An Ember in the Woodshed

The thunderous crash cleaved the evening hush as though a rogue lightning bolt had struck clean through the winter apple orchard. Alba dropped her woven wicker basket of washed comfrey roots, and a cascade of tender green shoots tumbled across freshly fallen snow. From the rear woodshed curled a thin plume of lilac smoke smelling of charred pitch pine and sweet mountain sulfur.

Alba ran across the frost with her boots unlaced. When she shoved open the rickety fir-plank door, she froze: the slate roof had caved in at the middle, and among a heap of broken firewood lay a creature the size of a setter, covered in copper scales that glowed with a dying light. Its left wing hung twisted at an impossible angle, the bone of the third digit broken and bleeding a golden lymph that hissed on the damp splinters.

The creature released a high, plaintive whimper reminiscent of a wounded osprey. Catching sight of Alba, it snapped its jaws, revealing needle-fine ivory fangs, and coughed up a tallow-candle flame that guttered out in an exhausted puff of soot.

"Easy, little one," Alba whispered, sinking to her knees in clean straw two yards away. "No harm will find you beneath this roof. You are an alpine cinder-drake, aren't you? The northerly gale caught you above the gorge crags."

Moving with deliberate gentleness, she unclasped her heavy woolen mantle and draped it over the beast’s shuddering flanks. The drake trembled violently from shock and mountain frost. Feeling the dry warmth of homespun wool, it rested its horned head upon Alba’s knees, closing amber eyes with an exhalation smelling of toasted applewood and sweet resin.

Alba examined the wing joint with feather-light touch. The fracture was clean yet perilous: if the bone knit out of true, the creature would never ride the mountain thermals again. She required slender splints of smoke-cured larch—an elastic, fireproof timber that could withstand the drake’s internal heat without kindling or softening. And across five leagues of valley, the solitary craftsman holding seasoned larch laths was Dorian, the brooding joiner across the icy brook.

Dorian’s homestead boasted no flowerboxes upon its sills nor a lantern at the gate. It was a squat fortress of gray granite ashlar, girded by sharpened stake palisades and orderly timber ricks smelling of cedar dust and river damp. The undershot mill wheel of his joinery turned sluggishly beneath crusts of ice, generating a hollow, rhythmic groaning that echoed through the misty evening.

Alba seized the forged iron knocker and hammered three resolute blows. No answer stirred, yet beneath the threshold leaked a ribbon of amber light. She kicked the oak paneling with her boot heel.

"Dorian! I know you wake because your flue breathes birch smoke! Open before my fingers freeze to your latch!"

The triple deadbolt withdrew with a harsh metallic screech. The heavy door swung back, revealing the imposing silhouette of a man standing well past six feet, with shoulders broad as mill doors and a dark beard clipped short without vanity. He wore a hide apron over a coarse gray wool tunic, his right hand gripping a seasoned ash mallet. A pale scar cleaved his lower lip, lending him an austere air that discouraged casual greetings from all the borough.

"I take no commissions at this hour," he stated in a low, grating timbre like rough gravel. "Return Monday morning with your dimensions drafted in ink."

"I require no furniture, Dorian," Alba replied, planting her feet on his threshold without yielding an inch to his bulk. "An alpine cinder-drake just crashed through my woodshed roof. His left wing bone is broken and his core grows cold. I need four cured larch laths and your joiner's skill to brace the joint before night locks down."

Dorian knit his dark brow in disbelief bordering on irritation.

"Cinder-drakes have not wintered in these foothills since the southern campaigns. It is a rogue badger or a mountain cur. Summon the village farrier."

"Badgers breathe no sulfur sparks nor wear copper armor, you stubborn block of timber," she flared, gripping the hide of his apron with surprising firmness. "If you refuse to fetch the wood, that fledgling will perish before dawn. Wounded creatures never judge your past mistakes; they seek only a hand that does not tremble when touching them. And you happen to possess the finest woodworker's hands in Montecanela, even if you have spent three winters pretending to be a ghost."

Dorian stared down at her. His dark pupils wavered before the passionate certainty burning in the young herbalist's hazel eyes. He looked at the heavy mallet in his grip, looked at the sleet frosting Alba’s bare shoulders, and let out a dry oath under his breath.

"Wait upon the stoop," he muttered, retreating into the wood shop. "I will fetch the laths and the curved spoke-shave. Do not wander into the yard."

He came back with the laths under his arm and something else: a pair of tanned leather gauntlets that reached to the elbow, scorched at the fingertips, of the kind only the army's dragon grooms wore. Alba looked at them and didn't ask. He pulled them on without a word of explanation.