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.”
“As long as I’m worth taking, they’ll keep coming.”