Dragon and tiger full back piece

Below her, on the grey shelf of rock where the grass lay flat, lived an old tiger with a cough like a split bellows. He had watched the dragon for forty winters and thought himself her equal. Each spring he climbed to the edge of the stones and roared that she was a scold and a sky-thief, and each time she laughed, and her laughter came down as long cold streaks that scored the hillside and bent the barley.

The tinsmith's daughter, Ada Vane, was the only one who climbed up to see them. She carried a tin bowl of barley porridge in one hand and a polished plate in the other. She set the porridge down for the tiger, who ate it grumbling, and then she held the plate up to the sky. The dragon, who had never once in all her years seen her own reflection, leaned down out of the cloud to look. She saw her teal scales and purple crest gleaming in the tin, and she was so astonished by her own beauty that she forgot to be angry. She drifted off over the ridge, slow and careful, not tearing anything at all.

The tiger lay down in the grass and was ashamed for almost a whole afternoon. Now, when the wind comes over Hollow Pine, it lays itself out in long gentle bars across the fields, and if you listen at the top of the valley you will hear tin lids turning on washing lines, all of them polished bright by Ada Vane's hands.