“I can believe you had some rain out your way though. We’ve seen that the streams from your sector have risen pretty fast – been flooding out a few ground-dwelling cabins as a matter of fact; hard to imagine a fire with all the rain that must have fallen. Did it get too wet for you to stay on duty?
“What happened? Did you slip and fall out of your tree? That’s a nasty injury – go see the doctor and have it taken care of, then come see me first thing tomorrow morning. We’ll discuss your absence from your post then,” Mastrin told Kestrel, as they both heard the sound of light footsteps behind the commander.
Cheryl appeared, her face looking over her father’s shoulder. Her quizzical expression changed to one of pleasant recognition, and she raised her left hand, the hand closest to the heart, the gesture used by elves to greet those they felt closest to.
Kestrel instinctively tried to raise his own left hand in response, pleased by Cheryl’s use of her heart-hand to greet him in the presence of her father.
Just the very beginning of the sudden movement on his part made the broken bone ends in his arm grate against one another, and he momentarily saw a red haze of pain in front of his eyes. He clutched the arm against him with his right arm, and felt embarrassed as he realized a moan of pain had escaped his lips.
“Daddy, he’s hurt!” Cheryl gasped sorrowfully. “Have someone take care of him!”
“I’ve just told him to go see the doctor,” her father said patiently. “You go back to the table and I’ll join you in a bit,” he dismissed his daughter, who dutifully turned and left, with a last glance over her shoulder at Kestrel and a wave of her fingertips.
“Get on to the doctor, and come see me first thing tomorrow,” Mastrin repeated, then he closed the door and left Kestrel alone on the porch.
The weary elf turned and gingerly descended the stairs down from the porch, each step jarring his worsening arm, and his fatigued journey to the doctor’s office took twice as long as usual. When he arrived at the office, the doctor was absent, eating dinner, but a nurse let him lie down on a bed in an examination room after wrapping the injured arm tightly against his chest to reduce the possibility of further movement.
The doctor returned an hour later, just after sunset, and came into Kestrel’s room smelling of ale.
“You did a number on this,” he murmured as he bent over Kestrel and look at the injury. “You should have come seen me right away. Look how swollen this is; you must have waited hours to have it treated.”
“I was out by the red stag’s woods when I fell, and I had to return to town,” Kestrel explained.
“You must have had quite a little bit of rain up there,” the doctor said conversationally as he unwrapped the bindings to look at the arm more closely. “The streams are way out of their banks.”
“Here,” he turned and pulled a dark brown glass flask off a shelf, and poured some liquid into a wooden cup. “Drink this, all of it, in one gulp,” the doctor told Kestrel as he handed him the cup, and turned away to pull something else out of a cabinet.
Kestrel couldn’t see what color the liquid was inside the dark cup, but he dutifully held it to his lips and started to swallow, then felt the burning pain in his throat and coughed energetically, setting the half-full cup down, while he tried to clear his throat and catch his breath.
“I said swallow the whole thing,” the doctor said, then turned and looked at him speculatively. “I forgot you’ve got some human blood; it may affect you a little differently that the rest of us.”
“What is it?” Kestrel asked.
“It’s whiskey. It helps kill pain. It does a little more than that for humans though, the way chairstem weed affects us,” the doctor answered. He picked up the cup and handed it back to Kestrel. “Go on, finish it – drink down the whole thing.”
Kestrel looked at the cup in his hand. His throat burned, and his head already felt touched with a feeling of lightness. “Are you sure this is worse than the broken arm?” he asked.
“Drink it,” the doctor gruffly ordered, and with a deep breath, Kestrel obediently swallowed the rest of the whiskey, then gagged for several seconds.
“Now lie back down,” the doctor told him, and he began to attach straps to the sides of the cot Kestrel lay on. The boy felt dizzy and closed his eyes as his head and his stomach reacted to the alcohol in his system.
“Nurse,” the doctor called, and the man from the front office cheerily came into the room with them. “Help me strap him down, and give him that leather bit,” the doctor said.
“What are you going to do?” Kestrel opened his eyes and asked as he felt the straps tightened across his legs and his chest.
“I’m going to have to reset your arm. It’s going to hurt – a lot,” the doctor said. “These straps will keep you from flailing around.”
Another strap went across his forehead, and then one held his good right arm in place beside his body. The doctor and nurse were proceeding with rapid, practiced efficiency.
“Here. Bite down on this when he starts,” the nurse said, and placed a toughened piece of leather between his teeth.
Kestrel was dazed by the alcohol and by the rapidity with which the two men were working around him, treating him as a commodity to be processed in an efficient manner. They tightened the last strap, so that only his left arm was free.
The doctor laid hold of the injured arm with a gentleness that was a dramatic change from the previous handling Kestrel had encountered, and slowly raised it into the air. Kestrel looked up at it with his blurry vision and saw for the first time that a frame of some kind had been attached to the ceiling overhead. A strap from the frame hung loose, and the doctor looped it around his patient’s wrist. He looked down at Kestrel. “We’re going to start in a moment; do you want one more shot of the whiskey?”
Kestrel shook his head no, and suddenly felt a stomach-churning wave of pain engulf him as the doctor tightened the strap and yanked hard on his arm. Kestrel felt the bone-ends grate against one another, and he distantly heard the nurse urging him to bite down on the leather bit. There was a sound, an inhuman moan that was rolling out of his own throat, he realized, as the pain continued. Then there was another sudden jolt in his arm, and the pain began to subside.
Kestrel blinked away the tears in his eyes and looked up at his arm overhead. The doctor was bandaging a pair of splints to his forearm, he realized.
“You’ve been a brave fellow,” the nurse said consolingly. “It’s all done already, just like that.” The nurse’s hand fumbled at Kestrel’s mouth for a moment, then removed the bit and threw it aside.
The doctor continued to wrap bandages. “That was very smooth. We seldom get a setting as perfect as that! You shouldn’t have any problems once the bones knit back together; there’ll just be a bump, but nothing that will affect your use of the arm. It may even be stronger in a few days after it grows together!” He finished his bandaging, as the nurse began to remove the straps across Kestrel’s body, and then they lowered the arm, and placed it in a sling, which they strapped against his chest.
“Here you go. Head home, and sleep on your back the next few nights,” the doctor said, as the nurse left the room to return to his desk out front. “With that human blood you may not heal as quickly as a normal elf – it may take you an extra week or more to finish. Chew on this to relieve your pain in the morning,” he added as he handed Kestrel a small bag of herbs.
“You may have a headache from the whiskey,” he told Kestrel. “Don’t get used to drinking that if you can avoid it. You’ll be much better off.” He placed a hand beneath Kestrel’s right arm. “Are you ready to go, or would you like to collect your wits here?”
“I’ll go now,” Kestrel mumbled indistinctly, still disoriented by the whole experience. He stood on wobbly legs, then tottered out the door. “Thanks, doc,” he turned to say, then wandered down the hall and out of the office, back into the clear, crisp air under the dark sky.
Chapter 4 – Rep
ort to the Commander
Kestrel walked cautiously through the dark streets, trying to maintain his balance as he kept placing one foot in front of the other, his focus diminished by both the pain and the whiskey. There were other people on the street, and he studiously avoid bumping into them, as all of them navigated effortlessly, their elven ability to see in the dark enabling them to go about their way at night, one of the many reasons the humans seldom made serious efforts to militarily invade the forest homes of the elves.
Kestrel arrived at his home after only a short walk. It was his town home, an apartment with two rooms on the undesirable ground floor of a building in town. Elves preferred elevated locations – homes on upper floors were highly preferable, and when Kestrel returned to what he thought of as his real home, he would go to the grove of hickory trees not far from the red stag woods, where he had a small shelter constructed in the upper branches of a large tree, as was typical of most elves.
Once inside his featureless town apartment he removed his shoes and unbuckled his belt, then laid down on his mattress, lying in the uncomfortable and unusual position of face upward, and quickly fell into a light sleep, but seldom slept well during the night; he often began to roll onto his side, only to experience intense pain that abruptly brought him back to a state of consciousness. The cycle repeated itself uncomfortably several times throughout the night as he sought to revert to his natural sleeping position, and by the time dawn’s first light began to noticeably brighten the bedroom’s interior, he was exhausted from the poor sleep.
Kestrel groggily sat up, his eyes more closed than open, and tried to motivate himself to get out of bed. Once he swung his feet to land on the floor, he managed to stand up, and thereafter he awkwardly cleaned himself up, ate a stale slice of bread for breakfast, then ambled back through Elmheng’s rustic provincial streets to the commander’s office. Elmheng was the administrative center of the elves’ dominion in the western portion of the Eastern Forest that abutted Hydrotaz and the Water Mountains to the north, a lightly populated region, where little excitement typically shook the daily order.
An invasion by the men of Hydrotaz was a strange bolt of surprising excitement however, and even though he had been excluded from it, Kestrel was as eager to learn about the situation at that battle as he was to report on his own activity the day before.
At the front door of the commander’s building he reported to an orderly, who sent him to wait in a lobby with a few other members of the forest guard. One was called into Mastrin’s office, then several minutes later another was, while additional junior members of the guard came and sat down as well, each waiting for their turn to talk to the commanding officer. Kestrel was the third person to enter the office from the lobby.
Inside he found Mastrin and a junior officer who seemed to be present mainly to take notes. “Well now Kestrel, looks like the doc put some serious time in to fix you up,” Mastrin said as Kestrel stood at attention before him, until the commander released him.
“Tell me what brought you back from the western boundary yesterday,” Mastrin advised him.
“I was on station in the late morning, when I noticed a large amount of dark smoke coming from a spot in the forest not far from where I sat,” Kestrel explained.
“There were no clouds in the sky or any lightening or any reasonable cause of such a fire,” he added, anticipating the question about to be asked, as the aide’s pen scribbled notes on a piece of paper.
“How is the battle going down south?” he interrupted himself suddenly, no longer able to bottle up his curiosity.
“There wasn’t really much of a battle,” Mastrin answered conversationally, much to Kestrel’s relief; he had feared he would be told to stick to his own story. “The humans started early in the morning with a lot of noise and an advance along a wide front. They caught our attention obviously. But they moved slowly and cautiously, didn’t penetrate deeply, only cut down a tree or two, then slowly moved around like they were shifting positions, before they withdrew by late morning.
“It makes me think it was just a feint to distract us from something else, which is why I’m interested in hearing your story. Please proceed,” the commander said as his aide sat patiently.
“The smoke was thick, and I judged it to be a pretty bad fire. I felt that it needed to be put out right away, immediately,” he emphasized, “before it started burning up a big chunk of woodland, so I started to pray,” he hesitated for just a second, knowing that he was about to remind everyone of his mixed ancestry, “to the human goddess Kai, and asked for her help to douse the flames.”
He took a deep breath, as the pen continued to scratch for a few more minutes, then paused. Kestrel knew that there was a general suspicion that he could pray to the human deities, but no one knew that he could ask for and receive such direct interdiction – he hadn’t known it himself. It was almost as if he had the power of a human priest, and he knew that more suspicions were going to be raised against him than praises would be sung for what he had just achieved on behalf of the elves.
“And soon after that, a big rain storm came. I had climbed down out of my tree and was running through the woods towards the fire to check on it when the skies just opened up and dumped water like a river was falling,” he noticed that both Mastrin and the aide were looking at him, and the pen was frozen in immobility.
“Just like that, the goddess answered your prayer?” Mastrin asked.
“Yes sir,” Kestrel answered.
“Did you make any sacrifice or promise?” his commander pressed him.
“No sir; maybe yes sir,” Kestrel answered, recollecting the goddess’s promise to collect payment from him in the future.
“Which is it? What did you give her?” the aide blurted out, drawing a sharp look from Mastrin. The junior officer looked down and began to take notes suddenly.
“I didn’t promise anything, but the goddess said I would owe her,” Kestrel explained.
“Not the conversation I expected, and certainly worthy of some theological discussion by the wise ones, I’m sure, but probably this isn’t relevant to the military matters at hand,” Mastrin said. He paused, and seemed to be judging Kestrel as he silently looked at his young guardsman. “This probably doesn’t need to be in the record; strike it and keep the notes clean,” he directed the aide. There was a flurry of scratching on the aide’s pad.
“So go on with your story about the fire,” the commander redirected his attention to Kestrel.
“I slipped in the mud as I was running, and landed on my arm, but I got up and continued to the edge of the fire scene. By then the rain was ending, and the fire seemed to be out.
“It was contained to a couple of hundred acres, but the forest is intact on all sides of it,” Kestrel finished. “I decided I should return and report, but all the flooding made me have to detour, so I was late getting back last night, sir,” he concluded his report and stood at attention as the pen continued to scratch for another few seconds.
“It seems to me that there may be some connection between this fire and the invasion. Was that your thought too?” Mastrin asked.
“I wondered sir; there didn’t seem to be any natural explanation for the start of the fire, and then from what you said about the action in the south, there really wasn’t any good reason for it,” Kestrel replied. “And I apologize for leaving the forest unprotected. I can resume my spot immediately if you want me to.”
“Not with that wing,” the commander told him. “Nothing to apologize for; I think you did right. I’ve already redistributed the guards to patrol the forest, so you can plan to stay here a day or two to heal up. Did the doctor tell you how long you’d need?”
“He said that my human blood might make me heal slowly; it may take a fortnight,” Kestrel said, dragging his nasty heritage out into the conversation again.
“I suppose it might; he’d know better than I would,” Mastrin agreed; he knew about Kestrel’s human heritage, and felt a
slight uneasiness about it, but he knew that Kestrel had been a reliable and effective member of his guard unit, especially in the case of the fire, and he knew that the boy seemed to have a healthy friendship with his daughter, one that Mastrin was willing to tolerate and observe for the time being.
“Tell you what – you go on over to let Cheryl see you to know you’re alive and taken care of, and that I’m not a human brute who has slaughtered you, then just be available the next few days. We should get a report back this afternoon from the patrol out looking at your fire spot, so you may want to hear their report later today,” Mastrin spoke in a casual manner that Kestrel suspected hid some machinations.
“We’ll write up a report after we hear the patrol’s information,” the commander told his aide. “Go along Kestrel, you’re dismissed,” he motioned towards a door, and the young elf left the room hurriedly, relieved at the lack of any reprimand or punishment. And then he forgot about all that and began to look forward to seeing Cheryl.
Chapter 5 – Cheryl’s House
His timing was going to be perfect, Kestrel concluded as he walked through town to the commander’s home. It was late morning; by the time he sat down and saw Cheryl, it would be almost lunch time, and her mother, always a perfect hostess, would invite him to join them for a meal, so he would get more time with Cheryl at the table.
He soon arrived at the high-positioned porch, the height that reflected the elves’ desire to be up off the ground – in the trees, or in something that could approximate a tree’s height if at all possible – and knocked on the door.
Footsteps sounded inside, and Cheryl’s younger sister Crozanna answered the door. Her eyes widened at the sight of the sling that cradled his arm. “Were you hurt in the battle yesterday?” she asked earnestly.
“No,” Kestrel said with a sigh, “I fell in the mud.”
The Inner Seas Kingdoms: 01 - The Healing Spring Page 3
