The wyvern stopped on the third morning and would not start again.
It had been getting worse in a way we had all been politely not discussing. The bad leg had stopped taking weight the night before, and it had spent the dark with the limb cocked up off the grit and the whole body trembling with the work of standing on three, and when Light went to it after we broke camp it put its head down into the stones and did not move.
He crouched and looked at the wound for a long time.
Then he laid his palm on the hide above it and held it there, and by the time he took the hand away his mouth had gone flat.
"How bad?"
"Come and feel."
I set Ilse down against the pack, with her cheek turned out of the dust, and went and laid my hand where his had been.
