Every village had a story about the dragon on the mountain, and every story ended the same way: shepherds lost sheep, knights lost their nerve, and no one who went up came back down. Tamsin had heard them all by the time she was ten, and by twenty-five she had stopped believing most of them — except the one her grandmother told, quietly, near the end.

"He doesn't take the sheep for food, love," Gran had said, eyes on the window and the peak beyond it. "He takes them because he's lonely. There's a difference. Lonely things collect."

Tamsin went up the mountain in late autumn, after Gran's funeral, carrying nothing but a lantern and a jar of honey that had been meant for the winter. She told herself it was grief walking, that she'd go partway and come home. The path had other ideas. It kept going. So did she.

The cave mouth was warm. That was the first wrong thing — no wind, no ice, just air like a hearth. The second wrong thing was the dark, which moved. She raised the lantern and the dark resolved into a shoulder, then a neck, then an eye the size of a serving platter, molten gold with a long black pupil that narrowed, considering her.

"You brought honey," the dragon said. His voice was not thunder. It was the sound a big fire makes when it settles, low and full of embers, felt in the sternum before it reached the ears.

"It was for my grandmother. She died. I didn't — I wasn't coming to you. I was walking."

"And yet." Steam curled from his nostrils, unhurried. "The jar, or you. Choose what stays."

"Both," she said, chin up, because grief makes people brave. "I'm keeping both."

Something moved through the gold of that eye — amusement, she'd have called it on a man. On a dragon it was like watching weather change in fast-forward.

"Sit, then, kestrel. Eat your grief with honey. I have watched your family for four generations. Your grandmother waved at me every solstice. She was the only one who ever did."

That was how it began: not with a knight, but with a jar of honey and a dead woman's solstice waves.

She came back. Of course she came back. November became a habit of Saturdays — the long climb, the warm dark, his voice moving through her chest while she talked about the village, the loom, the winter that wouldn't break. He never asked her anything. He answered what she hadn't asked.

The first time she touched him it was accidental: her palm flat against his forearm, a wall of scales like dark slate warmed by sun, and beneath them — she felt it stop her breath — a pulse, slow as a tide, so large her hand rose and fell with it.

"You may," the dragon said, when she pulled back. "If you're asking. It's been ninety years since anything touched me on purpose."

"What was it? Ninety years ago?"

"Another climber. She stayed a season. They all stayed a season and then remembered they were small." The great head turned, gold eye finding her. "You don't remember you're small. It's your finest quality."

So her hands learned him. She learned that the scales ran smoother toward the underside, slate giving way to something like oiled leather, hot as bathwater, that shivered when she pressed her weight into it. She learned the place behind his jaw where the hide went velvet-soft and he made a sound like a landslide deciding to be gentle. She learned that a dragon could hold utterly, impossibly still — a stillness no animal and no man had ever managed — while a human woman climbed the warm landscape of him and did whatever she liked.

"You're shaking," he observed once, her spread across the broad plateau of his chest, both of them breathing in fog.

"You're a dragon."

"You noticed."

"I'm allowed to shake." She laid her cheek against the heat of him and felt the great heart beneath it, one beat to her four. "I'm not afraid. It's the opposite of afraid. There's no word for it."

"There is," he said, and the ember-voice ran through her bones. "You'll find it. You're the finding kind."

Winter broke late that year. When the pass cleared, the village whispered about the widow's granddaughter who took the mountain path Saturdays, and the whispers were half right, which for village whispers was a triumph.

In spring she stopped coming home on Sundays. In summer she stopped coming home at all.

On the solstice, her grandmother's old habit, Tamsin stood at the cave mouth and waved at nothing — at the valley, the small roofs, the life she'd shrunk out of. Behind her, warm air moved, and the mountain of him curled around where she stood, a wall of dark scales between her and the wind.

"Ninety years," he said, "I collected lonely things. Sheep. Knights. The odd crown." His jaw came down until the great gold eye was level with hers, close enough to see herself in, small and entire. "And then the finding kind walked up my mountain with grief and honey, and collected me instead."

She put her hand flat on his jaw, over the velvet spot, and the long heartbeat rose to meet her palm.

"Both of us," she said. "We're keeping both."