ladder, and then, having remembered that his dignity did not descend ladders well, climbed down with considerably less of it. Somewhere below, a board complained under his weight, and a tin clattered, and a moment later Barnaby heard the knight, in a voice pitched for the ears of no one, reciting to himself: "Pantry, second shelf, right of the salt. Pantry, second shelf, right of the salt. Mantra. Mantra. Mantra."
Barnaby did not move. His boot, the one that had lost the croissant, was cold. The croissant halves were still on the floor, glistening faintly with butter in the dust. He looked at them. He looked at the dragon on the ladle. He looked at Nedra, who was now, very carefully, very slowly, lifting a corner of her apron toward the dragon's eye to remove the second oat.
"Miss Fennwick," he said.
"Mm."
"It said sovereign."
"I heard it."
"It said sovereign, Miss Fennwick. As in, a king. As in, a crown. As in, the sort of thing that, the last time one came through here, asked for the first half of the harvest and the third daughter."
"I heard what it said, Barnaby."
"Right," he said. "Right. And you named it after the orphan."
Nedra's hand stopped. The apron hung in the air between them.
"She has no one," Nedra said. "It has no one. If it wants to be a sovereign, it can be a sovereign with a name that has been warmed by something already. That is all."
Barnaby looked at the dragon. The dragon looked back at him. Its eyes were still copper, but there was, just at the rim of the right one, a flicker of something that might have been, on a creature less proud, confusion.
"Barnaby," the dragon said.
He startled. "That's me, yes."
"You are the one who put the boot on the croissant."
"I am, yes."
"That," the dragon said, with the air of a magistrate passing sentence, "was not how one welcomes a sovereign, either."
"Noted," Barnaby said.
The dragon turned its back on him with great formality, and the small ridge of spines along its spine caught the grey light and gave back, for a single breath, a thread of violet. Then it bent, delicately, and began, with great concentration, to lap at the porridge still pooled in the curve of the ladle. Each lap was a small, deliberate act of state. The tip of its tongue, the color of a bruised apple, made a soft clicking sound against the iron.
Nedra set the apron down. She did not, Barnaby noticed, fold it. She left it on the table beside the dragon, a square of worn linen, as if she had meant to put it there all along.
"Sit down," she said to Barnaby. "Your boot's leaking butter onto a floor I just swept. Twice."
"Once," Barnaby said. "Swept once. This morning. With a broom that has seen better centuries."
"Then sit on it and don't get up."
He sat. The chair gave its usual complaint. He put his hands flat on the table, the way his mother had taught him when he was small, because flat hands do less damage when the world is full of things you don't understand.
From below came the sound of Sir Pounceworth opening the pantry, of a tin being set down too carefully, of a muttered "second shelf, right of the salt, second shelf," and then of a small, surprised oath as something, presumably the honey, declined to be where the knight had been told it was.
The dragon finished the porridge in the ladle. It licked its whiskers, one by one, with the gravity of an old man combing his beard. Then it sat back on its haunches, tail curled around its feet, and looked up at Nedra.
"More," it said.
"That's all there was," Nedra said.
"That is a problem of provisioning," the dragon said, "not of appetite."
"Mm," Nedra said. She looked at the empty pot. She looked at the hearth. She looked at Barnaby. "And what, exactly, do you eat, your sovereignty, when the village has nothing left to give you?"
The dragon considered this with the seriousness of a cardinal weighing a heresy.
"Warmth," it said, at last. "I eat warmth. And, in extremis, the occasional poet, but only the dishonest ones."
Barnaby, who had a poem folded into the lining of his coat and had not shown it to a living soul, felt his ears go warm and was grateful, for once, for the grey light.
The wind outside rose, pressed against the granary wall, and went on. The hearth ticked. The dragon's ember, low in its throat, pulsed once in answer, and somewhere in the pit behind Nedra, a coal sighed and settled deeper into the ash.
Barnaby let out a breath he hadn't meant to hold. The dragon's ember pulsed again, dimmer now, as if the small creature had spent something of itself in the joke. Barnaby found himself hoping, irrationally, that the dragon couldn't actually taste honesty in a man. He had four drafts of one poem in his coat lining, and every one of them was a little too sincere for comfort.
"You'll have to forgive me," Nedra said to the dragon, "if I don't take the menu too seriously."
"I am, as ever, misunderstood," the dragon said. "But I shall persevere."
From the doorway came a sound like a cat sneezing into a wool blanket, which was to say it was small and entirely unrepentant. Barnaby turned. Cinder stood on the threshold in her usual coat three sizes too big, the cuffs frayed to threads, her hair the color and approximate consistency of a chimney sweep's broom. She had a fistful of napkins in one hand, pilfered from somewhere, and a smear of oat across her chin. She was staring at the dragon with the expression of a child who has been told there is no such thing as dragons and has just caught one licking a porridge pot.
"You're real," she said.
"I am," the dragon agreed.
"I told them you were real."
"You were right."
"I'm always right," Cinder said. "People just don't listen."
She took three steps into the room and sneezed.
It was not a polite sneeze. It was a sneeze that came up from somewhere deep in the chest, the kind that bends a person double and leaves their ears ringing. A spark came with it, bright as a struck flint, and landed squarely in the bundle of napkins Cinder was holding.
The napkins caught.
Cinder yelped, dropped the bundle, and the little fire skittered across the flagstones like a live thing, trailing smoke and a smell of scorched linen. Barnaby lunged for it. Sir Pounceworth, who had just emerged from the pantry with a tin of honey and a wounded dignity, dropped both and reached for a chair to beat the flames out with. Cinder stamped at the burning napkins with one bare foot and yelped again, hopping.
"No, no," Nedra said, in the same tone she might have used to correct a small mistake in a forge. "Stop, all of you. Cinder, off that foot. Barnaby, the scone."
Barnaby, halfway to the floor, blinked. "The scone?"
"The scone," Nedra said, "on the table. The one with the raisins. Bring it here."
There was indeed a scone. It sat on a chipped plate beside the empty porridge pot, modest and slightly lopsided, baked that morning by someone in the village and offered, as all such offerings were now, in lieu of anything more useful. Barnaby grabbed it. Nedra took it from him without looking, and with the calm efficiency of a woman who had once hauled burning iron out of a forge with her bare hands, she laid the scone over the little fire and pressed down.
The flame hissed, smoked, and went out.
The granary smelled of scorched napkin and warm bread.
"There," Nedra said, and set the scone back on the plate, slightly blackened on one side. "Waste of a good scone."
Cinder was hopping on one foot, then stopped, because the sole of her foot, while tender, was unburned. She looked at the charred napkins. She looked at the dragon. The dragon looked back at her with the polite interest of a cat watching a mouse attempt algebra.
"You sneezed a spark," the dragon observed.
"I sneezed," Cinder said. "The spark's its own thing. It's got nothing to do with me."
"The spark," the dragon said, with great dignity, "is a fundamental expression of your interior furnace. It has everything to do with you."
"My interior what?"
"Furnace. You are a child of the Last Hearth. You sneeze the way the rest of us sigh. It is, if anything, a little theatrical, but then so is the entire human project, and I have made my peace with it."
"I didn't mean to set anything on fire."
"Intent," the dragon said, "is the smallest part of fire. Fire does what fire wishes."
Nedra set the blackened scone down and brushed her hands against her apron. She looked at Cinder with the long, measured look of a woman who had watched a great many small fires start in a great many small ways. Cinder's mother, who had not been anyone's wife and had died in the ash-fields when Cinder was barely walking, had been one of the warmest people Nedra had ever known. It had been Nedra who had first noticed the sparks that followed the child around like lost dogs. It had been Nedra who had made sure Cinder knew how to spit on her own sleeve and pat a small flame out before it grew teeth.
"Sit down," Nedra said to Cinder, "and let's have a look at that foot."
"It's fine."
"Sit down."
Cinder sat. Barnaby fetched the basin. Sir Pounceworth retrieved his honey and his dignity, in that order, and stood at a polite distance, looking as though he would very much like to be useful and was not at all sure how. The dragon watched all of this with an air of tolerant amusement, its tail curled neatly around its feet, its ember dim and steady in its throat.
Then Cinder sneezed again.
The spark this time was smaller, but it landed on the edge of Nedra's apron, and Nedra, without looking down, took the hem of her apron in one hand and pinched the spark out between her thumb and forefinger. The faintest wisp of smoke rose from her knuckle. She did not flinch.
"No," she said, to Cinder, to the dragon, to the room at large, "that is not how one insults the oatmeal."
The dragon went very still.
"I beg your pardon," it said.
"I heard you," Nedra said. "Cinder sneezed a spark and you thought it was a slight against your porridge."
"I made no such inference."
"You called her sneeze theatrical."
"That is a description, not an accusation."
"You said the entire human project was theatrical."
"That is a philosophical observation."
"You are sitting in my granary," Nedra said, "having eaten the last of the village's oats for the week, and you are quibbling with a child about sneezes. That is not how one behaves as a guest in a house that is trying very hard to keep you warm."
The dragon's ember flared, just a little, deep in its throat. It drew itself up on its haunches until it was almost a foot taller than it had been, which was still only about the height of a well-fed cat. Its whiskers, which had been politely forward, drew back. Its eyes, which had been the color of a good fire, narrowed to the color of an ember that has been told it is being unreasonable.
"I have eaten," the dragon said, in a voice that sounded, suddenly, like old iron grinding, like a hinge that has not been oiled in a generation, like the sound a barn door makes when it has decided it is no longer interested in opening, "your oats, which were acceptable. I have accepted, which was gracious, your hospitality, which was modest. I have refrained, which was heroic, from commenting upon the inadequacy of the ladel. And I will not, madam, be lectured upon etiquette by a woman whose hearth is smaller than my grandmother's egg cup."
Sir Pounceworth made a small strangled noise.
"Your grandmother," Nedra said, very evenly, "may keep her opinions to herself."
"My grandmother is dead."
"Then she is no trouble at all."
The dragon opened its mouth. It closed it. It opened it again. The iron-grinding voice faltered, thinned, became something almost plaintive.
"I am not," it said, "an insult to your oatmeal. I am a sovereign. There is a difference."
"There is," Nedra said, "a great deal of difference, and most of it is in your head."
Barnaby, who had been holding the basin for some time without anyone using it, set it carefully on the floor. He looked at Cinder. Cinder looked back at him. There was, in Cinder's soot-streaked face, the particular expression of a child who has just watched two entirely unreasonable people have an argument on her behalf and is not at all sure she deserves it.
"Ma'am," Sir Pounceworth ventured, with the careful pronunciation of a man choosing each word as though crossing a frozen pond, "perhaps the, ah, the dragon might be allowed to, ah, recover itself. It has had, one assumes, a long morning. It has eaten. It has spoken. It has, ah, presumably traveled. It is possible that it is, ah."
He trailed off. He looked hopefully at Barnaby.
"Tired," Barnaby said.
"Yes," Sir Pounceworth said, with great relief. "Tired. Quite."
The dragon's ember dimmed. The iron-grinding quality of its voice faded, leaving something smaller and slightly embarrassed. It sat back on its haunches. It looked at Nedra with an expression that was, for the first time since Barnaby had seen it, something other than imperial. It looked, in fact, like a small creature that has been told it has been rude and is not entirely sure how to recover.
"I apologise," it said, with great formality and very little conviction.
"You will do better than that," Nedra said.
"I will attempt," the dragon said, "to moderate the, ah, the rhetorical temperature of my observations."
"Good," Nedra said. "And you will eat what we have, when we have it, and not complain of the ladel."
"I will attempt."
"And you will not eat the poets."
"I said in extremis."
"There is no extremis in Embermoss," Nedra said. "There is only a long Tuesday."
The dragon blinked. Its ember, low in its throat, pulsed once, twice, and steadied into something that looked, if a dragon could look humble, almost humble.
"Understood," it said.
Nedra nodded. She turned to Cinder, who was still sitting on the floor with her bare foot tucked under her, watching the whole exchange with her mouth slightly open. Nedra's hand came up, hovered for a moment, and then settled briefly on the top of Cinder's head, the soot dark against Nedra's knuckles.
"Get your foot seen to," Nedra said. "And try not to set anything else on fire this morning."
"I'll try," Cinder said.
"You always say that."
"I mean it this time."
Nedra made a small sound in her throat that was not quite agreement. She went back to the hearth. The coals there had settled to a low, steady glow, the kind that would keep through a long grey afternoon if no one was careless with it. She sat down on the low bench by the hearth, the way she sat every morning, and did not say anything for a while. Sir Pounceworth, sensing that the diplomatic crisis had passed, retired with his honey to a corner where he could pretend to be arranging preserves. Barnaby collected the charred napkins and the basin and moved quietly around the granary, putting the morning to rights.
The dragon remained where it was, on the hearthstones, its tail curled around its feet. Its eyes were half closed. Its ember, very low now, pulsed in time with the Last Hearth behind Nedra, as if the two had begun, without anyone quite deciding it, to keep the same quiet watch.
Outside, the wind pressed once more against the granary wall, tested the seams, and went on. Somewhere down the lane, a dog barked once and stopped. The village of Embermoss, which had woken to the news that there was a dragon in the granary, settled, by small degrees, into the long work of an ordinary morning, and the long work of keeping what little warmth it had left.
Barnaby set the empty pot on the shelf. He wiped his hands on his coat, felt the folded paper in the lining, and decided, for reasons he did not examine too closely, that he would not burn the poem after all.
Not yet.