Chapter 2
The fire crackled to life in the stone fireplace and the girl carried a flame over to the lamp on the table. As the light illuminated the tiny space in her cabin she collapsed into her only chair and closed her eyes. The man lay on her bed in the corner of the room, his body awkwardly propped up to prevent further damage to his wings.
"Male," she said aloud. Fae are male and female. Not men and women. Technically, he could still be female, she thought. She hadn't done a thorough investigation just yet. "But he sure is heavy enough to be male," she said to no one.
She looked at him again and inhaled deeply, then let it out in a whoosh. She stood and nervously wiped her hands on her shirt while she approached the bed. The girl leaned over and carefully unbuckled the leathers searching for ties under the thick plates. She slid them off delicately, taking extra care with the beautiful jewels embedded in them. The cobalt stones shone in the firelight feeling raw and angry in her hands. She quickly put them aside, subconsciously distancing herself from their energy. She pulled back what was left of his shirt revealing a finely toned chest with a deep gash across it. The gash had clotted but was full of dirt and would need to be reopened and washed out.
She stepped back to look at the big picture and dropped the ragged shirt on the floor. The cut could wait; the leg was a bigger problem.
She untied the buckle to his pants and worked them off carefully. "Small mercies…" she muttered. The movement would have been agonising had he been awake. Even unconscious he jerked and pulled away from the abuse. The male flinched and groaned as she lifted the leg to pull off the pants. The girl placed her hands on the leg feeling for the bones and breaks. He groaned and tried to move away.
The girl stepped back again and bit her lip, then walked to the far wall of the cabin, where a bookshelf stretched from floor to ceiling. Books of every shape and size lined the shelves, their covers marked with letters and colours from centuries of writing. She ran her fingers along them slowly, as though she knew their content just from the feel of the spine. It was like she entered into a bit of a trance, not even reading the titles but just waiting for the book to speak to her. When her fingers stopped on a book, she smiled to herself and let out a small sigh of relief. She pulled it off the shelf and began flipping the pages quickly as she walked to the table and turned up the lamp. With no hesitation she found the exact spot in the book that outlined the human skeleton. The book was written by human healers, exploring the structure and make-up of muscles, bones, blood vessels, and internal organs. She had it memorised but wanted to bring up the drawing to be sure. Particularly since the leg she was looking at wasn't exactly human. But aside from the wings, everything else looked the same, on the outside at least.
She bit her lip and muttered to herself, "But different back muscles...to power the wings. And the lungs would have to work differently...and the heart..to provide enough air and blood…" her voice trailed off as she thought through the biomechanics of what it would take to keep his hulking mass in the air. The male moaned under his breath and twisted his head. The sound snapped her out of her musings and brought her back to the pressing problem: the shattered leg.
She put the book down on the table and approached the bed. It was clear the bones had shifted and were cutting off proper circulation to the lower part of the leg. If she didn't set it soon, the muscle would would die from lack of blood. He would lose his leg if she didn't restored the blood flow. He would lose his life if he lost his limb, because she didn't think she could cut if off cleanly with an axe. Actually...maybe she could cut it off. She eyed the axe by the door. A well placed shot below a tourniquet would be less painful than what she needed to do to set the bones. She shook the thought from her head.
"Don't be ridiculous," she said to herself. "What if he needs his legs to take off?"
She didn't want to think of the wings yet. They had to wait. She turned back to the bed and squared her shoulders.
The snow continued to fall as the girl patched up the broken fae in her tiny cabin. Light and Dark had come and gone several times before her exhaustion began to take over. She had used a pulley and rope to create enough traction to pull the bones together, but she had only her touch to know if it had worked. She wouldn't be able to tell until the swelling went down and allowed her a more precise feel. When Light returned again she went out to collect some straight branches and peeled them smooth. She tore up the remnants of his shirt to use as bandages and created a splint to hold the leg in place in case he should jerk suddenly. She tested the nail bed of his toes, squeezing them to see how quickly the colour returned. Eventually the limb began to pink up, telling her that blood flow had been restored.
She boiled water over the fire and took a cloth to wipe off the dirt and blood that coated his body. She sterilised some cloths in the boiling water and when they were cool used them to wipe out the deeper wounds. She might have to stitch the gash across his chest. She had a book for that. But really what she was doing was procrastinating from dealing with the wings. She had no books on the anatomy of human wings. Fae wings, she corrected herself. He was fae. Or maybe they could be human wings. Could humans have wings? She wondered. Birds have wings. Insects have wings. Bats have wings.
Bats.
The wings looked like the wings of a bat. They came out of his back on a long bone, then fanned out in fingers. A thumb-like claw stuck out the top. The girl racked her memory for a book about bat anatomy. None came to mind, but she remembered a drawing of a bat's wing outstretched highlighting its ability to take flight.
Her hands paused from cleaning the fae's body and she stared hard at the wings. She slowly reached over and gently pulled the wing out from his body. The thin membrane of skin was in shreds and several 'fingers' were visibly out of place.
"Doesn't matter if they are bat wings. The bones should be straight and the skin must attach in order to heal," she affirmed to herself. He needs to fly. Had has to. To save them both.
