Victor Rosevale's Arc

Chapter 2 of 18

Victor followed the falcon until the trees thinned and the ground sloped toward water. He could hear the river before he saw it. He could also hear his own breathing, ragged from three hours of running with a spear and no rest. Halfway down the slope he stopped and swore at himself. He had left the gate with his weapon and his coin purse and nothing else. No linen. No salve. No needle. Sable's message had said she was bleeding, and he had brought nothing to stop blood with. He crouched behind a fallen trunk and made himself think. The nearest healer was half a day back through Mosswood. If he turned around now, Sable might be dead before he returned. If he pushed on empty-handed, he would find her and watch her bleed out in his lap. Neither answer was one he could live with. He tore at his own coat. The lining was clean wool, thick enough to pack a wound. He cut a long strip with his belt knife, then another, and stuffed them inside his shirt against his skin to keep them dry. He cut the leather thong from his purse for a tourniquet. It was not medicine. It was cloth and a cord. It would have to be enough. He stood, and the ground under his boot shifted. What he had taken for a mossy boulder opened one eye. The eye was blue and the size of his fist. The rest of the shape resolved slow, scale under moss, a long ridged back, a tail curled around the base of a tree. A dragon, small as dragons went, green stone under a coat of living moss. It had been sleeping an arm's length from him. Victor did not raise the spear. He had heard tavern talk of the mossbacks in the eastern woods. They fed on deer and left men alone unless startled. He was already the thing that had startled it. The dragon lifted its head and sniffed the strips of wool at his chest. Its nostrils flared once. Then it turned its snout toward the river bend and made a low sound, almost a hum. The falcon circled overhead and cried back. Victor understood, or chose to. "You know where she is." The dragon stepped over the fallen trunk and moved downslope without waiting. Moss dropped from its flanks in soft clumps. Victor followed at a run, one hand pressed to the wool inside his shirt. The river bend opened below them through a gap in the pines. On the near bank, half in the shallows, a body lay in a cracked leather vest. Red hair. Not moving. Victor went down the slope in a slide of loose stones, spear forgotten in his other hand, the strips of his own coat pressed to his chest like a promise he had almost failed to keep.