The dragon's hoard was smaller than Meret expected, and that was the first thing that worried her.

She had climbed four hundred feet of switchback trail with a magnifying loupe, a set of scales, and a letter of commission from the Guild of Assayers, and she had pictured mountains of gold. Instead she found a cave floor scattered thin, coins here, a cracked goblet there, like a dinner table cleared in a hurry.

"You're early," the dragon said. It did not open its eyes. Its voice came from somewhere behind its ribs, a sound like stone settling.

"The Guild sent me to assess the hoard for the tax registry. Standard valuation, once a decade." Meret set her case down and tried to keep her hands from shaking. "I was told to expect more."

"You were told wrong things by people who have never counted anything that mattered."

She crouched by the nearest coin, an old imperial mark worn soft at the edges, and turned it over. Then she noticed the others. A child's copper teething ring. A wedding band, still attached to a curl of dried leather that had once been a finger. A silver spoon engraved with initials that did not match any noble house she knew.

"These aren't treasure," she said. "These are..."

"Belongings." The dragon opened one eye, gold-slit, ancient. "I do not hoard gold, appraiser. I never did. Gold is what your kind assumes, because gold is what your kind would take."

Meret's throat went dry. "Then what is this?"

"Everything I could carry out of a fire I did not start."

She looked again, slower this time, and the shape of it rearranged itself in her mind. Not a dragon's greed. A dragon's grief. Three hundred years of small, ordinary objects, each one somebody's last thing, salvaged from villages the histories only ever described from the human side, the side with torches and pitchforks and burned granaries, never the side where a creature with claws too big for delicate work had gone back into smoke to save what it could.

"The registry lists you as a threat," she said quietly. "Class one. Immediate hazard to settlements within thirty miles."

"The registry is written by the settlements."

"I know." She had known it, distantly, the way one knows a fact without feeling its weight. Now the weight sat in her chest like a swallowed stone. "I'm supposed to catalog the hoard's value so the Guild can set the bounty rate. If it's small, the bounty goes up. They'll say you're hiding the rest. They'll say you're getting desperate, and desperate dragons come down into the valleys."

"Will they."

"That's how it's read. Every time." She had seen the ledgers. A thin hoard was never mercy in the record books. It was a countdown.

The dragon said nothing for a long moment. Outside, wind moved through the cave mouth and stirred a scrap of blue cloth, a child's dress, threadbare, folded with a care that no claw should have been capable of.

Meret picked up the loupe and set it back in its case, unused.

"I'm going to write that the hoard is extensive," she said. "Beyond counting. I'll say the cave goes back further than I could survey and I ran out of daylight."

"They will send someone else."

"Then I'll come back first. Bring proper torches. Actually survey it, catalog every piece, put names to what I can." She looked at the wedding band, the spoon, the small worn shoe by the far wall she had not let herself look at yet. "Someone should know these people existed. That should be worth writing down too."

The dragon's eye closed again, slow, almost human in its exhaustion.

"The Guild will ask why it took you so long."

"I'll tell them the appraisal was more complicated than expected."

Below, far down the mountain, the valley villages were lighting their evening fires, small and orange and entirely unaware that the thing they feared had spent three centuries doing exactly what fire had never let them do for each other.