Chapter 2 - The Weight of Scars
Two nights later, the fortress was dead quiet, wrapped in a blanket of heavy, starless fog that muffled the sound of the sentries’ boots on the ramparts. Sorcha slipped past the outer gate guards, her dark wool cloak pulled tight around her face, carrying a leather roll of specialized salves, clean lint, and a small lantern that flickered with a pale yellow flame.
She entered the north enclosure through the low service hatch. The air inside was thick with the musk of reptile hide and old straw. Vesper was huddled in the deepest, darkest corner of the stone alcove, his massive tail curled protectively around his snout.
She didn’t rush. She had learned during her long nights in the infirmary that animals—and dragons especially—respected stillness above all else.
“Vesper,” she murmured softly, keeping her hands visible, empty, and low.
The dragon’s head snapped toward her, his eyes glowing like dying embers in the dark. A low, warning rumble shook the loose pebbles on the enclosure floor.
Sorcha stopped dead. She didn’t take another step. She simply lowered herself onto a dry patch of hay, sat cross-legged, and waited.
Minutes ticked by. The cold seeped through her trousers, but she didn’t shiver. She kept her breathing slow and even, matching the tempo of the dragon’s respiration.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Vesper lowered his enormous head. The great, scaly snout rested heavily on the straw just a few feet from her knees.
Permission.
Sorcha exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She crawled forward on her hands and knees until she was close enough to touch the iron-black plates of his foreleg.
“Let me see,” she whispered.
She lifted her lantern, casting a steady circle of light across his massive forelimb. Beneath the thick overlapping scales of his elbow joint, something looked horribly wrong. The scales were splayed outward at an unnatural angle, revealing a deep, weeping puncture wound that was hot to the touch. The skin around it was bloated, purple, and leaking a thick, yellowish fluid.
Infected. Deeply, dangerously infected.
Sorcha swallowed hard, a cold knot forming in her throat. This injury had not come from another dragon’s talons during a territory dispute. The shape of the gouge was too uniform, too deep, and pressed against a nerve cluster that suggested continuous, agonizing pressure.
It came from iron equipment. A heavy restraint harness, fitted too tightly, rubbing repeatedly against his flesh day after day until the metal bit through the hide and ground down into the muscle.
“You didn’t just fight the riders,” she whispered, her voice cracking with sudden, overwhelming grief. “You’ve been fighting the bindings they put on you. You’ve been tearing yourself apart trying to escape them.”
Vesper let out a low, vibrating sound deep in his chest. It wasn’t a growl of anger. Over the past few weeks, Sorcha had grown to recognize it; she called it his listening sound. It was the sound of a creature acknowledging that someone finally understood.
Moving with agonizing slowness, Sorcha opened her satchel. She took out a flask of distilled spirit, pouring it over a clean cloth.
“This is going to burn,” she warned him softly. “I’m sorry.”
She pressed the alcohol-soaked linen into the festering wound. Vesper’s entire massive frame went rigid as a board. A tremor ran through his twenty-foot length, and for a fraction of a second, the muscles in his jaw bunched as if he might snap. Sorcha froze, her hand hovering over his flesh, ready to pull back.
The dragon didn’t strike. He let out a long, shuddering hiss of hot air through his nostrils, blowing her hair away from her face, but he held perfectly still. He endured the agonizing burn because he knew she was cleaning the poison out.
Working quickly and with practiced precision, Sorcha packed the deep cavity with crushed feverfew and dried willow bark to draw out the infection. Then, she wrapped a wide strip of treated canvas around the leg, tying it off with a secure knot.
The most dangerous, feared dragon in the Northern Corps sat in the dirt like a wounded hound, letting a human tend to his agony.
“You let me do this every single time,” she whispered, resting her tired hands on his scaled knee. “Twelve riders come at you demanding obedience, shouting orders, waving ropes like executioners.”
She patted the thick canvas bandage gently.
“And then I come afterward asking where it hurts, as if my stitches can fix the fact that you’re surrounded by fools.”
Vesper shifted his massive head closer, sliding it across the straw until it rested heavily right across her lap, pinning her legs beneath his immense warmth. It felt like being buried under a mountain of sun-baked stone, yet it was remarkably comforting.
Sorcha stopped breathing for a second, then slowly leaned forward, pressing her forehead against his obsidian scales.
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“I don’t know how to save you,” the confession slipped out, softer than a sigh, carried away by the damp draft of the cavern. “I can clean wounds. I can brew feverfew and stitch torn flesh. But I don’t know how to bandage a council report. I don’t know how to stop a political execution.”
Sorcha stayed there, trapped beneath the warm weight of the dragon’s head, long past the midnight hour. The exhaustion of the past week finally caught up to her, her eyelids growing heavier and heavier until she slumped sideways against his side, fast asleep in the dark alcove.
