Chaska sat back on her heels on the dry slate, set the small brass lamp on a flat stone where its flame wouldn’t blow out in the river draft, and opened her leather tool-pouch.
She did not have blacksmith’s pincers or surgeon’s forceps. A courier’s kit carried awls, waxed linen thread, spare harness buckles, a short belt-knife, and a flat whetstone for keeping steel sharp. None of those was long enough or narrow enough to reach into an acid-slicked mouth and grip a wet three-cornered piece of quartz without slipping.
On the slate beside Pip’s foot, the young predator’s breathing was growing shallower. The intervals between its whistling gasps stretched from three seconds to five, and the milky skin along its spine had gone stiff and waxy with shock.
Pip looked at the choking beast, then looked at Chaska’s hands, and tapped one unburned toe once against her tool-bag.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” Chaska muttered. She tried laying two iron tent-pins across each other like scissors, but the round iron rods rolled apart in her grip the moment she pinched a pebble with them. She glanced up toward her folded cargo frame on the ledge above, where Lilt’s pale chin rested over the stone lip, and snapped her fingers. “Stay right there. Don’t lick it, and don’t let it roll back into the river.”
