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 — Report 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.
