The landing broke off the spent arrow that had been embedded in Zandaril’s left calf and it was several moments before he could focus on checking for other damage.
Nothing seemed to be broken, so he fumbled with his bound hands until he could pull his belt knife loose. He held the blade reversed and sawed through the rope, then stripped the bonds from his wrist, dumped off his pack, and hobbled over to Penrys.
She lay in an oddly crumpled position, and he feared for a broken neck, but she was still breathing. He didn’t dare try to mind-speak, not knowing the range of the chained wizard who’d captured them. He quickly cut her bonds off and pulled her pack away but left her lying on her side, the undamaged one. The arrow in her right side above her waist was still intact, the point having penetrated all the way through.
He ran his hands over her arms and legs looking for breaks, but found nothing. When he felt under her head, his hand came back bloody.
Where are the wings, and the tail? How do they attach? There were no gaps in the clothing to accommodate them.
He remembered the arrow in one wing. How could he treat that?
Calm down. She’s breathing—let’s keep it that way. One thing at a time. Side and head. We’ll think about what to do for the wing after that.
Hot water. Nothing’s spurting blood, so start with that.
He quickly gathered loose branches and built a fire under the overhang of a bushy maple on the margin of the shingle, and shoved his pan into the middle of it to heat water. The leaves of the tree would dissipate the smoke, he hoped, and make it harder to find them.
After checking her pack for a spare shirt, he tore strips off the one she was wearing and made a pad for her head. Then he sat on the gravel by her head with his bad leg thrust out stiff before him, and tilted it up so he could see, pulling her hair aside to assess the damage. He felt a bump on the back of her head, but the blood was superficial.
Don’t know how bad it is inside, but nothing I can do about that.
He rigged the pad in place with a strip of rag to hold it, and laid her head back down, trying to position it so as not to apply pressure against the damage while keeping her on her side.
The water was boiling now. He dropped several rags into it, and sat down in front of her to work on the arrow. First he notched the shaft and then broke away the back with the fletching. He whittled the broken end carefully, shaving off every splinter he could find. Then, with a hot water-soaked pad ready, he grabbed the arrow just behind the point and drew it steadily out the front of the wound. A small amount of blood followed it, and leaked out the back, too, but much less than he expected.
He pulled what was left of the shirt up out of the way and probed with his fingers. He thought the arrow might have missed any vital organs, but still, there should be more bleeding. When he pressed down, a little more blood seeped out, then it stopped.
Zandaril had never seen a deep wound that behaved this way before, and it puzzled him. He’d hoped to flush out any scraps of clothing the arrow had driven into the wound, but none appeared. The shirt looked like it had been cleanly slit, but he thought it unlikely that no material had been carried in with the point, and he feared the festering that would result.
He strapped a boiled pad on it, front and back, and considered his next steps. Maybe a poultice would help draw any infection to the surface.
The throbbing of his own wound reminded him that they were both dependent on him, now.
Making himself comfortable near the fire, with the rest of Penrys’s stripped shirt, he thought through what he would have to do. His boot had kept the arrow from penetrating very far, but now boot, breeches, and stocking were all involved.
He wanted to save the boot—they might have to walk a long way from here. He picked apart the seam stitches at the back until he had freed up enough to fold the pierced side’s flap down and away from the broken stub of the shaft. He had to take the boot off to free the clothing beneath it, but he cursed the necessity as the pressure the boot had applied to the wound site suddenly released and the pain doubled.
He closed his eyes as sweat broke out on his forehead. He swayed and bent his head until the sensation eased and he could see again.
He pulled the leg of his breeches up, and the stocking down—both looked like clean cuts. The arrowhead was embedded in the meat of his calf with about an inch of the shaft behind it, and he was going to have to back it out the way it came, or open his leg up further with his knife, a prospect he wanted to avoid.
The sooner, the better. The boot had kept the flesh from swelling, but it was making up for that now, and any delay would make it harder.
Zandaril grabbed the broken-off end of the shaft with both hands and pulled steadily. Whenever he met resistance, he wobbled it a little to see if it had rotated from the original path.
He could feel the cold sweat dripping off his forehead and the sound of his panting breath seemed deafening, but he didn’t stop. When the widest part of the metal broadhead emerged from the wound, he yanked out the rest, dropped the bloody object on the ground, and concentrated on his breathing for a moment.
When he opened his eyes, he reached for his leg and kneaded it to drive as much blood out to clean the wound as he could stand. It bled much more freely than Penrys’s arrow wound, but a boiled pad and a rag tied around it finished the work for now.
He pulled the intact lower part of the boot back on his bare foot, in preference to walking without it on the shingle, and thought about the arrow through Penrys’s wing.
A glance up at the sun warned him that evening was near, and soon the light would fade. He needed to treat that wound now.
He hobbled back and sat down in front of her, stretching his bad leg out straight. There was no apparent change. Would she listen to him, unconscious, if he couldn’t mind-speak her?
“Hey, Penrys, you did well. We got away.”
No reaction.
He leaned forward and stroked her cheek with the side of one finger. “I need your help. I need to see your wings again.”
She breathed, and he kept stroking her cheek.
“Please, it’s important. Wings, you’ve got to show me your wings. It’s me, you can trust me.”
She stirred for a moment, and his hopes rose.
“You can do it. It’s safe.” On impulse, he brought the back of his hand up to her nose to let her smell him, and she sighed.
“Show me your wings, bikrajti. I want to see them.”
With a sudden displacement of air, the great wings appeared, and the tail.
The feathers were all shades of brown and black and dark amber and smoky gray, colored in bands like an immense eagle. The wings lay half open, draped along the ground and, when he looked closely at how they joined her body, he discovered there was a gap between the ends of the wings and her flesh, as though they were something she put on instead of part of her. The tail was the same, not actually contacting her skin. The clothing she had left moved smoothly between the gaps.
Fix first, investigate later.
He lifted the right wing that the arrow had pierced and spread it out to look for the wound. He found the blood on the feathers but, when he lifted them carefully to locate the wound itself, it eluded him. He searched the whole area but the bloody feathers were the only sign of injury.
He cleaned the feathers and let the wing retract to its original position.
“Mystery upon mystery,” he muttered to himself. “And what’s your relationship to our chained wizard up there, I wonder?”
It was a cold camp, and a cold meal, after the fire had been extinguished to guard them from discovery.
Before the light faded completely, Zandaril checked all of Penrys’s wounds one last time. He’d been forced to wrap some of the soaked rags around his own wrists where the abrasion from the ropes had rubbed his skin raw. When he looked for similar injuries on her arms, he found no marks. He remembered seeing welts earlier when he’d cut her bonds—what had happened to them?
Lifting the edges of the bandages on her side, he was not entirely surprised to see the wounds had visibly narrowed, with no seepage at all.
“No marks,” she’d said, back in the wagon, weeks ago, when she’d mentioned not having the signs of childbirth on her. “No marks at all.”
He believed her, now. Still, he wasn’t so sure that he wanted to move her, not until she woke from that head wound. He leaned over her, and shook her shoulder lightly. “Hey, there. You can put your wings away.”
She muttered something, and he did it again. “Go ahead, put the wings away.”
Wherever it was they went.
She twitched, and the wings and tail vanished.
A lump in the pocket of her breeches made him curious, and when he investigated he found she was carrying a small stone, like the ones in his shrine. It puzzled him—it was incomplete, the heavy base rounded and unstable. When he supported it in his hand he saw the movement in its form, but the lack of foundation was a defect. Well, a first had-kighat wasn’t always well-identified. Still, she’d been listening to him. How unexpected, for an outsider.
He pulled the blankets from each pack and laid one on the ground as a pad, rolling her from one side to the other to ease her over it. The other blanket and their cloaks went over them both, as he curled up behind her to share his body heat in the chill autumn air.
