The Girl Who Traded Dreams with a Dragon

The summer Ines turned eight, she stayed with her grandmother by the long, quiet lake. In the evenings the water was so still that the clouds were mirrored in it like freshly washed sheets. Behind the house stood a forest of tall pines, and beyond the forest, where no one really went, there was a grey cliff with a dark opening in its side. Grandmother called it the Cave, always with a capital C, as if it had a name of its own.

'Someone very old is sleeping over there,' Grandmother said one evening as they sat on the porch steps, each with a cup of warm milk. 'He has been asleep a long time now. Don't disturb him, but you don't need to be afraid of him either.' Ines looked toward the cliff. A soft light from the setting sun was turning the rock pink. 'Who is it?' she asked. Grandmother smiled and blew on her milk. 'A dragon,' she said, as calmly as if she had said a fox or a moose.

A dragon. Ines turned the word over in her mind all night. She had thought dragons only lived in books, not at Grandmother's lake. The next morning she walked along the water, around the little bay, through the pine forest, and up to the cliff. The Cave was wider than she had expected. The opening was tall as a gateway. From inside came the smell of warm stone and something else, something older, like rain on dry leaves.

She dared a few steps inside. Far in, in the dark, she could sense a soft, slow breathing, the way the sea breathes when it is asleep. She saw the edge of a great, dark, scaled shoulder, and a tail curled like a quiet snake. The dragon really was there. And he was enormous. Ines thought she ought to be afraid, but she wasn't. That slow breathing was the calmest sound she had ever heard.

That evening, when Grandmother had fallen asleep in her rocking chair, Ines crept back to the cave. She had no plan. She only had a feeling in her chest of wanting to tell something to someone who listened in their sleep. She stopped just outside the opening and whispered. She whispered about a dream she had had the night before: that she had flown over a great city where every house was full of paper kites, thousands of paper kites in every color, swaying in a soft wind.