The Baby Who Made a Dragon Smile
John the blacksmith had set up his forge in the ruins of an old castle on the edge of town. The rent was free — nobody wanted to live there — and the walls were pleasingly solid. He had one room for his forge, one room for his family, and one thing he hadn't known about when he moved in: a dragon in the cellar.
He discovered this on a Tuesday, when the noise from below became impossible to ignore.
The dragon was very old and impressively large, with scales the colour of old copper and a wing that hung at an unfortunate angle. He introduced himself in a businesslike way.
"I won't eat you," he said, "if you fix my wing."
This seemed reasonable. John was a sensible man who preferred practical arrangements to drama. He got his tools, went around to the dragon's injured side, and spent the afternoon riveting loose scale-plates back into position. The work was not unlike shoeing a horse, except the horse was forty feet long and occasionally breathed a small amount of smoke when startled.
He offered the baby as a pledge of good behaviour — his own, not the dragon's.
Rosie was eight months old, newly mobile, and constitutionally incapable of being frightened of anything. When she was placed between the dragon's enormous front paws and found herself staring up at a face of grey-green scales and amber eyes the size of dinner plates, she considered this for a moment.
Then she laughed.
Not a nervous laugh. The deep, rolling, unstoppable laugh of a baby who finds something genuinely delightful.
The dragon had been alive for three hundred years. In that time he had been feared, fled from, hunted, poked at with spears, and once pelted with rocks by an entire village. Nobody had ever looked at him and laughed with uncomplicated pleasure.
Something happened in the vicinity of his chest that he couldn't quite account for.
He tried a smile. It was not polished — dragons have no natural occasion to practise — but it was sincere. Rosie immediately laughed harder.
"Well," said the dragon, to nobody in particular.
John came back three hours later and found his daughter sitting against the dragon's side, chewing a rusk, while the dragon — with visible care — very gently patted her with the tip of one enormous claw.
From that point on, the dragon became noticeably easier to deal with. He stopped making threatening noises at night. He let the town's children peer through the grating on Saturday mornings. He frightened off a tax collector who had been bothering the neighbourhood for years.
"It's remarkable," said the mayor, who had worked up to standing at the cellar door. "What changed him?"
"She visited him every morning," said John's wife. "Brought him a wooden spoon and three blocks, the first week. I think he still has them."
Down in the cellar, the dragon curled carefully around the sleeping baby, and purred so quietly it sounded like distant thunder, and was quite content.