He crosses to me in two strides and drops to his knees on the shale, his hands, enormous, scaled, trembling, finding my side, pressing over the cut, his palm covering the entire wound.
“It’s not deep,” I say. “It’s not deep, Sirath.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know. It’s a cut, not a killing blow. I need to clean it and close it, and I need you to stop shaking because you’re pressing too hard.”
He eases the pressure, his hand staying, his other hand finding my face and tilting it up.
“I smelled your blood,” he says. “From the switchbacks. I smelled it on the wind.”
“I know.”
“If I hadn’t...”
“But you did. You got to me in time.”
His forehead drops against mine, his breath rough, his hand on my side, the blood slowing under his palm.
The mountain is empty. Nine soldiers, all retreating or immobilized: three blistered and screaming on the western slope, two paralyzed on the eastern ledge, two crawling off the ridge, one gone down the switchbacks, one running with bruises on his throat. Nobody dead.
My side hurts. His hands are shaking again. The rage is fading, and what’s underneath is what drove him up the ridge when he smelled my blood.
He hasn’t said it since the cave. He doesn’t need to. His body said it when it cleared thirty feet of ridge faster than I could take a breath.
SIRATH
She won’t let me carry her.
She walks back to the cave with her hand pressed against her side and her jaw set and her boots steady on the rock, blood between her fingers, blood on her shirt, blood on my hand where I held the wound. I walk behind her, close enough to catch her if she falls.
She doesn’t fall.
Inside, she sits on the stone seat at the workbench and pulls her shirt up and examines the cut with the same detached focus she uses on my scale patches, fingers probing the edges, assessing depth.
“It needs closing,” she says. “Not stitches. The edges are clean enough to seal with the salve if I add a coagulant.” She reaches for a vial, and her left hand is trembling, the blue-ringed tremor worse under stress, so she switches to her right.
“Let me,” I say.
“You don’t know how.”
“Show me.”
She looks at me. I look at her.
“Mix the salve with the brown vial. Third from the left. Three drops, not four.” She guides my hands with words, precise,expecting competence. “Spread it along the edges. Press them together. Hold.”
I do what she says. My hands are almost too large for the work, but the control is there, the same control I use for the bites, and my fingers press the edges of her skin together and hold while the compound seals the wound.
Her blood on my scales. Her skin under my fingertips, warm, human, fragile in a way that makes my jaw ache.
“Good,” she says. “That’s good.”
I keep holding. The compound sets. The bleeding stops. She breathes, in and out, slow, the rhythm she falls into after a bite.
“They’ll come back,” she says. “More of them. Better prepared. Gereth doesn’t stop because the first team failed.”
“I know.”
