Chapter 11: The Quarry

The blue dragon tried to get up and fell over in the snow.

He snapped at the first guard who got near him.

Then he swung his head at the hall door, at all of us crowding out of it with our cups still in our hands.

"Back," Wystan said. "Everyone inside."

Nobody moved.

They were all looking at me.

I walked out into the snow.

The dragon's ribs were heaving.

There was blood frozen on the iron cuff round his leg, and the leg under it was rubbed raw.

I knelt down in front of his head, close enough for his breath to melt the snow in my hair.

I didn't need to learn this one.

He already knew me.

I sang the pot song, and his name over it, the same way I had on the Eyrie roof with his head in my lap.

He stopped snapping.

He lay down flat.

The white went out of his eyes in one long breath.

He shrank.

A thin boy with a mop of fair hair lay in the snow in front of me, shaking, his ribs like a washboard.

Wystan pulled off his own coat and wrapped him in it.

Dorrit was already running for blankets.

The boy looked up at me.

He was twenty.

He looked twelve.

"Voice," he said. "It's you. It's really you."

"It's me. You're all right."

"I'm not," he said, and burst into tears.

We carried him into the kitchen and put him by the fire.

The cook brought him broth.

He drank it so fast he nearly choked, and the cook took the bowl away and made him go slower, and then gave him another.

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