Pip did not back away from the open jaws.
Keeping its six feet planted safely outside the puddle of sour foam on the slate, Pip craned its neck forward until its bound antlers nearly brushed Chaska’s shoulder, and stared straight down into the glowing throat with both amber eyes wide open.
The cold blue-white points of light inside the young predator’s ribs reflected in Pip’s twin amber eyes like tiny candle-flames in dark honey. For a creature that had spent its first weeks under a dark reliquary lid and its recent days trudging through snowdrifts and muddy limestone cracks, the sudden appearance of a silent, tidy little sky inside another animal’s belly was clearly the finest thing the mountain had yet produced.
Across Pip’s healed nasal membrane ridge, a soft, clear three-tone whistle rippled out—low, middle, high—the sound it only made when it was thoroughly pleased with a smooth piece of slate or a warm hearth-stone. Along the seam of its translucent shell, the hundreds of fine pale filaments lifted and swayed gently in time with the pulsing blue lights, no longer bristling with alarm.
Chaska sat back on her heels, rubbing her cramped right thumb where the brass mirror-bracket had pinched the skin through her glove, and let out a quiet breath of her own.
