The Last Hearth of Embermoss: Knitting a Scarf For a Grumpy Beast

The cellar stairs groaned under Nedra Fennwick's boots, each step releasing a breath of cold air that smelled of old stone and forgotten things. She carried no lantern. The Last Hearth's ember-glow from upstairs bled down through the gaps in the floorboards, painting the steps in dim copper light that was just enough to see by, if she was careful, if she had spent twenty years learning the geography of this place, which she had.

She found the book on the third shelf, behind a jar of pickled beets and a cracked tureen Elder Thorne claimed had belonged to a duchess. The leather binding was the color of dried blood and so stiff she had to pry it open with both thumbs. The pages inside were thinner than onion skin, the ink faded to the brown of weak tea.

"A Compendium of Lesser Wyrms and Their Keepers." The title page bore an illustration of a creature that looked nothing like Barnaby. It was green and horned and twice the size of a draft horse, and the keeper beside it was a man in armor who appeared to be feeding it a whole sheep.

Nedra turned the page. The next illustration showed a different dragon, this one red and coiled around a tower. The text beneath it was in a script she could not read.

She flipped further, past chapters on taxidermy and breeding and one alarming diagram of something she refused to look at closely. Then her thumb caught on a corner, and a folded sheet of parchment slipped from between the pages and drifted to the floor.

She picked it up. The handwriting was Elder Thorne's, cramped and precise, and dated fifteen years ago.

"I have failed them all. Let the next who reads this do better than I."

Nedra folded the parchment and tucked it back where it had been. Some things were not hers to carry. She had enough of her own.

The book had nothing useful on dragons the size of a teacup. It did, however, have a chapter on the care of "familiar-class wyrms," which included a paragraph on cold-blooded comfort.

"Provide warmth of a steady kind. A hearthstone, a warmed blanket, or the keeper's own body heat will suffice. Familiar wyrms bond to the first reliable source of comfort they encounter and will pine without it. A small woolen garment, kept clean and near the skin, may serve in lieu of the keeper when the keeper must sleep."

Nedra read the paragraph twice. Then she closed the book, tucked it under her arm, and climbed the stairs with the careful gait of a woman who had learned not to rush on old wood.

Upstairs, the granary was quiet. The Last Hearth burned low in its stone cradle, casting a wavering circle of amber across the packed-earth floor. Through the single window, the sky over Embermoss was the flat gray of early winter, and the first suggestion of frost had begun to silver the edges of the sill.

Barnaby sat on the windowsill.

He was not, by any honest measure, a frightening creature. He was the length of a woman's forearm, with wings like new leaves and a snout no sharper than a butter knife. His scales shifted in color as she watched, cycling through a slow pale green, a paler gray, a faint pink that suggested he was either pleased or embarrassed. He looked, at that moment, extremely displeased about something. His tail flicked once, sharply, against the glass.

Nedra set the book on the workbench and went to her chest of supplies.

She had wool. She had needles. She had not knit in fifteen years, not since her mother had died and the habit had died with her, but her hands remembered the shape of it the way old horses remembered the road home.

"Scarf," she said aloud, to no one in particular. "A small one. For a small creature."

Barnaby's head turned. One ear, which was more of a frill than an ear, lifted at the sound of her voice.

Nedra chose the lavender. It was the softest skein she owned, finer than the brown wool she used for socks and the rough cream she kept for repairs. She had bought it three winters ago because the color had reminded her of a field she had seen once, somewhere far from here, in the years before she had settled. She had never used it. She had been waiting, she realized now, without knowing what she was waiting for.

She sat in the rocking chair by the hearth and threaded her needles. The first few stitches were clumsy, the loops uneven, the tension wrong. She undid them and tried again. The yarn was slippery in her fingers, and the needle tips were slick with the cold.

On the windowsill, Barnaby shifted. He tucked his tail around his haunches and rested his chin on his claws. He watched her with the patient, judging eye of a magistrate.

"You may as well come down," Nedra said, without looking up. "I am not going to drop you."

The small dragon made no move. He blinked, slowly, one reptilian eye at a time, which she had come to understand was his version of polite refusal.

"As you like," she said.

She knitted. The rhythm came back to her in pieces, the way old songs did, the muscle memory rising through her arms and into her shoulders. Click of needle. Pull of yarn. Loop and slip. Click. Pull. Loop.

She knit a small rectangle at first, then thought better of it and began a longer shape, narrow enough to wrap once around a creature no thicker than a rolled blanket. She worked in plain stockinette, the simplest stitch she knew, because the yarn was too fine for anything elaborate and because she wanted it soft against a small, cold body.

Behind her, the cellar door creaked.

Nedra did not turn. There was only one person in Embermoss who used the cellar stairs without knocking.

"You left the beets out of order," Elder Thorne said from the doorway.

"Then put them back."

"I was not aware I had been invited to tidy your pantry."

Nedra knit two more stitches. "You have never waited for an invitation in your life."

A pause. Then the soft thump of an old man's cane on the wooden floor, and the creak of the second rocking chair, which she kept beside the hearth for the rare visitor who brought news.

Elder Thorne sat. He did not speak for a while. He watched the Hearth with the expression he always wore when he watched it, which was the expression of a man counting the cost of something he had spent long ago.

Nedra knit. The lavender grew under her hands, slow and even.

"It is a small dragon," Elder Thorne said at last.

"You have seen it."

"I have seen it. The village children have seen it. Sir Pounceworth has filed a formal objection with himself, which I expect to receive by morning."

"Did he."

"He wishes to know whether the creature has been properly registered with the Crown. He has drawn up the paperwork. It is seven pages. I have not read it."

Nedra's needles clicked. "You came down here to talk about Pounceworth."

"I came down here because the floorboards over my study are warm and I cannot sleep."

"Then sleep here."

Another pause. The Hearth ticked softly, the way a clock ticks when the house is empty.

"You are making it a scarf," Elder Thorne said.

"I am making it something to wear."

"For warmth."

"For comfort. There is a difference."

"There is not."

"There is," Nedra said. "Warmth is a thing you give a body. Comfort is a thing you give a creature that has decided to live with you."

Elder Thorne made a small sound that might have been agreement or might have been the particular dry cough of an old man who had outlived his willingness to argue. He drew his coat tighter around his shoulders.

"It will outgrow the scarf in a week," he said.

"Then I will make it another."

"And another."

"And another," Nedra agreed. "Until it does not need one, or until I have run out of wool, whichever comes first."

The door opened a third time, faster than the first two, and a shape came through it in a rush of cold air and the faint smell of woodsmoke.

Nedra did not look up this time either. She knew the particular sound of Cinder's arrival: the quick slap of bare feet on the threshold, the small catch of breath, the way the cold seemed to enter the room a half-second before the girl did and linger a half-second after she had gone.

"Smells different tonight," Cinder said.

"It smells the same as it always does."

"Something's different."

Nedra knit three more stitches. The lavender was starting to look like a scarf, or at least like the beginning of one. She held it up against the hearth-light and considered the length.

"Sit down," she said.

"I don't want to sit."

"Then stand."

Cinder stood. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded and her chin raised and the look on her face that was the look she always wore when she wanted to be invited closer and was not going to ask for it. Her hair was dark and wild, her feet were bare even in this cold, and her fingers were stained up to the second knuckle with the soot that never quite came out of them, no matter how many times she washed.

She looked past Nedra, to the windowsill.

She looked a long time.

"Is that him," she said, quieter than before.

"That is him."

"He's smaller than I thought."

"He is exactly as small as he is."

Cinder's eyes came back to Nedra, then to the wool, then to the needles, then to Nedra again.

"You're making him something," she said. It was not a question. Her voice had flattened into something careful.

"I am."

"In my color."

Nedra paused. She looked down at the skein in her lap, at the soft lavender pooling against her skirt.

"It is the color of a field I saw once," she said. "A long time ago."

"It's purple."

"It is lavender."

"It's purple," Cinder repeated, with the particular stubbornness of a girl who had been told what things were too many times by people who did not know.

Nedra's needles resumed. Click. Pull. Loop.

"You may stay," she said, "if you sit down."

Cinder did not sit. She crossed the room in three quick steps and lowered herself onto the floor at Nedra's feet, cross-legged, her back against the leg of the rocking chair. Her head did not quite reach the seat of it. She looked up at Nedra and then, sideways, at the windowsill.

Barnaby had not moved. His tail had stopped flicking. His head was tilted at an angle that suggested he was listening to the conversation, or possibly judging it.

Nedra knit. The scarf grew by another inch. Cinder sat at her feet and watched the Hearth and did not speak, and the three of them remained that way for some time, until Elder Thorne's breathing had deepened into the soft rasp of an old man half-asleep, until the scarf had become long enough to wrap once around a small throat, until the lavender skein was half-used and the night outside the window had turned the color of ink.

The scarf was finished at the moment the last coal in the brazier split and fell.

Nedra felt the give of the final loop, the pull of the last strand through the last stitch, and she held the work up to the dim hearth-light. It was longer than she had intended. It would wrap twice around a child's throat or once around the neck of a small and stubborn creature. The lavender was softer than she had remembered, the color of a bruised dusk, and the weight of it in her hands was a thing she had not known she was waiting to feel.

She looked at the windowsill.

Barnaby had not moved. His forepaws were tucked beneath his chin in the way of cats who considered themselves to be in charge of any room they occupied, and his eyes, the pale bruised-pink of winter dawn, were half-lidded. His tail had begun to slow its metronome. His breath came in the smallest of mists, each exhale a punctuation he seemed to consider grammatically necessary.

"Barnaby," Nedra said.

He did not look at her. This was a technique he had perfected over the years. It involved a particular angle of the head, a studied examination of the ceiling beam, and the implicit suggestion that whatever she was about to say was beneath his notice.

"I have made you something."

He looked at her then. The motion was small and reluctant, as if his eyes had been dragged across the room by an unseen thread. He saw the scarf. He saw the color. His nostrils, no wider than a child's thumbnail, flared once, twice, and then his tail began to move again, slowly, with the particular tempo of a creature considering whether to be offended.

Cinder stood up from the floor. The motion was sudden enough that Nedra's rocking chair creaked, and Elder Thorne, in his chair by the brazier, made a small sound in his sleep that might have been a word or might have been a cough.

"It is a burial shroud," Cinder said. "For a peasant."

Nedra's needles stilled.

"It is a scarf," she said, "for a beast who has sat on my windowsill every night for six winters and has never once let me thank him for the warnings he gives me when the wind turns bad."

"It's purple."

"It is lavender."

"It's a burial shroud for a peasant. I won't have it."

The words were fast and rough-edged and they landed in the room like something dropped from a height. Cinder's chin was up. Her hands were at her sides, and one of them, Nedra noticed, was faintly smudged with ash at the knuckles, as if she had been reaching into the hearth again before she came in. The girl's eyes were on the scarf and her mouth was a thin line, and the set of her shoulders was the set of someone who had decided, very young, that the only way to keep anything was to refuse it before it could be taken away.

Barnaby, on the windowsill, had begun to rise.

It was a small motion, almost shy. His hind legs pushed against the wood and his wings, the thin translucent things Nedra had only ever seen at their full stretch once in all the years she had known him, lifted a quarter-inch from his back. He did not fly. He hovered. He rose six inches above the sill, then a foot, and the air around him took on the faint, mineral smell of cold stone that always came when he moved.

He was leaving.

Barnaby hung in the air between the windowsill and the floor, his small wings a blur of membrane and old scar tissue, and the mineral smell of him sharpened as he rose. The scarf lay on the table behind him, lavender wool catching the last of the morning light, and the three stitches Cinder had unpicked lay in a tiny pile like dropped petals.

"Don't," Nedra said.

It was not a command. It was the word she used when a piece of cooling iron was about to crack under the hammer, the word she had said to herself in the long nights when the Last Hearth guttered and she had to choose, again, which corner of the granary to feed. She said it the way she said everything that mattered: quietly, with the full weight of twenty years behind it.

Barnaby did not land. But he did not, either, drift toward the open window. He hung there, his ancient eyes fixed on some middle distance between the sill and the hearth, and his whiskers, which had been laid flat along his cheeks, began to rise, one at a time, like the spines of a bristling cat.

Nedra set her needles down on the table. The click of them on the wood was very small in the still room.

"Six winters," she said. "You sat on that sill through the long cold, and you never asked me for a single thing. Not one crust, not one thread, not one minute of my time that I did not offer. And now I am offering, and you are leaving my house because a child who has never had a scarf in her life does not know what one is for."

Cinder made a sound, half a scoff, half a breath. "I know what it's for."

"Then say it."

The girl did not say it. Her jaw worked once, twice, and then her gaze dropped to the floor where the three dropped stitches lay, and she did not pick them up, but she did not step on them, either.

Nedra turned back to Barnaby. He was still hovering. The sun through the window caught the thin places in his wings and turned them briefly to gold.

"I have made four hundred and eleven hearth-keeps in my life," Nedra said. "Some of them went to kings. Some of them went to mothers who wept on my shoulder because they could not keep their babies warm. This wool came from a ewe named Patience who lived on the Marrow Hill and died last autumn at the good age of fourteen, and it was spun by a woman named Beryl who has hands like mine and a heart like yours and who, if I told her I had wasted her skein on a scarf a beast would not wear, would never forgive me. Sit down, Barnaby. Let me finish what I started."

For a long moment, no one moved. The brazier ticked. The sleeper in the chair by the hearth coughed softly and turned his head. Somewhere outside, the wind moved through the bare alders by the square, and the sound came in through the cracked window like a long slow exhalation.

Barnaby landed.

It was not a graceful landing. He came down slightly off-center on the table, one hind foot catching the edge of the wool basket, and he sat for a moment with a faintly offended expression, as if the table had been the one to miscalculate. His wings folded. His whiskers settled. He did not look at Nedra, and he did not look at Cinder, and he looked very hard, with great dignity, at the wall.

Nedra picked up her needles.

"Thank you," she said, and did not look at him while she said it, because she had learned, twenty winters ago, that the kindest thing you could do for a creature who had given way was to pretend he had not.

She threaded the lavender wool onto the needle and found the place where Cinder's unpicking had stopped. The three loose stitches were small and tight, the kind a good knitter could lift back onto a needle and bring forward without a seam. Nedra did this now, her fingers quick and sure, and the row resumed as if it had never been broken.

"It will take me an hour to finish," she said, mostly to the room. "If the house is to be quiet, I will be grateful. If it is not to be quiet, I will manage."

Cinder did not leave. She stood by the door with her hand on the latch and her shoulders drawn up around her ears, and she watched Nedra's hands move, and after a while, without saying anything about it, she let go of the latch.

She did not sit. She leaned against the doorframe with her arms folded and her chin still up, and she watched, and the set of her mouth did not soften, but it did not harden, either. It merely watched.

The minutes passed. Nedra's needles clicked, and the scarf grew, and the sun moved across the floor and climbed the legs of the table and at last came to rest in a long warm stripe across the boards. Barnaby, after a long period of pretending to be interested in the wall, allowed his gaze to drift, by degrees, to Nedra's hands. His whiskers, which had flattened again, began to rise, one at a time, as the lavender wool passed from needle to needle.

He could smell it, she thought. He could smell Patience in it, and Beryl's hands, and the Marrow Hill, and whatever it was a creature like him used to smell wool for. Perhaps warmth. Perhaps safety. Perhaps only the particular comfort of being thought of, in a quiet room, by someone whose needles moved at the right pace.

The last row came. Nedra bound it off, and she held the scarf up, and it was long, longer than it had any right to be for a beast of Barnaby's size, because she had miscounted somewhere in the middle, or because she had always intended to, and the lavender of it was the soft, almost grey lavender of a winter sky just before it begins to snow.

"Turn around," she said to Barnaby.

He did not turn around. He looked at her over his shoulder with an expression of considerable hauteur.

"Turn around, or I will put it over your head while you are still wearing it, and you will look like a very small lavender ghost."

Barnaby turned around.

Nedra folded the scarf in half, and then in half again, and she draped it, very gently, over his back. The wool settled around his shoulders and across his narrow chest, and the ends of it hung nearly to the floor on either side, and the color of it against his grey fur was so exactly, so absurdly right, that she had to clear her throat before she could speak.

"There," she said. "Adequate."

This was not what she meant. What she meant was a word she had not yet found, in any of the languages she knew, for the feeling of finishing a thing she had started in grief and seeing it become, at the end, a thing that could keep a small creature warm. But she had never been good with words for that, and Barnaby, she suspected, would not have known what to do with them if she had.

Barnaby sat for a moment under the weight of his new scarf. He shifted once, twice, as if testing whether it would stay. It stayed. He put his head down, and then, with a movement so slight that only Nedra, who had watched him for six winters, would have seen it, he tucked his nose under the edge of the wool near his chest, and he breathed in.

He did not say thank you. He did not purr. He simply sat, in his scarf, with his whiskers finally, finally laid flat, and he allowed the room to be warm.

Nedra stood for a moment watching him, and then she went to the small iron stove in the corner and put the kettle on. The chamomile was in a tin on the shelf above, and she measured three dried blossoms into the pot, because three was the right number for a small creature, and she poured the water when it had barely begun to sing, and she set the cup on the table beside Barnaby in a patch of afternoon sun that had crept, by some happy accident, onto the counter's edge.

Barnaby regarded the cup. He regarded the steam rising from it. He drew the cup toward him with one careful claw, and he lifted it in both hands, and he drank.

He drank too fast.

His eyes went wide. His whiskers shot straight out. He set the cup down with a sharp click and sat very still, his tongue, presumably, scalded, and his expression one of such dignified, affronted patience that Nedra had to put her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing.

Cinder, from the doorway, made a sound that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. It came out as a small huff through her nose, and she looked away at once, as if she had been caught at something.

Barnaby turned his gaze on her. He did not speak. He did not have to. The look he gave her was the look of a creature who had been offered a hot drink by a careful hand and had accepted it, in full knowledge of the risks, and who was not, on any account, going to be made to feel foolish about it.

He lifted the cup again. He drank, this time, more slowly. He set it down. He wiped his whiskers with the back of one claw.

"Adequate," he said.

His voice was small, and dry, and a little hoarse from the scald, and the word was, by any measure Nedra knew of him, the highest compliment he had ever paid to any cup, or any hearth, or any person, in six winters of sitting on her windowsill.

The sun moved on the counter. The sleeper in the chair slept on. The brazier ticked. And in the quiet shop, with the lavender scarf still warm on his small grey shoulders, Barnaby settled, at last, into the patch of light, and he stayed.