Sirath
She’s asleep against my chest when I wake.
Her hair is in my face, and her hand is on my arm, fingers curled into the scales, holding on in her sleep the way she holds on to everything, with her whole grip.
I don’t move. My scales are brighter than they’ve been in two years, and her heart beats against my ribs.
I could stay here. My scales settle, my jaw unclenches, and the thirty years of argument don’t arrive. I could stay here, with her weight against me and her breath on my neck and her fingers wedged between my scales.
I could stay. I don’t examine it. I don’t argue with it. I let it sit.
She wakes up the way she does everything, fast and aware, no transition between sleep and not-sleep. Her eyes open, and she looks at me, then at her hand on my arm, then at the position of our bodies, tangled together on furs that smell like both of us.
“Morning,” she says.
“Morning.”
“Your scales are bright.”
“Your hair is in my mouth.”
She snorts, an actual snort, ungraceful, and her face does the thing I’ve been collecting. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Tastes better than the spite jerky.”
She stares at me, her mouth opening. “Did you just make a joke?”
“No.”
“You made a joke. At dawn. Before food. Before the sun is up. Before I’ve had water.” She sits up, her hair everywhere, and points at me. “I’m counting that. Eight.”
“Eight what?”
“Almost-laughs. I’ve been keeping count. That was the first actual joke, though. New category.” She runs her fingers through her hair, working out the tangles. “I’m putting it in the notebook.”
“You are not.”
“Under behavioral observations, subcategory: evidence of personality.”
I watch her stand and stretch and walk to the water source and splash her face and dress, and the ordinariness of it lodges somewhere behind my sternum. I don’t try to name it.
She comes back, sits on the stone seat at the workbench, reaches for the salve jar. “Turn around. Morning application.”
I turn, and her hands are on my back, the salve cool at first, then warm as it works into the scale tissue, her thumbs along the gland line, the new growth coming in bright where the dead patches used to be.
We’ve done this every evening for days, but this morning her hands move differently. She lingers on the healthy scales, traces the ridge of my spine with her fingertips, the touch light and deliberate, and I close my eyes and let her.
“The regrowth is accelerating,” she says. “You’re responding faster than I projected.”
“Is that good?”
“That’s very good. It means the treatment is working, which means I’m good at my job, which I already knew, but confirmation is nice.”
“Humble.”
“Accurate. There’s a difference.”
A low rumble in my chest.
After the salve, I go to the cave mouth. The air is cold, the sky clear, the sun not yet over the ridge, and down the slope the snow tells the story.
Fresh tracks, more this time, same path as before, advanced past the second switchback.
The tracks mill around the wide section. They spent time there. Looking at the upper approaches. Discussing.
Learning the way to a cave with her inside it. The venom comes up fast, not the slow bonding surge I have learned to carry but something with teeth, flooding to the front of my jaw with no dose to measure and nothing holding it back.
For a breath I am not careful. For a breath I want to go down to the switchback and meet them and show them what lives at the top of this mountain. Then I take it back, harder than I have ever had to take anything back. My hands are shaking, and it is not the sickness.
I go back inside. “They’ve been past the second switchback,” I say. “Three sets. They stopped at the wide section and spent time there. Looking up.”
She turns from the workbench, and her face changes, the warmth from the morning closing and something sharper moving in. Her eyes go to my hands first, the way they go to anything she means to read. She knows the sickness tremor; this is not the sickness, and she sees that it is not. “How long?”
“Soon. They’ve stopped being cautious.” I sit by the fire.
“There are three approaches. The eastern path is the widest, but it passes under an ice shelf I can bring down. The western path crosses a scree field that sounds like breaking glass. The direct route up the switchbacks narrows at two points.”
She listens without interrupting and doesn’t reach for the notebook.
“I can hold the narrow points alone,” I say. “The question is whether they try one path or split.”
“How many?”
“Six, maybe more. The tracks overlap.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then: “I have compounds that could help. Contact irritants from the frostbark scrub near the tree line. Diluted venom extracts that would incapacitate without killing. I can mix a few things and place them along the approaches.”
“Traps.”
“Deterrents. There’s a difference.” She tilts her chin. “I’m a poisoner. Let me poison things. You handle the part where you’re enormous and terrifying.”
“Division of labor.”
“See? You’re getting it.”
I look at her across the cave, glow-stone light on her face, the workbench covered in her vials and her stone and her notebook and the salve jar, her hair still messy from sleep, the bite marks on her neck fading.
“I’ll need to see the approaches today,” she says. “You show me where to place the deterrents. I’ll mix them tonight.”
“After the morning bite.”
“After the morning bite.”
She tilts her head and bares the left side of her neck.
The gesture has become routine. The hunger under it has not.
I cross the cave and put my hand on the side of her face, and she leans into it, and I bite, and the venom rises wanting all of her at once.
I give her the measured dose and nothing past it.
She breathes heavily, licks her lips. Her eyes are warm when they open.
“We should go,” she says. “Before the sun melts the prints.”
We go. She packs three empty vials, the pipette, and a handful of frostbark she collected near the tree line last week, and I lead her down the switchbacks, showing her the three approaches, the choke points, the scree field.
She walks the paths the way she walks everything, alert and observant, asking questions I don’t expect, not about defense but about the rocks, whether the frostbark grows faster in shade or sun, which approach holds snow longest. She’s thinking about chemistry, not strategy: where to place compounds that react to body heat, which surfaces hold a contact irritant longest, how wind carries a scent.
I’m thinking about lines of sight and where to put my body between the threat and the cave.
Between the threat and her.
On the walk back up, she takes my hand, her fingers lacing through mine, small and warm between the scales. She doesn’t say anything about it. Neither do I.
We walk the rest of the way like that.