Ox Fat and Crossed Cinchas

At four in the morning, the underground stables belonged neither to men nor to glorious chronicles, but to water condensing upon stone and the thick stench of animal lard. It was a heavy air, almost chewable, where the rancid tallow of an ox—boiled weeks prior in copper vats to waterproof the harnesses—mixed with the breath of burnt stone and cold sulfur rising from the pit vents.

Julian Vane sat on a wobbly fir stool, trying to push a shoemaker's awl through a cincha that seemed to have the consistency of fossilized oak.

His fingertips were black with old ink—a stubborn residue from ballistics exams that not even ash soap could scour away—and his breath came out in white puffs that dissolved against the brass lantern.

Maya Soler shoved the rotted plank gate with her hip. She carried in her arms a dented kettle of warm grease and two esparto scrubbers that smelled of cellar damp.

"You're late," Julian said without lifting his eyes from the leather.

"The quartermaster was drunk and the storeroom door was bolted shut. You could have come to help instead of staying here staring at your nails."

"Someone had to separate the iron buckles from the bronze ones before the rust welded them together forever. You're welcome."

Maya dropped the kettle onto the flagstone floor with a dull thud. A brownish splash stained the toe of Julian's boot.

He looked at her.

She did not apologize.

"The harness is fifteen years old," Maya said, kneeling beside the bundle of leather Ordoño had dropped the previous afternoon like someone tossing a dead dog into an entryway. "If we pull hard on the breast cincha, it's going to snap like pine bark."

"Not if you soak it in grease before tightening."

"If I soak it in grease it'll slip right over the rings the moment the beast tosses its head."

"It doesn't slip," Julian countered, his voice taking on that measured, exasperatingly neat tone with which he usually recited the maneuver manuals. "Ox leather absorbs the tallow right down to the core. It loses surface friction for half an hour and then regains its grip. It's right there in Marshal Gault's treatise."

"Gault rode heavy draft horses in the valley, Vane. Not three-ton beasts sweating boiling steam."

Julian pulled the strap with a dry snap. The old leather creaked as if someone were breaking a handful of dry twigs at the bottom of a cave.

"Do you have the rag or are you going to keep giving lectures?"

Maya tossed him the most frayed piece of esparto. Julian caught it in midair, frowned at the yellowish grease coating his palm, and without a word began to rub the breastplate of the double harness in circular, methodical motions. There was an evident clumsiness in his wrists, unaccustomed to stable work; Julian belonged to the map rooms with charcoal braziers and mahogany desks, where mistakes were erased with a horn scraper and hands smelled of dry lemon.

Maya, instead, plunged her bare fingers directly into the kettle. The grease was warm, viscous, and smelled of the slaughterhouse, but she did not hesitate as she spread it over the thick seams, searching with her thumb for the cracks where time had weakened the hemp.

They worked for ten minutes in silence.

The only sound was the harsh scraping of the esparto, the rhythmic dripping of a water leak on the north wall, and, every now and then, the deep rumble coming from the stall at the back: a heavy, dense exhalation that made the partition boards vibrate as if a forge bellows were breathing underground.

"Your father is still sending letters to the rector," Maya blurted out suddenly, her eyes fixed on a double-pronged buckle.

Julian stopped the rag. He glanced at her sideways.

"My father writes letters to everyone. He's a diplomat. It's what people do when they don't know how to use their hands."

"They say he asked them to review the computation of the decimals."

"My father could ask for the moon on a silver platter if it pleases him. The rector replied that chalk marks on a blackboard aren't erased by ministerial decree."

Maya pulled on one of the crossed straps harder than necessary.

"We would have avoided this if you had missed the last question about air density in the peaks."

"You would have taken first place all by yourself," Julian conceded, returning to the rubbing. "But the answer was three-quarters of an atmosphere at four thousand paces. I wasn't about to lie just to make your life easier."

"Always so considerate."

"It's a family curse."

A long, broken shadow fell over them from the access corridor. The light of a torch flickered against the vaulted ceiling, casting grotesque figures over the ashlar walls.

Instructor Ordoño stopped at the edge of the pit, leaning on his ash staff like a shepherd watching stubborn sheep. He wore his unbuttoned brown cloth greatcoat and held a steaming tin mug in his left hand. He didn't look like he had slept; in truth, no one at the academy could ever remember seeing Ordoño with his eyes fully closed.

"At six you have to test it on the beast," he said in that gravelly voice that sounded like pebbles rolling down a torrent. "If the harness gives way on the ramp, I won't bother picking up the pieces. Quartermaster charges five reals for every lost buckle."

"The leather is stiff in the keepers, instructor," Julian pointed out, rising with a certain martial stiffness. "It will need at least two days of neat's-foot oil before it takes flight tension."

Ordoño took a sip from his mug, clicked his tongue, and spat a bit of herbal infusion onto the floor.

"Nobody learns to yield with solemn speeches; one learns by sharing a filthy rag with the person you swore to hate."

He turned on his heel without waiting for a reply. His hobnailed boots echoed down the stone hallway until they faded into the upper courtyard.

Silence.

Julian looked at the greasy rag he held in his right hand, then looked at Maya, who was still kneeling on the dirty straw with her doublet sleeves rolled up to her elbows.

"He's a charming man," he murmured.

"Shut up and take the other end."

The interior of the stall was larger than the common cells, but the presence of the ash-colored reptile reduced it to a dead end. The beast lay on a bed of volcanic gravel and pressed ash, its tail tucked against its sides like a thick, knotted mooring cable.

It wasn't sleeping.

The dragon's eyes—two dull yellow slits, like copper coins buried in mud—followed the two cadets from the moment they unlatched the iron bolt. A warm vapor billowed from its nostrils, laden with a pungent mineral scent reminiscent of freshly struck flint.

"You go in first," Maya said in a low voice, hoisting the bundle of the double harness over her shoulders.

"Why me?"

"Because you have ninety-four point five. Make the theory count."

"Theory says ash females attack whoever shows their left profile first. You walk."

Maya let out a huff that condensed the cold between them and took the first step. The floor of frozen flagstones crunched under her soles. The reptile did not get up, but its dorsal scales, damp from the mist seeping through the high skylights, bristled with a dry, metallic rasp, akin to dragging mail armor from a campaign chest.

As they drew closer, the dawn chill abruptly receded. The beast gave off a dense, dull heat, similar to the radiation of an iron stove hours after the logs had burned down.

"Pass the lower cincha under the sternum," Julian whispered, positioning himself on the other flank of the reptile. "I'll catch the ring from this side."

Maya bent down, dodging a foreleg whose claws gripped the stone cracks with blind force. The air around the animal's flank burned slightly against their lips; the breath escaping Maya's mouth rose in quick spirals and instantly froze on her eyelashes and the rough collar of her doublet.

"I can't reach," she muttered, stretching her arm between the folds of leathery skin. "The harness is too short or the beast has gotten fat since they filed this piece of junk away."

"Pass it under the wing fold. There's more slack there."

"If I touch the wing joint, it's going to shake its keel, Vane. It'll crush us against the wall."

"Pass it."

The reptile let out a low growl, a cavernous rumble born not in its throat but deep within its ribs. It moved its head, heavy as a poorly carved block of granite.

With a clumsy, heavy motion, the beast shoved Julian's shoulder with the blunt mass of its snout. It was no attack; it was a blind push, like an old ox swatting away a horsefly in the stable.

Julian lost his footing on the loose gravel and stumbled sideways, crashing hard against Maya's side. His ribs slammed into her shoulder with a dull impact that knocked the wind out of him.

"Watch it!" Maya protested through clenched teeth, struggling to keep her footing.

Before they could pull apart, the animal's snout pressed forward again, pinning them against the main beams of the fir partition, shrinking the space until nothing remained between them but a sliver of stale air. Amid the struggle not to fall beneath the beast's paws, both of their hands clamped onto the same strap: a thick stretch of leather impregnated with rancid tallow and edged with a greenish bronze buckle.

Julian hesitated.

The skin of Maya's fingers was freezing and coated in grayish grease; his burned from the effort of supporting their combined weight. Their knuckles locked over the taut cincha.

Outside, the bell in the main tower struck the first call for matins, summoning them to prayers neither of them intended to say.

Julian tightened his fingers over the damp leather, digging his nails into the dried-out edge of the cincha, and did not withdraw his hand.