Ronan Orrwick's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The sea drake washed into Ronan's cove at dawn, and his enclosure was too small to hold it. The driftwood pen sat near the breakwater, built for seals and birds. Ronan had nursed a baby seal there all winter, a gannet before that. Now a creature longer than his shack lay stranded on the rocks. Green scales blended into blue along its coiled body. Red wounds split the scales in a dozen places. One eye tracked him as he knelt in the shallows. Ronan kept his voice soft, the way he did with every hurt animal. "Easy. I've got you." The drake's tail twitched. It understood him, or seemed to. But the pen walls reached his waist, no higher. The driftwood would never cage this. The tide was already pulling back. In hours the drake would lie dry on bare stone, and its wounds would rot in the sun. He ran for his supplies. The baby seal barked at his heels. Inside the shack, big windows threw light across his cluttered medic cache. Bandages, gauze, antiseptic, scissors. He grabbed what he could carry and dragged it to the water's edge. He packed the worst gash and wound gauze around the drake's thick neck. The creature held still for him. But he could not treat a wound this size in the open, and he could not move a body this heavy alone. Ronan looked past the cove. Across the shallows stood the old tidal mill, its stone walls sunk into the water. He had passed it a hundred times. Its wheel hung broken and still. Behind the wheel, the mill's flooded basin held seawater at every tide. It was deep. It was wide. It was already full. He waded to the mill and tested the basin. Water reached his chest, cold and dark. The stone sides were sound. A gap in the lower wall let the tide flow in and out. He could flood it deeper, block the gap, hold the drake safe between the stones. The driftwood pen could never do this. The mill could. The tide would not wait. Ronan dug at the old timber gate until it swung free. He hauled driftwood and rope from his pen and lashed a channel from the cove to the mill basin. Then he returned to the drake. He braced his shoulder against its coils and pushed. It pushed with him, slow and heavy, down the wet channel. Inch by inch they moved through the shallows. The seal splashed ahead, barking. At last the drake slid into the flooded basin. It uncoiled in the deep water and sank below the surface, wounds and all. Its eye found Ronan once more, then closed. Ronan climbed the mill wall and sat, soaked and shaking. The driftwood pen stood empty across the cove. His sanctuary had a new home now. But the mill was a ruin, the gap in the wall still open, and the tide would turn again by nightfall.