Chapter 8: Sea Cave

"We can't win it on the ground," I said.

We were walking back from the Great Hall with the whole academy staring at us.

"I won on the ground last week."

"You won because he didn't know you. Now he does." I looked at him. "Your wings have to work."

"My wings set crooked nine years ago, Beastwright."

"Then I break them and set them again."

He stopped walking.

"You want to break my wings," he said.

"Twice. One each."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"I think I'm in love," he said, and kept walking.

I didn't know what to do with that, so I pretended I hadn't heard it.

I couldn't do it in the menagerie.

Too many eyes. And Leofric's house students had started loitering near the pens.

So on the first rest day I took him down the cliff stairs at low tide to the sea caves.

They ran under the whole academy, a maze of wet black rock and green pools. Kerensa and I had found them in our first year.

The biggest one had a sand floor and a ceiling as high as a chapel.

I'd carried down splints. Two long oak poles, leather straps, a bucket of plaster, and a bottle of poppy syrup.

"Shift," I said.

He shifted.

The cave filled up with serpent.

His wings lay folded wrong along his back, the left one bent at the shoulder, the right one twisted at the long bones.

I climbed up onto his back with my bag.

"Drink this." I held out the poppy syrup.

He turned his huge head and looked at the little bottle.

"That's for a horse," he said, his voice coming from somewhere deep in the rock.

"You're bigger than a horse. Drink all of it."

He drank all of it.

I waited until his breathing slowed.

Then I found the old break in the left wing with my hands, the place where the bone had knitted wrong, and I put my knee on it.

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