“Don’t try to sit up yet,” Ashaun said, dropping to one knee in the loose shale beside Ysabet and bracing her translucent stone left forearm under Ysabet’s upper back so she would not slide toward the trench mouth. “Breathe small first. Tell me if you taste blood.”
Ysabet let out a slow, hitching breath through her teeth and spat onto the gray gravel. Her saliva was clear. “No blood,” she whispered, pressing her good left hand against the thick wool of her coat just below her armpit. “Nothing punctured inside. Just feels like a draft mule kicked me square in the left ribs.”
Chaska climbed out of the timbered trench carrying Suth’s ash staff in one hand and supporting Pip against her hip with the other. Pip’s six feet were caked with gray mineral mud from grounding the stun-jar, and its sideways jaw still bore a dark smear of blood from forcing out a word through its scarred tongue after the electrical shock. As soon as Chaska set Pip down on the frost-stiffened grass, Osha knelt beside it and held out the original field mouse in her cupped palms. The mouse hopped eagerly onto Pip’s nearest foreleg, sniffed the faint scorched mark along the Little Harbor seam of its partial shelter shell, and ducked straight back into the warm chest fold, settling with its bad hind leg tucked beneath its belly.
