Chapter 1

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The moving truck had left three days ago, and Iroh still could not find his socks.

His mother said the socks were in a box. His father said the box was in the hallway. Iroh, who was seven years old and had been named after a character in a book because his parents were the kind of people who named children after characters in books, knew that the socks were nowhere at all. Socks had a way of disappearing when you moved to a new house. Especially when you moved to a new house that belonged to your grandmother and smelled like lemon peels and old paper.

"Barefoot is fine," said Nana from the kitchen. She was slicing an apple into thin white moons. "The floor is warm today."

Iroh's little sister, Kai, who was five, was under the kitchen table pretending to be a badger. She growled softly. Kai had pretended to be many different animals in her life, but she was especially good at badger.

"Iroh," Nana said, handing him a slice of apple, "the garden is for exploring. Go and explore."

"The garden has weeds as tall as me," Iroh said.

"Then you will have company," said Nana, and she smiled in the way she had, which was small and quiet and seemed to mean more than it showed.

Iroh took his apple and went out the back door.

The garden had been beautiful once. Nana had told him so. There had been rows of tomatoes and a patch of mint you could smell from the porch. But that was a long time ago, before Grandpa died, before Nana's knees began to ache, before the weeds forgot their manners and grew wherever they pleased.

At the far end of the garden stood the greenhouse.

It was made of glass and white-painted iron, and most of the glass was still unbroken, though green with moss and pollen and the small ghosts of spiderwebs. The roof had a skylight, and the skylight had a little iron wheel you were supposed to crank to open it. The whole thing looked like a ship that had been left by the sea, too tired to float anymore.

Iroh had been told not to go into the greenhouse. His mother had said, "Not until we clean it out, it isn't safe." His father had said, "There are wasps." Nana had said nothing. Nana, Iroh was beginning to understand, said nothing when she meant yes.

He went to the door and pushed.

The door opened with a long, slow creak, like a word being spoken by something very old.

Inside, the air was warm and green. The floor was made of bricks the color of old tea. Plants that had once been neat and named had gone back to being wild. There were ferns that touched his knees. There was a grapevine that had crawled up one wall and over the roof and looked, in places, like handwriting. There was a clay pot, tipped over on its side, with a crack running down its belly.

Iroh stood very still.

Something in the greenhouse made a sound. It was not a wasp. It was not the wind. It was a small, high squeak, the kind of sound a kitten would make if the kitten had been learning how to whistle.

Iroh held his breath.

The squeak came again, from under the pot.

He walked toward it, very carefully, because his father had taught him that when you meet something new in the world, you should walk as if the ground had feelings.

He knelt down. He put his hand on the pot. The pot was warm, which was strange, because the day was cool.

He tipped the pot up.

And inside the broken pot was a dragon.

Iroh did not scream.

This surprised him, later, when he thought about it. A boy finds a dragon in a greenhouse; a boy should scream. But the truth is that screaming is for the things we have already decided are scary. Iroh had not decided anything yet. He only knelt there, holding the edge of the broken pot, and looked.

The dragon was the size of a squirrel.

Her scales were green with gold at the edges, like leaves that had started to turn in autumn. Her eyes were the yellow of honey held up to a window. Her wings, thin as leaves, were folded against her back, and one of them was torn.

She was shivering.

She looked up at Iroh and opened her mouth, and a single small puff of smoke came out, no bigger than a dandelion's breath.

"Oh," Iroh whispered.

The dragon flinched at the sound, and Iroh felt something move inside his chest, the way you feel when you have scared a bird by accident.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, quieter still. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

He did not know what else to do. He sat back on his heels and tried to make himself smaller. He tried to make his breathing slow. His mother said that animals could feel when your breathing was wrong.

The dragon kept shivering.

After a while, Iroh reached out one finger, very slowly, the way you reach for a butterfly you do not really expect to catch. The dragon watched him. She did not move.

He touched her gently, just behind her ear, if dragons had ears. There was a tiny ridge there, soft, the texture of a rose petal over something harder.

The dragon closed her eyes.

"I have to go," Iroh whispered. "I have to go get you some water. But I am coming back. Do you understand? I am coming back."

He did not know if the dragon understood. But he said it twice, because that was what you did when something mattered.

He slipped out of the greenhouse and closed the door behind him.

In the kitchen, his mother was unpacking plates. His father was on the phone with someone about a box that had never arrived. Kai was under the table again, but this time she was a fox.

Iroh walked past all of them as if he were made of glass.

He found Nana in the little room she called her library, though there was barely room for a chair in it, because of all the books. Nana was sitting with a cup of tea and a book written in a language Iroh could not read.

"Nana," he said.

"Yes, cricket."

"Do you have a thimble?"

Nana looked up. Her eyes were gray and clever and very kind. "A thimble?"

"For water."

She did not ask why. This was one of the best things about Nana. She did not ask why when the question would not fit.

"Top drawer of the sewing box," she said. "The little blue one."

"Thank you, Nana."

He was almost out of the room when she spoke again.

"Iroh."

"Yes?"

"Whatever it is," said Nana softly, not looking up from her book, "go gently. The world is old, and it has many small hearts in it."

He filled the thimble with water from the tap, slowly, so that it would not spill. He wrapped a heel of bread in a napkin and stole a pinch of sugar from the sugar bowl, because he had read once that hurt birds sometimes took sugar water. Maybe dragons were a little like birds.

He walked back to the greenhouse with his hands full and his heart so fast he could feel it in his fingers.

When he opened the door, he was afraid for a moment that the dragon would not be there. That he would look under the pot and find nothing, and would have to wonder for the rest of his life whether he had dreamed the whole thing.

But she was there. She had not moved, only curled a little tighter.

He set the thimble down in front of her.

The dragon sniffed it. She looked up at him. She looked back at the water. Then, with a tiny pink tongue no longer than an eyelash, she began to drink.

Iroh sat and watched her drink. He could hear the small busy sound of it. He could see her little throat moving.

When the water was gone, she looked at him, and her yellow eyes were brighter than before.

"I'll bring more tomorrow," he whispered.

He crumbled the bread into crumbs. She ate two of them, slowly, as if deciding. She did not eat the sugar.

Iroh watched until she fell asleep with her head on his shoe.

Then the back door banged, and Kai shouted that dinner was ready.

Very carefully, Iroh slipped his foot out from under the dragon. He laid his folded-up sweater down for her to sleep on instead.

"Goodnight," he whispered. "Don't go anywhere."

Her name was Ember.

Iroh knew this the next morning when he came back with a saucer of warm milk. He sat down across from her, set the milk between them, and said the words that had been in his head since the night before.

"I think your name is Ember."

The dragon tilted her head. Her torn wing fluttered, then stilled.

"Is it?" he asked.

She made a small sound that was not quite a squeak and not quite a purr. It sounded like the word yes, if yes were a hum.

Iroh smiled so wide his cheeks hurt.

He brought her a strip of bandage he had taken from the first-aid kit. The bandage was meant for people, and it was too wide, so he had cut it into a thin ribbon with Nana's sewing scissors. He had practiced on his stuffed rabbit the night before. He had wrapped the rabbit's arm seven times before he got it right.

"It will hurt a little," he told Ember. "But only for a minute. And then it will feel better."

Ember watched him with her honey-yellow eyes.

He lifted her wing, as gently as he could. It was warm and thin and had a small faint pattern in it, like the veins of a leaf held up to the sun. The tear was along one edge, where the wing met her back.

He wrapped the bandage around it, loose enough to breathe, tight enough to hold. He tied a knot the way his father had shown him on his shoelaces. Over, under, pull.

Ember did not bite him. She did not even flinch. She only kept watching his face with a kind of seriousness that made him want to be worthy of it.

"There," he whispered.

She stretched the wing, a tiny flutter.

She closed it. She breathed out a puff of smoke so small he had to squint to see it. And then she climbed, very slowly, up his sleeve, and settled on his shoulder, and put her head against his neck.

Iroh sat very still.

Ember smelled like warm stones. Like the way a sidewalk smells after rain, in summer, when the sun comes back out. Like the inside of a loaf of bread before you slice it. Like something Iroh did not have a name for, something far away.

When he finally stood up, slowly, slowly, she was asleep on his shoulder.

He walked back to the house that way.

Kai was on the back steps eating toast.

Iroh froze.

But Kai did not look up. She was deeply focused on her toast. Kai, when she was eating, was a creature of total attention. It was, Iroh thought, the only time Kai was quiet.

He slipped past her. He walked up the back stairs, into his bedroom, and laid Ember down on his pillow like a secret.

Kai found out on a Thursday.

Thursdays were library days at school, which meant Iroh came home later than usual, which meant Kai had extra time to be nosy, which meant Kai was already in the greenhouse when Iroh opened the door.

She was sitting on the brick floor with Ember in her lap.

Iroh froze.

Kai looked up. Her eyes were enormous. Her mouth was a perfect small O. There was a piece of leaf stuck in her hair.

"Iroh," she whispered, in the whisper that was louder than most people's shouts, "there is a DRAGON."

"I know," Iroh whispered back.

"In Nana's GREENHOUSE."

"I know."

"A dragon," Kai whispered, "is a dragon."

This did not, strictly speaking, add anything new. But Iroh understood what she meant. He sat down beside her.

Ember was in Kai's lap. Ember did not look unhappy. Ember had her eyes half closed, the way cats do when they are being petted by someone they have decided to tolerate.

"How long have you known?" Kai said.

"Eight days."

"EIGHT DAYS?" Kai's whisper cracked into a regular voice.

"Shh. Shh."

"Eight days," Kai hissed. "And you did not tell me."

"I was going to."

"When?"

"When I figured out what to do."

Kai looked down at Ember. She stroked one finger along the ridge of Ember's back. Ember sighed, a small sleepy dragon sigh.

"I love her," Kai said.

"I know."

"I want to keep her."

And here Iroh felt a small, hot feeling in his chest, because he had been thinking the same thing, and because it was exactly the thing he knew he was not allowed to think.

"Kai," he said.

"I want to keep her forever. I want her to sleep in my bed. I want to name her Princess Sparkle."

"Her name is Ember."

"Fine. Princess Ember Sparkle."

Iroh took a breath.

"Kai," he said, "she isn't ours."

Kai looked up at him. Her face was doing the thing it did when she was about to cry, which was a kind of scrunching that started at the eyebrows.

"She's in our greenhouse," Kai said.

"She's in Nana's greenhouse. And she's hurt. And she's a baby. And she has a family somewhere."

"Where?"

"I don't know."

"So how do you know she has one?"

"Because," Iroh said, and he was surprised to find that he did know, "everyone has one."

Kai looked down at the dragon in her lap. Ember was breathing slowly. The bandage Iroh had tied on her wing was dirty now, a little, but still tied tight.

"I would be a good mother," Kai said, very quietly.

"I know you would."

"I would feed her."

"I know."

"I would love her more than anyone."

"I believe you."

"Then why can't I keep her?"

Iroh thought for a long time before he answered. He thought about his goldfish, which had died two summers ago, and how his mother had said, "The nicest thing you can do for something is let it live the life it was made for." He thought about the bird he had found once in the park, and how his father had said, "If you close your hand around a thing, it will think your hand is a cage."

"Because," he said, "loving something isn't the same as owning it."

Kai looked at him like he had spoken in a language she almost knew.

"Then what's it the same as?" she asked.

Iroh thought again.

"It's the same," he said slowly, "as helping it go where it belongs."

Kai was quiet for a long time. Ember blinked up at her. Ember made the small hum that meant yes.

Finally Kai bent her head and touched her nose, very gently, to the top of Ember's head.

"Okay," she whispered. "But I love you. Princess Ember Sparkle."

Ember did not seem to mind the name.

Nana found out on a Sunday.

It was raining that morning, one of those long steady rains that makes the whole world sound like a library. Iroh had an umbrella, and under the umbrella he had a thermos of warm milk, and in his pocket he had a piece of toast wrapped in a napkin. He crossed the garden in his rubber boots, slipping a little on the wet stones.

He did not see Nana behind him.

Nana had been watching from the kitchen window for three days.

She had noticed that Iroh went out to the greenhouse every afternoon. She had noticed that Kai, who had never been able to keep a secret in her life, suddenly had a secret and was nearly bursting with it. Nana, who had been a librarian for forty-one years before her knees made her retire, knew how to notice things.

On the Sunday in the rain, she put on her own rain boots, which were the color of mustard, and she took her own umbrella, which was the color of a robin's egg, and she walked across the garden after her grandson.

Iroh was sitting on the brick floor of the greenhouse with Ember in his hands.

He was whispering to her.

He was telling her about his day. About Mrs. Hartwell at school, who had given him a gold star for his essay on whales. About Kai, who had broken a plate that morning and tried to blame the cat, even though they did not own a cat. About the rain, which he thought sounded, on the glass roof, like someone practicing piano very far away.

Ember was listening.

Nana stood in the doorway for a long moment without speaking.

When Iroh finally looked up, he went perfectly still.

"Nana," he whispered.

"Ah."

That was all.

"Ah," she said again. And she lowered her umbrella and closed it and stepped inside.

"Nana—" Iroh started.

"Don't be afraid, cricket."

"She isn't mine. I mean, she's—"

"I can see what she is." Nana sat down, slowly, on an overturned crate. Her knees cracked. "She is a dragon. A very small one."

"Yes."

"Where did you find her?"

"Here. Under the pot. With the crack."

Nana nodded. "The pot I broke," she said, "the summer before your grandfather died. He was so cross with me. I dropped it carrying it in out of the rain." She looked around the greenhouse, at the ferns, at the vine crawling over the glass. "He loved this greenhouse. He came out here every morning with his coffee. He said it was his chapel."

Iroh, who had never heard Nana say the word chapel, waited.

"Your grandfather used to tell me stories about dragons," Nana said. She was looking at Ember, not at Iroh. "He grew up near mountains. His grandmother told him the stories, and he told them to me. He said dragons were not like in the movies. He said they were quiet things. He said they came into the world when the world needed reminding of something."

"Reminding of what?"

"Different things. Different dragons."

Ember, on Iroh's palm, blinked up at Nana. She tilted her head. She made her small hum.

Nana held out a finger. Ember sniffed it. Then Ember climbed, delicately, from Iroh's hand to Nana's hand, and curled up in Nana's palm as if she had decided something.

Nana's eyes filled up with water, but she did not cry.

"Hello, old friend," she said, very softly.

"You knew her?" Iroh whispered.

"No. Not her." Nana smiled. "But I knew the story of her. And now I am in the story. That is a thing that happens, sometimes, when you get very old. The stories come to find you."

She looked at Iroh.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I thought you'd make me let her go."

"I am going to make you let her go," said Nana gently. "But not yet. And not alone."

After that, everything was different, because a secret that three people share is a different kind of secret. A secret that three people share becomes a project.

Nana took Iroh into her library that evening. She pulled a stepstool up to the tallest shelf and, with a little grunt, brought down a book that was enormous. The cover was leather, cracked at the corners, and on the front there was a shape stamped in gold that might have been a leaf or might have been a wing.

"This was your grandfather's," Nana said. "He read it to me when we were young."

"Is it in English?"

"It is in three languages. And some of it is only pictures."

She laid the book on the little table in the library. Iroh came around to look.

The pages were thick and soft. The writing was done by hand, in ink that had gone a little brown. Around the edges of the pages, someone long ago had painted small, careful pictures. Flowers. Birds. A fox with a fish in its mouth. A whale. A girl holding a lantern. And, on one page, a dragon.

The dragon in the book had green-gold scales.

"Oh," said Iroh.

"Oh indeed," said Nana.

The picture showed the dragon in flight, a ribbon of her trailing behind her like a comma. Around her, in all directions, were painted stars. And below the picture, in spidery handwriting, were words.

Iroh could not read them.

"It says," Nana read, tracing the words with her finger, "that the young dragons fly by moonlight. That the full moon is the map that shows them home. That a lost dragon, under any other light, will only turn in circles. But under the full moon, she will find her people."

"The full moon," said Iroh.

"Yes."

"When is the next one?"

Nana thought. She counted on her fingers, which she always did when she was thinking of dates.

"Fourteen days," she said. "Fourteen days from tonight."

"Is her wing going to be better by then?"

Nana looked at him kindly.

"I think, cricket," she said, "that her wing is getting better because you have been kind to it. Kindness," she said, "is a medicine the world often forgets about."

For fourteen days, Iroh took care of Ember.

In the morning, before school, he brought her warm milk and a piece of fruit. (She liked apples, in tiny pieces. She did not like bananas, which she batted away with a small annoyed paw.) After school, he came back with crumbs from his lunch and a fresh bowl of water. He rewrapped her bandage every other day. He sat with her while she slept. He read aloud to her from his library book about whales, because Nana said you should never underestimate a creature's interest in other creatures.

Kai came with him, most days. Kai had, somewhat, accepted the situation. She brought Ember gifts. A button. A dandelion. One of her own socks, which Ember curled up inside like a tiny sleeping bag.

"That's not yours to give, Kai," Iroh said, about the sock.

"It's a gift. Gifts are yours to give."

"It's Mom's sock."

"Mom has two feet," said Kai firmly. "Ember has four."

Iroh did not have an answer for this, so he let it go.

Iroh listened.

He thought, the more he listened, that Nana was a kind of greenhouse herself. Old and warm and full of growing things.

One afternoon, when Kai was at a friend's house and Nana had gone to lie down, Iroh sat alone in the greenhouse with Ember. The sun was low. The glass was full of gold.

"Ember," he said.

Ember looked up.

"You're going home soon," he said. "Are you ready?"

Ember did not make a sound. She only climbed up his arm and sat on his shoulder and pressed her small warm body against his neck.

Iroh did not try not to cry. He let the tears come. They slid down his face and fell on the brick, and each one made a small dark spot.

"I'm going to miss you," he whispered. "I'm going to miss you so much."

Ember breathed a puff of warmth against his cheek.

It was, he thought, the kindest thing a dragon could say.

On the twelfth day, Iroh noticed something.

He was sitting on the brick floor, pouring milk from the thermos into a saucer. Ember was standing on his knee, waiting.

She stretched.

She stretched, and both of her wings opened.

Both of them.

The left wing, which had been torn, opened all the way out. The bandage was gone — Iroh had taken it off three days before to check the wound, and Ember had shaken the bandage off her and refused to let him put it back — and the wing was whole. The small thin edge that had been ripped was smooth again. The pattern of veins ran clear and unbroken, all the way to the tip.

"Ember," Iroh said.

Ember flapped. Just a small flap. But it lifted her off his knee and held her in the air for a full second, the length of time it takes to blink, twice, before she landed again on his hand.

Iroh put his forehead against her. Very carefully.

"Oh, Ember."

Ember made the hum that meant yes.

Nana was watching him from across the table. She did not ask. But when dinner was over, she came and stood behind his chair and put her hand, briefly, on the top of his head.

"Tomorrow," she said quietly, "we will open the skylight."

The iron wheel that opened the skylight had been stuck for years. It was the color of old pennies, and it was crusted with moss and spiderweb, and when Iroh tried to turn it, nothing happened.

"Nana, it won't move."

"Try the other way."

"It won't move the other way either."

Nana came over. She spit, just a little, on her palm, and rubbed her palm on the wheel.

"Old librarian trick?" Iroh said.

"No. Just spit." She took the wheel in her two hands. She was stronger than she looked. She pulled, and the wheel groaned, and a small shower of rust came down on both of them, and then — slowly, like an old man sitting up in bed — the skylight began to rise.

It rose, with a long slow creak, until it was wide open.

Above them, for the first time in a very long time, the sky could see into the greenhouse. A pigeon flew over, surprised. A leaf drifted down. The air that came in smelled of cut grass and rain and the way the world smells in the late afternoon when summer is almost over.

Nana looked up.

"My husband," she said, "would have liked this moment."

She did not say anything else for a while. Iroh did not either. They stood together in the open greenhouse, and the wind moved the ferns at their feet, and Ember sat on Iroh's shoulder, with her two wings folded, and looked up, too.

The full moon came on a Friday.

Iroh spent the whole day pretending it was a normal day. He went to school. He ate his sandwich. He wrote a spelling test. He got eleven out of twelve right, because he missed the word believe, because there was an i in it where his hand did not want to put one.

After school, he did not run home, although his feet wanted to. He walked. He noticed things. He noticed a dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. He noticed a bumblebee on a clover. He noticed that the sky, even at four o'clock in the afternoon, was the special deep blue it gets when there is going to be a bright moon.

He wanted to remember all of these things.

When he got home, Nana was already in the greenhouse.

She had put an old blanket on the brick floor. She had lit three candles in glass jars, because she said the going of a small wild thing deserved a little ceremony. She had even changed into her good sweater, the blue one with the stars on it that she usually saved for dinners out. Ember was on the blanket, washing her face with her paws.

Kai was there too. Kai had put on her Halloween crown. She said it was a dragon-sending-off crown, now, and that was its true purpose, and she would thank them not to correct her.

"Ready?" Nana said.

Iroh was not ready.

"Yes," he said.

The moon came up slowly.

It came up over the roof of the house first. Then over the apple tree. Then, at last, it came into the square hole of the skylight, and the greenhouse was full of silver.

Ember lifted her head.

She had never seen the moon before — not from inside the greenhouse, with the glass always between her and the sky. Now the glass was gone. Now the moon was whole and open above her, round as a plate, bright as a lamp.

She made a sound.

It was a sound Iroh had never heard her make. It was not a hum. It was not a squeak. It was a small clear cry, the way a lamb sounds when it sees its mother from across a field.

"She hears them," Nana whispered.

"Who?"

"Her people. Somewhere up there. The moon is the map."

Ember spread her wings. She spread them all the way, both the one that had been torn and the one that had never been torn, and in the moonlight her scales were not green at all, but silver, silver everywhere, silver like a river.

She turned to Iroh.

She climbed up his arm, one last time, to his shoulder. She pressed her forehead against his jaw. She breathed a small puff of warmth on his cheek.

"Goodbye, Ember," Iroh whispered. "Goodbye. I love you. Go home."

Ember looked at Kai.

Kai was crying already, quietly, under her crown. Ember flew, very short, from Iroh's shoulder to Kai's. She touched Kai's nose with her nose. Kai made a small sound that was half a laugh and half a sob.

"Princess Ember Sparkle," Kai whispered, "come back someday."

Ember looked at Nana.

She flew, last of all, to the back of Nana's hand, which Nana held out flat. She stood on the back of Nana's hand for a long, slow moment. Nana's lip trembled, and she bent down, and she said something in a language Iroh did not know, softly, into Ember's small green ear.

Ember hummed.

Then, all in one motion, she crouched, and she leaped, and her wings opened, and she was going up, up, up into the silver, up through the skylight, up past the roof of the house and the top of the apple tree and the edge of the moon itself.

For one second they saw her, a small dark shape against the light.

Then she was gone.

They did not go inside right away.

They sat on the blanket under the open skylight and watched the moon.

Kai, after a while, lay her head on Nana's lap. Nana stroked her hair. Iroh lay on his back and looked up at the stars.

"Nana," he said.

"Yes, cricket."

"Do you think we'll see her again?"

Nana was quiet for a long moment.

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe. Maybe not. But the thing about a small wild life that passes through yours — " she paused, thinking " — it doesn't really leave. It stays inside you. It changes the inside of you, a little, so that you walk through the rest of the world differently. You see more. You are kinder. You notice the small hearts in the small places."

"The small hearts in the small places," Iroh repeated.

"Bees," said Nana. "Beetles. The old lady at the grocery store. The weeds in the garden. Your sister."

"Hey," said Kai sleepily.

"Especially your sister," said Nana, and she laughed a small laugh.

Iroh thought about this.

He thought about Ember's scared shivering body under the broken pot. He thought about her honey-yellow eyes watching him wrap her wing. He thought about how she had smelled like warm stones, and how she had curled up inside Kai's stolen sock, and how she had breathed a puff of warmth on his cheek just before she flew away.

It was a big promise. He knew he would not keep it all the time. But it was a promise worth making anyway, and he made it, lying there under the moon.

In the morning, the greenhouse was still open to the sky.

Iroh woke up early. He put on his socks — he had found them, at last, in a box labeled BOOKS, because that was how moving worked — and he went outside in his pajamas.

Nana was already there.

She was standing in the doorway of the greenhouse with a little trowel in her hand and a packet of seeds in her pocket.

"Good morning, cricket," she said.

"Good morning, Nana."

She looked around the greenhouse. At the ferns. At the grapevine on the glass. At the broken pot, which was still on its side, because neither of them had been able to bring themselves to move it.

"I thought," she said, "we might plant something."

"What?"

She took the packet of seeds out of her pocket. She held it up.

The picture on the front was of a small red flower. The kind of flower, Iroh thought, that might look a little like an ember if you squinted.

"Fire poppies," Nana said. "Your grandfather used to grow them. They like warm places and a great deal of light."

"Can I help?"

"I was rather counting on it."

They worked together all morning.

Nana showed him how to loosen the dirt with the trowel. How to drop the seeds, one by one, into shallow little holes. How to pat the dirt back over them gently, "like tucking them in," Nana said. "Seeds are babies too."

They watered them. They labeled the row with a little wooden stick that said FIRE POPPIES in Nana's careful old handwriting.

Kai came out, eventually, still in her crown, still a little sleepy. She sat on the brick floor and watched them work.

"Nana," said Kai.

"Yes, Kai."

"Do you think she got home?"

Nana looked up at the sky through the open roof. The sky was blue and clean. The morning sun was coming in, warm and slow, the way honey falls off a spoon.

"I think so, Kai."

"How do you know?"

Nana was quiet.

"I don't know for sure," she said at last. "But I have decided to believe it. Deciding to believe something kind is not the same as knowing. But it is not nothing, either."

Kai nodded, very seriously, as if Nana had said something she had been waiting her whole life to hear.

They worked in the greenhouse until noon.

They did not plant only poppies. Nana found old seed packets in a tin in her pantry, packets her husband had saved and never used, and they planted those too. Basil. Tomatoes. A kind of sunflower Iroh could not pronounce. Mint in one corner, because Nana said mint would take over if you let it, and she wanted to let it.

They did not clean the greenhouse. They did not pull up all the old weeds. They left some, because, as Nana said, "Even weeds are somebody. Even weeds might be somebody's dinner. Let's not be too tidy about it."

Iroh looked at his grandmother over a tray of seedlings. The sun was in her gray hair. Her hands, which were small and spotted, were full of dirt.

"Nana," he said.

"Yes, cricket."

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For not being surprised."

Nana looked at him. Her gray eyes were very kind.

"Iroh," she said, "I am surprised every day. I have been surprised every day of my life. The world is full of dragons, cricket. Some of them are small. Some of them are tall. Some of them have scales, and some of them have feathers, and some of them are just old women in greenhouses. The trick," she said, and she smiled, "is to keep noticing."

Years went by.

The fire poppies came up the first summer, and the second summer, and the third. The greenhouse filled in. The old glass was washed, though some of the moss was left, because Iroh had grown attached to it. The broken pot stayed where it was. Kai started kindergarten, then first grade, then second. She stopped wearing her crown every day, although she still wore it on her birthday, and on the first day of spring, and on any other day when she remembered that she was, in fact, a princess.

Nana grew older.

Iroh grew taller.

On the night of every full moon, he went out to the greenhouse. He cranked open the skylight with the wheel, which he could now turn easily, by himself, and he lay on the blanket, and he looked up.

He did not see Ember again.

Not exactly.

But sometimes, on the clearest nights, when the moon was very full and the sky was very quiet, he thought he could see a small dark shape pass across the moon. Very high up. Very small. Gone in a blink.

And always, on those nights, he remembered what Nana had said about deciding to believe kind things. And he decided.

He decided every time.

He grew up into the kind of person who fed stray cats. Who carried spiders out of the bathtub in a teacup. Who knelt down to talk to other people's babies on the bus. Who, when he was a grown man and he saw someone crying on a train, handed them his handkerchief without saying anything at all.

"When I was seven, I met a dragon. She was hurt, and I helped her. And she taught me everything."

Most people laughed when he said this, because they thought it was a joke.

A few people did not laugh.

Those were the people he kept, his whole life.

That, in the end, is the whole story.

That, in the end, is the whole world.

THE END

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A Note from Crimson Ark Publishing

Long ago, in the writings that have shaped our publishing house, a teacher named Bahá'u'lláh wrote that a person “As the necessary conditions have thus been created, systematic programmes for the expansion and consolidation of the Faith have been launched accordingly.” It is a small sentence, but it lives, quietly, inside this story.

Kindness is not something we earn by being large, or important, or useful. A dragon the size of a squirrel is worth as much care as a person the size of a mountain. A weed is worth as much as a rose. The old women in greenhouses, the bees, the beetles, the small scared things under the broken pots — all of them are somebody.

There is a kind of noticing, too, that is very close to prayer. When we kneel down to look at a creature we did not expect, when we whisper so we do not frighten it, when we bring it water in a thimble just in case — we are doing something holy. Wonder, carried gently, is a prayer without words.

May you find your own dragon someday. And may you be kind.

— Crimson Ark Publishing