Work Text:
1992
The Romanian Longhorn had been off her food for the best part of a week, which was the only reason any of them were standing close enough to find out why.
"She's not going to flame," Charlie Weasley said. "Look at her. She's half asleep."
"She's a dragon, Weasley." Mihai had not moved from behind the wall of feed crates, where every man with any sense was standing. "Asleep is only awake she hasn't got round to yet."
The Longhorn lay along the far side of the holding pen with one wing folded wrong, dragging in the churned mud. She was a greyish sort of green, the colour of a pond in winter, and her two long horns had gone the dull yellow of old bone. Every few breaths her sides heaved and something rattled deep inside her, like wind in a chimney. She had not touched the sheep they'd left her, nor the one before that. A dragon that would not eat was a dragon that was either dying or working out how to make somebody else do it first, and Charlie meant to know which before the morning was out.
"It's her wing," he called over his shoulder. "Something's gone in the joint. I can see it from here."
"Then you can see it from here as well," said Bryn, who was beside Mihai and showing no sign of leaving him, "which is a much nicer spot, on account of not being on fire."
"Five minutes." Charlie was already pulling his gloves up. "Stun her if she shifts. I only want a look at the wing."
"Charlie—"
But he had gone over the fence.
He moved the way he'd been taught, slow and side-on, never straight at her, talking the whole while in the low, flat, nothing-much voice that sometimes settled them and sometimes did not. "All right, girl. All right. Nobody's after you. Just having a look at that wing of yours." The smell of her grew as he got closer, a smell like a forge and a butcher's shop had been shut in a room together, and under it something sour that he didn't like at all. Sick. She smelled sick.
The wing was worse close up. The joint had swollen to twice its size and the hide stretched over it had gone tight and shiny, and there was a tear running through the webbing that had begun to weep.
"She's torn the membrane," he called back, crouching now, a yard from it, near enough to put a hand out. "Right through. No wonder she's not—"
The Longhorn opened one eye.
It was an eye the size of a dinner plate, the yellow of a struck match, and it found Charlie at once and held him.
"Charlie." Bryn was not joking any more. "Charlie. Back. Now."
"Stun her," said Mihai, and Charlie heard him moving, heard the crates scrape. "Both of you, on her neck, now—"
Two jets of red light hit the Longhorn under the jaw. They might as well have been thrown bread rolls. She was sick, and she was frightened, and she had a stranger crouched over the worst pain she had ever known, and she did the one thing a dragon truly understands how to do about a difficulty.
She drew a breath that pulled the air past Charlie's face, and she turned her head, and she let it out.
He was already moving when the fire came, which was the only thing that kept it off his face. He felt it before he heard it — a wall of heat that arrived all at once, like a door slammed in front of him — and then the whole left side of him was inside it and the world was white and roaring. The noise of it was in his teeth. He went down into the mud rolling, over and over the way they drilled you, until the cold wet of it was the only thing on his skin and the fire was out, and from very far away there were people shouting his name.
Hands got him under the arms. Bryn, and a fair-haired keeper named Annika, hauling him bodily over the fence while behind them the Longhorn slumped back with her head on her foreleg, emptied out, as though that one breath had been the last thing in her.
"I'm all right," Charlie said.
"You were on fire."
"I'm not on fire now."
He wasn't, by then, though the sleeve was gone from his left arm past the elbow and the stink of it was making his eyes stream. He held the arm up and looked at it the way you'd look at something through a rain-streaked window. From the wrist to above the elbow the skin had gone a shining, furious red, blistering already in two or three fat places, and there was a stripe of the same burned down his ribs where the fire had reached round him.
"That," said Bryn, "is not all right."
"It's a burn. I've had burns." Charlie got his legs under him and stood up, mostly to settle the question of whether he could, and the daylight went thin and swam at the edges and then steadied. "There. Standing. Good as new."
Mihai came round the crates with his wand still in his fist and his face shut like a door.
"Infirmary," he said.
"It's a burn, Mihai."
"It is a dragon-fire burn, which is another beast entirely, as you know perfectly well, and you are going to Magda if I have to carry you there over my shoulder like a roll of fencing wire."
"I've the rest of the feed run to do." Charlie was already walking it off, to make the point, holding the arm a little out from his side. "I'll go in after. She'll keep. Magda loves it when we come in at the end of the day, you know she does. Makes her whole evening."
Behind him, Bryn said something to Mihai that Charlie didn't catch, and Mihai said something back that was shorter, and neither of them came after him, which Charlie took, wrongly, for the end of it.
***
He did not go to the infirmary.
He went to the equipment shed, where the field kits were kept, and sat down on an upturned bucket and got the dittany open with his teeth, because his left hand had stopped wanting to do anything that needed fingers. Dittany was the thing for a wound. A few drops and the skin knit itself up green and new and good as anything. He put a few drops on.
They hissed, and steamed, and did nothing whatever.
"Huh," Charlie said, to the empty shed.
He tried the burn paste instead, the thick orange stuff that smelled of marigolds, and that at least took the top off the pain, dropping it from somewhere near unbearable to merely bad, so he worked it the length of his arm and down along his ribs with his teeth set, and wound a bandage over the lot one-handed, which took a good while and a fair amount of language. Then he pulled the rag of his sleeve down over the bandage where nobody would look twice, and he went and got back on his beast and finished the feed run.
It was a long run. The reserve held more than forty dragons across a valley you could have lost a small county in, and you went round it on the back of a thing built like a carthorse and tempered like a wasp, and you did not hurry it. By the second paddock the arm had begun to throb in time with his heart. By the fourth, a Welsh Green nearly took his head off because he was slow getting the carcass down the chute, slow because he had only one arm he could trust, and he had to sit very still on the ridge afterwards while the valley tilted and righted itself. By the time he reached the last enclosure the light had gone the colour of weak tea and the whole left side of him felt as if it belonged to some other man, a man who was being cooked, slowly, from the outside in.
A young keeper, no more than seventeen, new that summer, met him at the gate to take the empty harness.
"You all right, Charlie? You've gone a funny colour."
"Grand," said Charlie, and very nearly fell off getting down.
***
The lamps were lit in the long hut where they ate by the time he got back, and the smell of stew came out of the door to meet him, and Charlie found, which was strange after twelve hours' work, that he did not want any.
He took his usual place across from Bryn and Annika and an old Welshman called Owain, who had been on the reserve longer than anybody living and had a face and a pair of forearms that said so. Charlie put his right elbow on the table and kept the left arm down by his side, and when he reached for the bread he did it with the wrong hand and sent the salt over.
For a moment nobody said anything.
"How's the arm," said Owain.
"Grand."
"Show us, then."
"I'm eating."
"You're not, though," said Annika, watching him. "You've shoved that same bit of bread round your plate since you sat down. You've not had a mouthful."
"Leave off." Charlie made himself pick up his fork. "It's a burn. You've all had burns. Bryn had that Horntail catch him in the spring and he was back on the run inside the week."
"That was my leg," said Bryn, "and it was a brazier I kicked over, not dragon-fire, which is a different thing, as Mihai has told me eleven separate times since, and as he'll be telling you next."
"Show us the arm, Charlie," said Owain. Something had gone out of his voice that had been in it before, some of the ease, and it made the table go quiet. "Go on."
Charlie looked at him for a moment. Then he set down his fork and rolled back what was left of the sleeve.
The bandage had soaked through. That was the first thing they saw. The orange paste had gone a colour orange paste had no business going, a brown that was nearly black, and where the burn showed above the wrappings the skin had stopped being red. In the middle of it, the worst of it, it had gone a dull grey-white, the very colour of the Longhorn herself, and it did not look like part of Charlie at all.
Annika put down her fork.
"Right," said Owain quietly. "Up. You're going."
"It's only—"
"I've seen that colour twice in my life, boy." The old man had gone very still. "First fellow walked it off. Like you. Two days, because he was hard, see, harder than the rest of us, too hard for a healer. They had the arm off at the shoulder in the end, and he was lucky to keep the rest of himself, because dragon-fire's not like a kettle-burn, it doesn't stop when the flame's gone out. It carries on. It eats inward. That grey there, that's it eating." He got to his feet. "The second fellow we walked straight to Magda the same night he took it, and he's still here, and he's got both his arms still, and he's sat four tables down from you eating his supper right now. So you'll forgive me, Charlie, if I know which of the two I'd sooner you turned out to be."
Charlie looked down the hut. Four tables along, a thickset man called Grigore caught his eye, lifted his spoon a little way in something that was almost a salute, and turned back his own sleeve to show, wrist to elbow, the shining silver map of a burn that had healed a long time ago.
Charlie looked back at his own arm.
"All right," he said. "All right.
***
Magda's infirmary stood at the far, quiet end of the camp, whitewashed within, a row of clean beds down one wall and shelves down the other holding more jars than Charlie had seen in any one place in his life. Magda herself was a short, square woman of sixty-odd with grey hair scraped back so tight it looked like it must hurt, and a habit of looking at you over the tops of her spectacles that sent grown dragon-keepers off to find something to do elsewhere. She had been the healer on the reserve thirty years. It was widely held among the handlers that she was the one thing on the whole continent that the dragons themselves were sensible to be frightened of.
She looked up when Owain brought Charlie in. She looked at Charlie's face, which had gone the grey of candle-wax. She looked at the arm. She did not say that she had told him so, having not in fact been there to tell him anything, but thirty years of telling young men exactly this was in the long breath she let out down her nose.
"Sit," she said.
He sat on the end of the nearest bed. She took the bandage off with a flick of her wand and a pair of scissors both, and when the last of it lifted away she went still for a second, and that was worse than anything she might have said.
"How long," she said.
"Sorry?"
"How long ago." She was already up and pulling jars down off the shelf — one, two, three, four. "The fire. When did it take you?"
"This morning. Early." He looked to the window, where the last of the light had almost gone. "About — ten hours back. Bit more."
"Ten hours." She set the jars down hard enough to ring them. "Ten hours, with dragon-fire in your arm, walking a valley feeding sheep to dragons. You stupid, stupid boy. Do you know what that is, in the middle there?" She moved one finger over the grey heart of the burn without touching it. "That is dead. That part. The fire killed it this morning, and it has spent the day since killing what lay next to it, and then what lay next to that, because that is the nature of the thing — it does not go out, it goes in — and your dittany and your marigold grease are about as much use to it as you spitting on it would have been."
"Took the edge off, the grease," Charlie said.
Magda shut her eyes briefly. "He says it took the edge off."
What she did to him over the next hour was, Charlie decided somewhere in the middle of it, comfortably the worst thing to happen to him in the whole of his twenty years, and that was a life that had by then taken in a broken collarbone off a bolting hippogriff and the time the twins had hexed his broom to pitch him head-first into the pond. She made him drink something first, out of a chipped cup, bitter and green, that set his ears ringing. Then she heated a salve over a low blue flame until it was very near boiling and laid it the length of the burn, and it was like taking the fire all over again, only slower, and on purpose, and Charlie made a sound he was not proud of and got hold of the edge of the bed with his good hand until the knuckles stood out white.
"It is drawing it back out," Magda said, which for her was practically tender. "The fire. It hurts because it is working. Breathe, now."
He breathed. The grey at the centre of the burn went darker, and curled, and a thin smoke came off it that smelled of the inside of the Longhorn's pen, and she wiped it clear and laid on more and did it again, and again, until the light beyond the window had gone altogether and the lamps were burning and Charlie's shirt was soaked through.
When at last she bound it in clean white linen over a cool, pale paste that smelled of almost nothing, the pain had sunk down to a deep, level ache, and Charlie felt as though he had run the length of the valley and back without stopping.
"You keep the arm," Magda said, putting her jars away. "You may thank that old fool Owain for it, and not yourself. One more day and you and I would have been having a very different conversation."
"Thanks, Magda."
"You are not welcome. You are an idiot." She fixed him over the spectacles. "You are off the dragons. Three weeks. No feed runs, no handling, no wandering up to a paddock to be brave. Light work, where I can put my eye on you, and you come to me every morning so I can look at that arm, and the first streak of grey I see come back in it, I keep you three weeks more on top. Are we understood?"
"Three weeks is—"
"Are we understood, Weasley."
"...Yes, Magda."
She had nearly finished with the shelf when she paused, a jar in her hand, and did not turn round.
"There is one thing more," she said. "A burn this bad, I send word home. It is the rule. Next of kin."
The bottom went out of Charlie's stomach in a way the boiling salve had not managed.
"You don't—" he started. "Look, Magda. You don't have to do that. I'm fine, you said so, I'm keeping the arm and everything, there's no call to go frightening anyone over nothing—"
"It is not for you to say who I frighten." She set the jar down and reached for a quill. "Who is it. Mother? Father?"
"...Mum," Charlie said, with the air of a man putting his name to something he could already tell he'd be sorry for. "Molly. Weasley. But honestly, Magda, couldn't you just put — could you put something like, minor incident, fully recovered, nothing to—"
"I will put what happened," said Magda. "I always do."
And she dipped the quill.
***
She kept him in the ward that night.
He had thought he would lie awake with the ache of it, but the green draught she'd given him sat heavy behind his eyes, and he was somewhere near the edge of sleep, the arm propped up on a folded blanket and the stove ticking down in the corner, when the door went and somebody came in carrying a light.
It was Owain, a candle in one hand and two mugs hooked on the fingers of the other.
"Brought you tea," he said. "Don't tell Magda. She holds that tea interferes with the draughts, which it may do, for all I know. Shift up."
Charlie shifted up. Owain put a mug into his good hand and lowered himself onto the next bed with a grunt, and for a while the pair of them sat and drank in the dark and said nothing at all, while somewhere out across the valley the dragons called to one another, low and far off.
"That second fellow," Charlie said at last. "The one who kept both his arms. Grigore."
"What about him."
"You told us you'd seen that colour twice. Him, and the one who lost the arm." Charlie turned the mug round in his good hand. "Only you knew what it was before you'd hardly looked. Quicker than a man knows a thing he's only ever watched happen to somebody else."
Owain was quiet a moment. Then he set his mug down on the floor, and turned back the sleeve of his own left arm, and held it to the candle.
The scar ran from the wrist up past the elbow, silver-white and old, the skin of it gone smooth and shining, the same as Grigore's had been four tables down.
"Twice I've watched it happen to another man," Owain said. "That's true, and that's what I told you, because the third time isn't one I tell in the hut." He turned the arm slowly in the light. "I was about your age. I'd a notion I was the best they had, which I might even have been, and I let a Vipertooth get a breath at me and then I sat on it the best part of a day, because I was hard, see. Same as you." He pulled the sleeve back down. "Big Romanian named Tomas threw me over his shoulder and carried me to a healer in the end, the way Mihai promised to carry you. I'd not have the arm without him. I'd not have a deal of anything without him."
Charlie looked at the dark where the old man's arm had been a moment before.
"That's why," he said.
"Why what."
"Why you got me up off that bench tonight."
"Aye, well. Somebody did it for me." Owain picked his mug back up. "Seemed only right I passed it on." He drank. "Why'd you sit on it, then? You're not stupid, whatever Magda calls you. You knew what it was the same as I did."
Charlie was a long time answering.
"I'm young for it, out here," he said. "Not the youngest — but I'm the one they let near the worst of them, because I'm good with them. I am, and all, I'm not —" He turned the mug again. "I thought, if I went running to the ward over a burn, that'd be it. They'd see the kid who couldn't take it. They'd start being careful with me. Stop putting me on the bad ones."
"Nobody would have seen that."
"You don't —"
"I do." Owain leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "You want to know what we see, when one of you young ones takes a knock and has the sense to go and get it seen to? We see a man who'll still be here in thirty years with both his hands on him. That's the whole of it. We want you to get old, boy, however daft a thing that is to want, out here in this place." He got to his feet and gathered up the mugs, and stood looking down at Charlie a moment in the candlelight. "Now get some sleep. And stop fretting over that letter gone home. There's nothing to be done about it tonight, and worrying never yet turned an owl round in the air."
He carried the candle out with him. Charlie lay back and listened to the dragons calling to one another across the valley, fainter now, and fainter, until at last he couldn't hear them at all.***
It was two days before the answer came, and they were not a comfortable two days.
Charlie spent them on a bench outside the infirmary in the thin morning sun, doing the work Magda had found for him, which the first day was sorting a crate of dragon-hide gauntlets into pairs and the second day was sorting the same crate again because she said he'd done it wrong, which he hadn't, and which they both knew he hadn't. His arm hung strapped across his chest and ached when he forgot it and ached worse when he remembered, and the whole time, underneath, he was doing sums about owls. A day to fly to England. His mother to read it. However long it took his mother, having read a note from a foreign healer about her son and a dragon, to do anything at all but sit down very suddenly at the kitchen table. A day for the reply to fly back. He did not let himself think too hard about what the reply would say. He had grown up in the same house as that reply. He knew its handwriting.
It came on the third morning, and it came hard.
He was most of the way through the gauntlets when a shadow crossed the bench and a large, official reserve owl dropped onto the far end of it with a thick envelope held out in one foot and the look of a bird that had flown through weather to get there. And behind it, lower, and slower, and listing badly from one side to the other like a rowing-boat in a gale under a soft brown-paper parcel very nearly as big as itself, came a second owl that Charlie knew at once: a small, ancient, grey thing with its feathers all going the wrong ways, which cleared the infirmary roof by no margin worth speaking of, set its sights on the bench, missed it entirely, and came down in the water butt with a splash and a noise of profound personal complaint.
"Errol," said Charlie, and got up too quickly, and went round to fish him out.
The old owl let himself be lifted dripping from the butt and set on the bench, where he shook a fine spray over everything within reach, glared at the valley as though it had insulted him, and stuck out his leg with the parcel still tied to it as if nothing at all had occurred. Charlie got the knots undone. The label had gone soft with butt-water but he could still read it: CHARLIE — EAT SOMETHING, in writing he'd have known at the bottom of the sea.
He took the thick envelope off the reserve owl, which gave him a flat look and left, and he weighed it in his good hand. It was heavy. For a moment he thought about not opening it. Then he thought about what his life would be like if he failed to write back having opened it, and he broke the seal with his thumb.
Dear Charlie,
I have read the letter from the reserve healer four times now and I still don't understand the half of it, and your father has read it as well and HE doesn't understand it, and between us we have decided that "a Category One dragon-fire burn, recovering well" might mean very nearly anything at all, and that we shan't either of us sleep properly until you have written to me in your OWN hand and told me precisely how bad it was. And don't you dare make it sound better than it is, Charlie Weasley, because I shall know. I always know.
A BURN. From a DRAGON. I had to sit down. A strange owl I'd never set eyes on brought it in over breakfast and I dropped the teapot and your father mopped while I read it, and Ron wanted to know why I'd gone white and I couldn't get the words out to tell him for a full minute.
Now. You are to do EXACTLY what that healer tells you. Do you hear me. Every last thing. I don't care if you feel perfectly well, I don't care if you've decided you know better than she does, because you do NOT — she has been at it thirty years and you have been at it two, and I have had a great deal more to do with burns than either of you, thank you, having raised the twins. If she says rest, you rest. If she says three weeks, you do four, to be safe.
I have sent a jumper, the new one, the dark green, because the nights will be turning over there and you never once in your life packed anything sensible. There's a tin of fudge in with it as well, which you're to share round, because Owain sent me a very kind note years ago when you first went out and I have never forgotten it.
Ginny starts in September. I keep finding her sitting on her trunk in the hall and it isn't even packed yet. The house is going to be so quiet, Charlie. First you, and then Bill off to Egypt with the curses and the goblins, and now my baby. I'm sure I don't know what I did to be given sons who go straight off and take up the two most dangerous jobs in the whole wizarding world, but it must have been something dreadful.
Please. Please be careful. You are not nearly so indestructible as you have always thought you were, and neither were your brothers, and I should very much like all of you to go on proving me wrong about that for a good many years yet. I love you very much and I want you home at Christmas with both your arms.
All my love, Mum
P.S. Your father wishes to know whether the reserve makes use of Muggle fire-extinguishers, and if so whether you might send one home for him to look at. Please pretend you never read this. Please.
Charlie read it twice. Then he folded it back along its own creases, carefully, one-handed, and sat for a while looking at the gauntlets he had been pairing without seeing a single one of them.
***
Later, when the hut had gone quiet, he sat on his bunk with a borrowed quill and a square of parchment balanced on a book on his knee, and he wrote: Dear Mum, I'm completely fine.
He looked at it. He looked at his left arm, strapped to his chest in its clean white linen, which he could not raise so much as to his own waist, and which Magda that very morning had pronounced "coming along, slowly, no thanks at all to its owner." He crossed out completely and put totally, decided that was worse, crossed out the whole line, and began again.
Dear Mum,
I'm all right. Honestly I am. It was the Longhorn — she's poorly, she's torn a wing and she's off her food and in a foul temper with it, and she got a fright and I got in the way, which was my own daft fault and nobody else's. The healer here is the best on the whole continent, everyone says so, and she's keeping a close eye on the arm and it's mending. I'm off the dragons a few weeks, which is sending me round the bend, but I'm doing every single thing I'm told. I promise you that.
He stopped. He thought about the grey at the heart of the burn, and the smoke that had come off it, and the sound he'd made when the salve went on. He thought about Owain saying which of the two I'd sooner you turned out to be. He thought about his mother dropping the teapot in the kitchen at home with the whole morning around her.
He wrote none of it down. There was no good in it, and no kindness either. But he sat a moment longer than he needed to before he dipped the quill again.
I got the jumper. It fits. Tell Dad no extinguishers — we manage, and I'd never hear the end of it from this lot. The fudge has been shared, mostly, and Owain says to thank you. And tell Ginny I'll write to her at school, and that the very first time she gets up on that broom she's been on at you about all summer, she's to keep both hands on the thing, unlike SOME people we could name.
I'll be home at Christmas. Both arms. I promise you that as well.
Love, Charlie
He read it over. It was, he thought, about as honest as a letter home is ever quite allowed to be, which is to say not very, and exactly as honest as it needed to be, which was another thing altogether***
The autumn came down out of the mountains over the week that followed, the way it always did, all at once and without asking, and the mornings on the bench turned cold enough that Charlie gave in at last and worked the dark green jumper on over the strapped arm, easing it down inch by inch over the linen, and went out to do his gauntlets.
Mihai found him there, the paired gauntlets stacked in tidy rows along the bench, the green wool with its big gold C bright against the grey of the morning.
"Very smart," said Mihai.
"My mum made it."
"I can see your mum made it." Mihai lowered himself onto the end of the bench, in the spot the owls had used, and looked out across the valley to the far side of it, where the Longhorn had been shifted to the recovery paddock and was, word had it, taking food again at last. "She is well, the dragon," he said. "Eating. The wing knits. Magda set it."
"Glad to hear it."
"You will be back up on her by the time the snow comes." Mihai's eye went sideways, to the arm, and the jumper, and the gold C on the front of it. "If your mother permits."
"She doesn't get a say in it," said Charlie.
"No?"
Charlie looked down at the jumper, at the close, even stitches of it, at the great gold C his mother had put there with her own two hands a thousand miles off because the nights would be drawing in over here and he never packed anything sensible.
"No," he said, and a grin got loose across his face, and he reached for the next gauntlet with his good hand. "Course she doesn't."