“Pull yourself tighter! I can’t keep this tourniquet on much longer!” Elster’s tense words were like a drench of icy water in his face. “Help me lift her, “ she muttered. “We must do our moving and manipulating while she’s senseless.”
The physician’s voice was all brisk business, but one glance at her set, gray-tinged face told Cygnus that Elser really needed to go straight to the window and vomit.
To the relief of the young physician, the girl made no sound as they moved her to the bed. “Cover he as well as you can,” Elser muttered, frowning at the injured arm. “Shock and blood loss are our chief foes – she must be kept warm.”
She gestured at the small brazier that she used to boil water for her needles and blades. “Stoke that as best you can—it won’t put out much heat, but.” She probed at Raven’s ragged wound. “Normally, I’d let you deal with this, but she made a dreadful mess of these veins, and time is of the essence.”
Cygnus straightened up from feeding wood into the tiny stove, his eyes wide with horror. “She tired to take her own life?”
“What do you think? Elser was flushing out the wound with a cleansing infusion. “Look what those brutes have done to her wings!” Her hands always been the steady hands of a master and a surgeon. Cygnus had never seen them shake before. Elster took a deep breath. “Besides, she is not the Princess, but the Queen—and we’d do well to bear that in mind as we work!” she added waspishly. Like a true master, Elster had herself back under control. Cygnus wished he could have the same for himself.
“Now..” Elster muttered, bending low over Raven’s arm. “Cygnus, will you be so good as to start cleaning up those wings before the poor girl wakes? Take the greatest care to piece tighter all that remains – the Queen may never fly again, but cast me from top of Yinze’s temple if I’ll amputate! The poor child has been mutilated enough…”
Cygnus could bear no more. The thought of one of the Skyfolk—the very Queen—bearing two mangled stumps instead of her wings was enough to finish him. At least he made it to the window before he started vomiting.
“Come on, boy! Are you a physician or not?” Elster barked.
Cygnus made a superhuman effort to pull himself together—and succeeded. He took a long swig from the Master’s waterskin, poured some of the cleansing infusion into a bowl to wash his hands—and bent grimly to the grisly, painstaking work of piecing together Raven’s shattered wings.
“Well done, boy! I couldn’t have done a neater job myself!”
Cygnus blinked, wiped sweat from his brow, and looked up—or tried to. His neck and back seemed to have frozen in position. Someone had filled his eyes with boiling sand, and his aching fingers were rigid with cramp. A host of candles and small oil lamps were burning around him, their twinkling flames dancing in the gloom of a room gone dark, and outside the window, the sky was the rich and vivid blue of almost-night. Then, with a jolt of shock, he realized that it was not dusk, but dawn!
The crack of his bones as he stretched was like the snapping of kindling. Elster, red-eyed and haggard of face, was beaming at him, and gesturing at the wing that was stretched out before him, Cygnus looked at it, shaking his head in disbelief—and suddenly his weariness was forced aside by an expanding glow of pride and satisfaction. Father of Skies, he marveled. Did I really do that? What had been a mangled mass of bloody feathers and bone looked like a wing again; the major skeletal framework was firmly splinted; the fragile bones that supported the structure of the pinions were pieced together like a fledgling’s puzzle and held in position by an intricate framework of slender spills of wood—the lightest he could devise. Damaged muscle and torn skin had been stretched back into place and secured with hundreds of tiny stitches.
The wing looked like a wing again—almost. Cygnus, thinking back over his handiwork, remembered bones chipped and splintered beyond repair, and pieces never found. Slippery curls of tendon that could not be reattached and muscles that would be forever weak—if they worked at all. Whether circulation had been restored to the wings through the damaged vessels, only time would tell. Even now, his painstaking work might still have gone for naught. Cygnus felt his glow of satisfaction turn to ash within him, and turned away with an oath. “What difference does it make in the end?” he said bitterly. “She will never fly again.”
Elster, who had been completing a similar miracle of restoration on the other wing, sighed. “That’s right,” she said mildly. “We might as well have saved our time and just hacked the useless things off in the first place! The Queen is crippled already—what difference will it make to her if she is deformed besides?”
Cygnus felt his face grow hot with shame. “I never thought of that,” he confessed.
Elster raised an eyebrow “Ah, but that is why I am the Master and you are not. There are two things that the true physician must never be without. Skill—and compassion. Always compassion,” Cygnus nodded, accepting the wisdom of Elster’s words. “But Master,” he continued meekly, “what will happen when she wakes and discovers the truth?”
Elster ran a distracted hand through her black and white streaked hair, and gestured bleakly at the bandage on Raven’s arm. “You think she does not know already?”
Cygnus nodded. “I guessed as much, All the time I was working on that wing, I was thinking: What if it were me? And I knew then, that in the Queen’s position, denied the skies forever, I would have no desire to live. And it seemed to me that to save her life, I had to fix that wing so that it could be used again, or it was all in vain.”
The Master put an arm around his shoulders. “I know,” she said gently. “I watched you, as I worked—laboring on those tiny fragments with such determination on your face—and I bled inside for the grief that you must face. But all physicians, soon or late, come to this pass, where the best they can do will not suffice. My boy, only Yinze himself could make her fly again. It would have been kinder by far to have simply let her die where she lay, as she most surely wished. But she may not.” Her voice grew hard, “Now that Flamewing is dead, that frail, crippled little girl is the Queen—and she will be needed, if—” With a gasp, she caught herself up quickly. “If our folk are to have a ruler. Unfortunately, someone must make her see that—and the task will fall to us.”
Cygnus opened his mouth, but after the murder of Flamewing and the mutilation of her daughter, he could find nothing to say. Though he had been acting under Blacktalon’s orders, Flamewing’s blood was on his own hands. It was entirely due to his actions that Raven must live as she was: motherless, crippled—and Queen.
Suddenly the sight of Raven’s mutilated body vanished behind a blur of tears. Cygnus buried his face in shaking hands, “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Oh Gods, I’m sorry!”
“So you should be sorry—but that isn’t good enough,” Elster told him astringently. “Yinze only knows what possessed you, Cygnus. You, a healer—my most talented pupil—to become involved in such evil! Why, with such skill at your disposal, did you turn to destroying, instead of healing?”
Like floodgates bursting, it all came pouring out of Cygnus—his doubts, his despair, his feelings of inadequacy when the evil winter struck down his people. “You say I have skill,” he cried bitterly, “but had I been any use at all, I could have saved them! I failed them, Elster—I failed my people when they needed me! And if my way—the way that you taught me—was no good, then what was left? I was so desperate to accomplish something, and Blacktalon seemed to hold out the only hope!”
Cygnus looked into Elster’s eyes, and saw tears glinting faintly in the drear dawn light. “Oh, you poor fool,” she whispered. “Poor blind young fool. Why did you not talk to me, and share your doubts? My dear boy, there is not a healer in the whole of history that has not entertained such dark thoughts at one time or another!” She shook her head. “There are ills and evils in this world that we cannot heal, for all our wishing—but that is no reason to adopt them!”