It was not her nakedness that sent all moisture from his mouth, his heart racing as he observed her. In her effort to preserve what modesty she could, she had taken her long hair and pulled it forward. She was facing away from him so he could not yet make out how efficiently it had seen to its task, but it left her back entirely exposed.
Where milky flesh should have been smooth and enticing, two reddened cords slashed across both shoulder blades, scars that had not healed well. Split in some areas, stretched beyond their limits, others still tightly pulled.
There was no mistaking the area.
It was where her wings should have been.
Clothes utterly forgotten, Grimult took a step toward her. He could not reconcile the urge to touch, to make certain what he saw was truly there, but he acted as if possessed by another entirely.
Perhaps Penryn herself beckoning him forward, wanting him to see, to understand.
He could not know.
Only was certain that an anger had settled in his chest, hot and biting and unlike anything that had been before.
She turned slightly at his approach, her expression quizzical and then dismayed. “I had not meant...” she began, her eyes darting like a some frightened creature that had not realised the trap that had ensnared it.
That was not his aim. He did not want her fear, or her embarrassment. “When you said you were without wings,” he began, his throat terribly dry, as if they had never found the stream at all and he was still parched from their careful rationing. “I thought you had been born without. That it was a part of your nature.”
He saw her throat bob as she swallowed, his hand coming out and settling on one of her scars. She flinched and he immediately withdrew. “Do they hurt?” he asked, his own wings aching in sympathy.
“Not anymore,” she murmured, bowing her head and turning away from him once more. It allowed him to look all he wanted, to see that the marks themselves were even worse than he had initially thought, some portions simply better obscured in patches as tissue faded to white rather than red.
“They tell me I was too young and should not remember the pain at all.” She shook her head firmly. “But I do. And I remember the sound of cutting through bone.”
He should turn her around, should hold her properly, should tell her how sorry he was for all that she had endured. He could not pretend to understand their reasons, why she could not simply be told not to fly as he was, a portion of her life set apart, to walk the path was set apart, the tedium part of the sacrifice made once a generation.
But they had not. They had cut her wings entirely, denied her even the smallest taste of one of their kind’s truest joys.
“Why?” he asked, perhaps to her, or more truly, to himself. “Why would they do this to you?”
Her shoulders hunched further. “They had their reasons,” she answered tightly, her own misery coming through all the same. “Ones that I am not permitted to share with you.”
He wanted to rail against that. To tell her that the sags had forfeited their rights to their secrets when they had resorted to butchery.
“They were not malformed?” he asked, desperately trying to reconcile the awe he had always felt at the more mention of a sage with what was plainly before him. “It was not... not to save you from some malady?”
He could not think of one that might require such an amputation, but he was no doctor. He did not know what healers had to do in other clans, when work was more dangerous and injuries more threatening than simple farm-work.
She did turn then, her jaw set and her eyes flashing. “They were perfect, same as yours. And they took them from me before they could be of any use. And tried to fill my head with why and the good that would come of it, but all I learned was that I hated them. Every one. Because they were liars.” A deep breath that might have been a sob. “How they could stand there and say that they cared for me, that I was the most important thing in their world and yet treat me as they did...” she shook her head. “I know they did not. Not in any way that mattered. That was good and kind and was anything like...” she hesitated, her upset winning out from whatever part meant to temper her tongue. “Like your family,” she finished with a shrug of her shoulders. “I received the privilege of growing up alone. With any ties to my true heritage shorn from my back.”
Wings did not always tell of an ancestry, not unless there was something particularly rare to be sent down through the line. Certain markings, perhaps, the swirls of colours that might be seen in particularly rare families.
Others were plain, stately in their uniformity, Grimult’s not unlike his father’s own pair of dark grey. Lighter perhaps, a testament to his mother, but nothing unremarkable. Lira had the prettiest of the siblings, Grimult had always thought, more silver than grey, “Like my grandmother,” his mother would declare fondly while seeing that each feather was placed exactly as it should be.
What had Penryn’s been before they were taken? He tried to imagine them, but could not. The possibilities were endless, and would only cause his anger to fester on her behalf.
“I am so very sorry,” Grimult gave in answer, finding the words sorely inadequate to express his sorrow. Old habits insisted that the sages must have their reasons, that they were not merely cruel and heartless. But he did not believe that so easily. Not anymore. Only true explanations, a fuller understanding of Penryn’s role might be able to—not excuse—but clarify their purpose.
But he was
