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“It won’t come back.”
The point dips toward her bare knee. I bring the bowl up until the iron rests inside it. She keeps hold of the shaft.
“You found me half-dead in a river.” Each word comes through her teeth. “I’d been bleeding. I was cold. I hadn’t eaten.”
I wait while she lifts the bolt clear again.
“I could feel my pack before you brought me here. Faintly, but I could. Then you took me under a mountain, farther from home. Of course I can’t reach them.”
Her good thumb works over the broken grain. A splinter lifts, and she presses it flat.
“There’s too much stone. Or too much distance. Take me out where I can try properly.”
“No.”
She looks past me toward the passage, then back down at the head.
“Moonbright stops healing. That’s why the wound’s still open. It doesn’t mean the wolf is dead. It means there’s poison left in me.”
I’d want that too.
I rest the bowl on my knee.
“Mel will know what to do. She fixed moonbright. The Wardens spent years killing us with it, and she made a paste that gets us healing again.”
I look at her face.
“She used the flower itself. I’ve had it packed into a wound of my own. So don’t sit there telling me what can’t be fixed.”
Her injured arm has begun to sag. I move the folded cloth beneath her elbow, and she settles onto it while she keeps talking.
“Mel will need this. She’ll want to see what they put on it.”
She turns the bolt toward the light again, examining the seam. Her brows draw together. She brings it closer, then tips it toward the fire, and her brows stay drawn.
“She’s treated wolves worse off than me.”
The fire catches a fresh piece of wood. She watches the point until the light steadies.
“Take me to her.”
I draw a slow breath through my nose. “No.”
“Then bring her here.”
Not under this mountain. My claws tick against the bowl. “No.”
She pulls her elbow off the folded cloth. “You don’t know her.”
I hold the bowl out. “Put it here.”
She closes her fingers over the stub. “I’m keeping it for her.”
“It’ll be kept.”
She studies me, the stub held between two fingers now. Then she lays it in the bowl with the broken end toward her.
“Don’t clean it.”
