Victor Rosevale's Arc

Chapter 4 of 18

Victor set Sable down inside the rocky cleft and pressed his palm to her thigh. The linen was warm and wet again. Blood had soaked through the flight kit's clean wrap. Her skin had gone the color of river stone. He knew field wounds. This one would kill her before dawn without stronger medicine than a tin of salve. "Honey. Stay awake," he said. "Look at me." Her eyes drifted, then fixed on his face. "Pack the wound harder." "It's packed. It won't hold." He sniffled. "I need something else." The moss-covered dragon stepped into the mouth of the cleft. It watched him with a pale blue eye and turned its head south, down a narrow game trail he had not seen. It waited. When he did not move, it flicked its tail against the stone and turned its head again. "It wants me to follow," he said. "Then follow," Sable whispered. "I'll keep the spear." He put the spear in her hand and closed her fingers around the shaft. "If they come, you scream. I'll hear you." He kissed Sable and ran after the dragon. The trail dropped through fern and root for a hundred paces and opened into a hollow he would have walked past in daylight. A stone basin sat in the middle of it. Steam curled off the water in a thin white ribbon. The pond glowed from underneath, soft blue, the color of a lantern behind cloth. Cattails ringed the edge. Carved letters ran along the near stone. He could not read them, but the word for what this was sat plain in the water itself. He filled his canteen. He soaked a strip of the linen. He cupped a second handful and drank, because he could not carry her here in time and he needed his legs to hold. He ran back. Sable's eyes were half shut. He cut the soaked wrap away. He poured the glowing water over the wound in a slow line from thigh to knee. She arched off the stone and bit down on her own sleeve. The bleeding thinned. Then it stopped. The torn edges pulled toward each other like cloth drawn by a needle. Not healed. Closed enough to hold. He pressed the wet linen against the seam and wrapped it tight. Sable breathed. Real breath, deep in her chest. Color came back into her mouth. "Where did you find that," she said. "The dragon showed me." She laughed once, a dry sound, and let her head rest against the stone. "Then we owe it."