She doesn’t let go of my arm, and I don’t pull my tail back. We stand on the narrow path with the drop below us and the mountain above us, and neither of us moves.
Her heart rate is elevated. I feel it through the contact, her pulse against my scales, fast. When she lets go, her fingers trail down my forearm, and the touch leaves a heat trace I feel for the next twenty minutes.
We climb back in silence. The gap in the rock face appears above us, half-hidden by the granite shelf, and she ducks through first. I follow.
Inside, the glow-stone is still lit and the fire has burned to coals. The cave is warm after the mountain cold, and she goes straight to the workbench, spreading the new sulfur samples across the shelf next to her vials.
I go to the cave mouth.
The snow on the lower approach has fresh marks, two sets of prints following the same path the runner used days ago. They’ve come further up this time. The stride is trained, the weight distribution says gear and purpose.
I watch the prints until the light fades. They stopped at the second switchback and turned back. Testing the approach. Counting the distance.
“Two more,” I say when I come back inside. “Same path as the runner.”
She looks up from the sulfur. “How far up?”
“The wide section. Where the rock walls open.” I sit down near the fire. “They’re learning the terrain.”
“How long before they stop learning and start coming?”
“Not soon.” I watch the last light go off the lower switchback. “One scout, then two. They map and they walk away. That isn’t a force gathering to rush a cave. That’s advance work for someone who isn’t here yet.”
“How do you know they’re not here yet?”
“Because if they were, they’d have come. You don’t scout a thing this carefully and then sit on it for fun. Whoever wants you is far enough off that the watchers can take their time, and a party big enough to come up this mountain after me has to march from wherever he keeps it. That’s not close.” I sit by the fire. “Weeks, before anyone tries the approach in numbers. Maybe longer.”
She takes that in, the way she takes in a result that changes the model. “Then we have weeks.”
“We have weeks.”
She nods and goes back to the sulfur, and I watch the glow-stone light catch her hands as she works. I don’t tell her the other half of it.
That I could go down tonight and end the two who left those prints, and that I won’t, because two bodies on this mountain bring ten more asking why, and ten more would come faster than weeks.
The watching I can carry. It buys her time to fix me, and it buys me time I have no right to want.
RUELLE
Ten days, and his scales are healing.
The dull patches on his left shoulder have shrunk, healthy color pushing back in from the edges. The salve is working, the one I mixed from the sulfur compounds and his extracted venom, a paste that smells like burned matches and looks like clay and is reversing two years of deterioration in days.
I notice the healing over dinner, which is hare. Again. The third hare this week; he hunts every morning now, since the spite jerky incident. The hare is fine.
The cooking is not fine.
“You’ve seen people cook,” I say, picking a piece of charred meat off the bone. It’s black on the outside and raw in the middle. “Haven’t you?”
He goes still. “My mother was an excellent cook.”
“And she didn’t teach you?”
“She tried.”
“What happened?”
“I burned everything. She said I had the patience of a rockslide and the technique of a forest fire.” A pause. “She was not wrong.”
