I Only Summon Villainesses

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.

The heat came up through the scale into my palm from six inches away. Not warm. The kind of heat you find on a person the night before you lose them, coming off a leg that had been opened twice in a dark full of things that had been dead a long time.

’...Ah, damn.’

I took the hand back and wiped it down my thigh, which did nothing for either of us.

”Send it back.”

Light’s hand stayed where it was.

”To the Sanctum. Send it in, it heals in there, you call it out when we get where we’re going—”

”I have tried.”

”Since when?”

”The lair.” He did not look up from the leg, and there was no heat in it at all. ”Every night since the lair. The door does not open. It has never once done that anywhere else, in any gate, at any depth. Down here it simply does not open.”

Bren had come up behind us with the water. She looked between the two of us.

”What does that mean?”

I came up out of the crouch with my knees complaining.

”It means his summon can’t go home. It means neither of mine can. It means every one of us who has a door has been standing outside it since we got here, and we all worked out separately that it was just our own bad luck.”

She did not follow that, and I had no patience left to explain it properly, and she took the water back up the line.

Light was still looking at that leg.

”It will not walk today. It will not walk tomorrow.” He got up. ”And the rot is going up.”

”So cut it.”

He turned his head at me.

”You have never taken a limb off anything.”

”I have taken plenty of limbs off things.”

”Off something you intend to keep alive afterwards.”

’No. I have not.’

We did it on the flat shelf below the camp. It was the only ground that would drain.

My well was a dry socket. So was Light’s, which I found out standing over that leg and had not known before, and which explained a great deal about the way he had been fighting since the lair. So there was no flame to seal with and no touch to put it under, and what we had was a blade, a fire big enough to heat it, four people, and a wyvern that outweighed all of us together.

’Wonderful.’

Bren held the head.

She volunteered. I want that written down. A woman who had been standing in a lair with lines up her throat four days earlier knelt down in the grit, got both arms around the skull of a thing that could have taken her in half, and set her forehead against its brow and started talking to it. I could not hear what she said. She kept saying it the whole way through.

The big man lay across the shoulder. The silent one held the good back leg, and he did it well, and he still did not say anything.

I took the tail end and got my whole weight on it.

Light did the cutting.

He was fast. That is the kindest thing I can say about it and the truest. He had clearly done it before, on something, somewhere, and he did not stop once he started and he did not talk while he worked. The blade went into the coals twice and came out dull red, and the smell that came off the hide the second time was still in my sleeves days later.

The sound the animal made went out across that country and came back to us three times.

’I’m going to be hearing that one for a while...’

It took eleven minutes. I know because Devant counted them out loud, evenly, from the top of the shelf, where he sat with his knees up and did not come down.

By the end my forearms were slick past the elbow and there was grit worked into all of it, and I had a bruise across both shins from the tail that came up black by evening and was still there a week later.

Afterwards Light sat in the mess with his hands on his thighs and his head hanging, breathing like a man who had run somewhere, and the wyvern lay flat with its one eye open and its sides going and did not die.

It was still alive at midnight, and still alive at dawn.

Bren stayed with the head until the morning.

I found Devant on the shelf at some point in the small hours, still sitting where he had counted from.

”You could have helped.”

”Yes.”

”You watched.”

”Yes.”

”You said, three days ago, that you had no interest in the animal.”

He looked at the shape of it down there in the dark, and at the woman asleep against its skull.

”So I did.”

Then he got up and went down the shelf, and I watched him crouch by the stump and put both hands flat over the cut and hold them there, saying nothing to anyone, for a long time.

I do not know what he did. I am not sure he did anything.

But the leg had stopped weeping by morning, and the heat had gone out of the hide, and the wyvern got up on three legs at noon and stood there swaying with its head low and looked at Light until Light came and put a hand on its skull.

We made two miles that day.

Devant said nothing at all about the pace.

That evening I sat with Ilse’s head on my thigh and Bren beside me, both of us too tired to be good company, and she asked the question the way you ask about weather.

”How long has she got?”

”He keeps changing the number.”

”I noticed.” She pulled her knees up. ”He said eleven. Then nine. Then a week. This morning he told the big man four days.”

’Four.’

I sat with that, with her breath going out cold against my thigh and fogging in the firelight.

Then I got up and walked out past the fire, with every intention in the world.

I came back and I could not tell you where I had been.