Cinder was a young dragon who could not breathe fire. When he tried, he only coughed, and a few sparks the size of peas fluttered out of his mouth and died in the air like tiny, embarrassed stars. The big dragons of the mountain found this funny. "Cinder," they said, sending banners of flame up at the sky, "you couldn't light a candle."
In midwinter he left the mountain at night and climbed down through falling snow to a village of forty houses, where every window was dark. In front of the bakery sat the baker, Mrs. Marsh, a woman of sixty, wrapped in a blanket beside her cold oven. "The storm blew snow down the chimney and put out the fire," she said, in the tone of someone discussing the weather with a dragon. "The matches are wet, the logs are damp, and by morning there will be no bread."
She was not afraid of a dragon at her door; she had simply run out of strength for being afraid. "Can you light an oven?"
"I can only cough sparks," said Cinder, studying his feet.
"Then cough," said Mrs. Marsh.
The first spark died on the wet logs. A proper dragon's fire would have taken the roof and the shelves and the baker with it, but a spark, she said, could be coaxed along by anyone with enough patience and a handful of dry shavings. She fetched a tin from under the counter, and Cinder lay down before the oven door and coughed, and coughed, and coughed. The fortieth spark took. A flame the size of a thumb grew into a small fire, the small fire into a glowing heart, and the old brick oven began, at last, to breathe.
At dawn the first loaves came out, steaming, and the whole village crowded in, to eat warm bread in a happy silence. Mrs. Marsh hung a sign on the door: "Cinder, Official Oven Lighter." And Cinder, with crumbs on his chin, understood that his sparks had never been too small. They were exactly the right size.
