A raised ridge of flesh along either side of the gaping tear indicated it had tried to close and heal, but had broken open again. It looked bad and smelled worse. Flies, some large and buzzing, others tiny and myriad, swarmed and settled on it.
Alise and Sedric, both her elders, were standing there like timid children, waiting for her to do something about it. The silver seemed to be paying no attention to them; it was at the far end of the crescent of dumped meat and feeding dragons, snatching at what it could reach and then retreating a half-step from the others to eat it. She wished she had something larger to feed him, something that would keep him standing still and his mouth occupied. She watched him pick up a large bird, toss it up, catch it and gulp it down. She had to act soon; when the food was gone, there would be nothing to distract him.
Sedric had fetched his kit of bandages and salves. It lay on the ground, open and ready. Thymara had brought other, more prosaic supplies: a bucket of clean water and a rag. She felt like a messenger who’d forgotten the words he’d been paid to say as they all waited for one of them to begin. She turned away from them and tried to think what she would do if she were here alone, as she had expected to be.
Well, no, she admitted to herself. She’d expected Tats to be here with her, or at least Sylve or Rapskal. She now felt a fool for volunteering to take on the hapless silver dragon. Skymaw was more than enough to deal with. She couldn’t possibly care for this dull-witted creature as well. She pushed that thought away and angrily crushed her self-doubt before the two Bingtowners. She set one hand lightly on the silver dragon’s dirty hide, well away from the wound on his tail. ‘Hello?’ she said quietly.
He twitched slightly at her touch, but made no reply. She refused to let herself glance at her companions. She didn’t need their approval or guidance. She made her hand more firm on his skin. He didn’t pull away. ‘Listen, dragon, I’m here to help take care of you. Soon we’ll all be going up the river to look for a better place for you to live. But before we start travelling, I want to look at the injury on your tail. It looks infected. I’d like to clean it and bandage it. It may be a bit painful, but I think it has to be done. Otherwise, the river water will eat at it. Will you let me do that?’
The dragon turned his head to look at her. Half of a dead animal hung from his jaws. She couldn’t determine what it had been, but it smelled dreadful and she didn’t think he should eat it. But before she could frame that warning, he tipped his head up, opened his jaws and swallowed it. She felt her gorge rise. Lots of animals ate carrion, she sternly reminded herself. She couldn’t let herself be upset by it.
The dragon looked at her again. His eyes were blue, a mingling of sky and periwinkle that swirled slowly as he stared at her. He made a questioning rumble at her, but she received no sense of words. She tried to find some spark of intelligence in his gaze, something more than bovine acceptance of her presence. ‘Silver dragon, will you let me help you with your injury?’ she asked him again.
He lowered her head, rubbed his muzzle against his front leg to clear a strand of intestine that dangled from the side of his mouth. He pawed at his nose, snorting, and with a sinking heart she noticed that his nostrils and ears were infested with tightly clinging parasites. Those would have to go, too. But first, the tail, she reminded herself sternly. He opened his mouth, revealing a long jaw full of glistening pointed teeth. He seemed so placid, even unaware, but if she hurt him and it angered him, those teeth could end her life.
‘I’m going to start now,’ she told the dragon and her companions. She forced herself to turn to the Bingtowners and add, ‘Be ready. He’s not really responding to anything I say. I don’t feel like he’s any more intelligent than an ordinary animal. So when I try to look at his tail, there’s no telling what he’ll do. He may try to attack me. Or all of us.’
Sedric looked properly daunted, but Alise actually bared her teeth in determination. ‘We must do something for him,’ she said.
Thymara dipped the rag into the water and wrung it out over the gash. Water trickled from the rag into the gash, and ran away in a dirty rivulet down the dragon’s tail. It carried off a few maggots and disturbed a cloud of insects, large and small, that rose, buzzed and tried to resettle immediately. It did little more than wash away surface dirt, but at least the dragon had not turned and snapped at her. She mustered her courage and gently pressed the rag to the injury. The dragon rippled his flesh around the area but did not growl. She wiped gently around it, taking off a layer of filth and insects and baring a raw stripe down the centre. She plunged the rag into the bucket, rinsed and wrung it out, and applied it more firmly. Crusty scab came away and there was a sudden trickle of stinking liquid from the wound.
The dragon gave a sudden snort and whipped his head around to see what they were doing to him. When he darted his head toward Thymara she thought she was going to die. She couldn’t find breath to shriek.
Instead the dragon nosed at the oozing injury. He pressed his nose flat to the swelling, forcing the pus from it. For a moment he worked at it, starting at the top of the gash and pushing his snout along it. The smell was terrible. Flies buzzed excitedly. She closed her nostrils as much as she could and lifted her hand, pressing the back of her wrist against her nose. ‘At least he’s trying to help us clean it,’ she said through clenched teeth.
Abruptly, the dragon lost interest and turned back to his feeding. Thymara seized the opportunity to wet the rag again and wipe the pus away from the injury. Three times she rinsed out the rag and cleansed it, until she feared the water in the bucket was as foul as the stuff she was trying to wipe away.
‘Here. Use this.’
She turned to find a grim-faced Sedric offering her a thinbladed knife. She stared at it; she’d been expecting him to hold out salve or bandaging. ‘For what?’ she demanded.
‘You need to cut away the proud flesh. Then we need to bind it closed. Perhaps even stitch it closed. Otherwise, it’s not going to heal well.’
‘Proud flesh?’
‘That swollen, tough looking stuff at the edges of the wound. You need to cut it away so that you can bandage it, fresh cut to fresh cut. So the flesh can heal together.’
‘Cut away the dragon’s flesh?’
‘You have to. Look at it. It’s all dried out and thick. It’s already dead, really. It can’t heal that way.’
She looked at it and swallowed sickly. He was right. From the palm of his hand, on a flat fold of clean cloth, he offered her the shining knife.
‘I don’t know how to do this,’ she admitted.
‘I doubt that any of us do. But we know it has to be done.’
She took the proffered knife and tried to grip it firmly. She set her free hand flat on the dragon’s tail. ‘Here I go,’ she warned them, and gingerly set the blade to the ridged flesh at the edge of the wound. The knife was very sharp. Almost without effort, it slid into the flesh. She watched her own hand move, carving away the stiffened skin at the edge of the injury. It came away like shrivelled rind from a dried-up fruit. It was caked with dirt and scales; the moving knife bared dark red flesh. It oozed blood in slow, bright droplets, but the dragon went on snorting through his food, as if he didn’t feel it.
‘That’s it,’ Sedric said in a low, excited voice. ‘That’s right. Cut that piece free and I’ll get it out of your way.’
She did as he bade her, scarcely noticing how he deftly caught it in a gloved hand. Alise had gone silent, either raptly watching or intently not watching. Thymara could not afford to look at her to find out which. She had cleared
