Jeffrey Quyle - The Healing Spring

Seconds later he heard footsteps inside, heavy boots striding across the floor inside, then watched the door open and Commander Mastrin appeared, a napkin in his hand as he swung the door inward.

“Kestrel?” he questioned, surprised to see the young elf on his doorstep. “What brings you here? Shouldn’t you be on duty?”

“Sir,” Kestrel began. He knew what his message was, but until the moment he faced the commander he hadn’t practiced putting his thoughts into words. At the moment he finally saw his commander, with his mind increasingly clouded by the pain from his arm, he felt at a loss to explain his reason for appearing there.

“There was a great fire in the forest,” he began, knowing that the fire was the focus of his mission.

“It’s been a pretty clear day here,” Mastrin answered. “Was there a lightning storm we didn’t know about? I can’t imagine a fire starting under a clear sky.

“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.