Slowly I opened the book and turned pages. Good for burns, better with morning cobwebs and a little milk, said the laconic page for one of her simpler remedies.
I didn’t have cobwebs or milk, but after a little sluggish thought I put out my hand to one of the broken stems of grass around us and squeezed a few milky green drops out onto my finger. I rubbed them between my thumb and finger and hummed, “Iruch, iruch,” up and down, like singing a child down to sleep, and began to lightly touch the worst of his blisters one after another with my fingertip. Each one twitched and slowly began to shrink instead of swell, the angriest red fading.
The working made me feel—not better exactly, but cleaner, as though I were rinsing water over a wound. I kept singing on and on and on and on. “Stop making that noise,” the Falcon said finally, lifting his head on a hiss.
I reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Groshno’s spell for burns,” I told him: it was one of the charms the Dragon had tried to teach me when he’d still been insisting on thinking me a healer.
The Falcon was silent, and then he hoarsely began, “Oyideh viruch,” the start of the chant, and I went back to my humming, “Iruch, iruch,” while I felt out his spell, fragile as a spoked wheel built out of stalks of hay instead of wood, and hooked my magic onto it. He broke off his chant. I managed to hold the working together long enough to prod him into starting again.
It wasn’t nearly the same as casting with the Dragon. This was like trying to push in harness with an old and contrary mule that I didn’t like very much, with savage hard teeth waiting to bite me. I was trying to hold back from the Falcon even while I drove on the spell. But once he picked up the thread, the working began to grow. The Dragon’s burns began fading quickly to new skin, except for a dreadful shiny scar twisting down the middle of his arm and side where the worst of the blisters had been.
The Falcon’s voice was strengthening beside me, and my head cleared, too. Power was coursing through us, a renewed tide swelling, and he shook his head, blinking with it. He twisted his hand and caught my wrist, reaching for me, for more of my magic. Instinctively I jerked loose, and we lost the thread of the working. But the Dragon was already rolling over onto his hands, heaving for breath, retching. He coughed up masses of black wet soot out of his lungs. When the fit subsided, he sank back wearily onto his heels, wiping his mouth, and looked up. The queen was still standing on the razed ground nearby, a luminous pillar in the dark.
He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Of all the fool’s errands that ever were,” he rasped, so hoarse I could barely hear it, and dropped his hands again. He reached for my arm, and I helped him drag himself to his feet. We were alone in the sea of cooling grass. “We need to get back to Zatochek,” he said, prodding. “To the supplies we left there.”
I stared back at him dully, my strength fading again as the magic ebbed. The Falcon had already subsided back into a heap. The soldiers were beginning to shiver and twitch, their eyes staring as if they saw other things. Even Marek had gone inert, a silent slouched boulder between them. “Kasia went for help,” I said finally.
He looked around at the prince, the soldiers, the queen; back to me and the Falcon, down to the dregs of ourselves. He rubbed his face. “All right,” he said. “Help me lay them straight on their backs. The moon is almost up.”
We wrestled Prince Marek and the soldiers flat in the grass, all three of them staring blindly at the sky. By the time we had wearily pushed down the grass around them, the moon was on their faces. The Dragon put me between him and the Falcon. We didn’t have the strength for a full purging: the Dragon and the Falcon only chanted another few rounds of the shielding spell he’d used that morning, and I hummed my little cleansing spell, Puhas, puhas, kai puhas. A little color seemed to come back into their faces.
Kasia came back not quite an hour later, driving a