First, then, the arm. Working clumsily, one-handed, he untied the frayed old piece of rope he used as a belt and bound the injured limb to his aching side. It was the best he could do to keep it immobilised. Using strips from his torn shirtsleeve, he bandaged the cut in his leg as tightly as he could manage. As for the rest of his hurts - well, they would just have to take care of themselves. Until he could find some water, there was little more he could do for them.
The first difficulty lay in actually getting down from the tree in one piece. He knew he’d do better to wait until the sky grew lighter, but he was afraid that if he tried to stay up there for the rest of the night he would drift off to sleep and fall to the ground. It felt like an awfully long way to climb down, especially with only one arm and an injured leg. He was only able to take shallow breaths, due to the pain that knifed through his ribs with every inhalation. Shaking all over, partly with fear and partly from the reaction to his fall, he began to descend, selecting his route with care. He got stuck a couple of times, in places where there was nothing he could do but scramble and slither and eventually let himself drop, trying to protect his broken arm as best he could and praying that the boughs below would be strong enough to catch him. Somehow, his luck held. He finally made it down. As his feet touched the ground he felt his knees give way, and he slumped, exhausted, against the tree’s massive bole.
When Dael awakened he was aching, chilled to the bone and furious with himself for falling asleep in the open. What if a wild animal had come along? Or worse still, one of the accursed Phaerie? Might-have-beens, however, were the last of his worries. So far, he had been fortunate indeed, but he had a suspicion that his luck had finally run out. His injuries alone were probably enough to condemn him to a lingering, painful death, especially if the cuts and lacerations should fester. Alone in the forest in winter, he was hopelessly ill-equipped to survive. He had no means of making a fire, he didn’t have a cloak or blanket, and his clothing was hopelessly inadequate for the freezing weather. His only way of keeping warm at night would be to heap dead leaves around him. With no tools or weapons apart from his useless knife, he couldn’t hunt animals for food, and there was nothing growing in the forest to eat at this time of year: it was a long way from the nesting season for birds, and there were no mushrooms, nuts or berries.
Dael rubbed his hand across his face. He had tried to keep going, but the odds had been stacked so high against him it was hardly surprising that nothing ever went right. He closed his eyes, sunk in dark despair, too weary and desolate even to weep. What was the point? There was no chance of him living through this mess. Why put himself through any more misery and pain? He had his knife. He might not be able to kill an animal with it, but he could easily open one of his own veins.
The handle of the knife, usually so familiar in shape and texture that he never gave it a moment’s thought, felt different today. The smooth, carved bone seemed alien and heavy in his trembling hand, and the blade gleamed with cold menace in the grey morning light. He tried to find the right place on the wrist of the broken arm - awkwardly, since it was still bound to his side - once again feeling that shock of agony as bone scraped against bone. Pressing the keen edge of the knife against his flesh, he braced himself to slash deeply. How long did it take to bleed to death? Hopefully, it would be over quickly, and then . . .
And then what? Some slaves believed that they would go to some kind of ease-filled paradise - well, Dael would believe that when he saw it. Some were sure that they would be reborn into a better life. But how could such a thing be possible? They would still be humans, wouldn’t they? Still be slaves. Dael had always suspected that such notions could be nothing more than wishful thinking - and that being the case, did he really want to throw away the only life he had? Though it was unlikely that he would find another group of ferals or escapees to help him this close to the Phaerie city, it wasn’t absolutely impossible, was it? His life was all he had. The only thing they had not been able to take from him. How could he throw it away as if it were worthless? The Mages and the Phaerie might think mortals were little more than animals, counting for nothing, but Dael would never let himself sink so low as to believe that. When the Phaerie had cast him so carelessly from the skies, they had believed he would die. Why go out of his way to prove them right? If he ended his life now, they would have won. And he had been through so much already and survived. Why not wait a little longer? After all, he thought bleakly, what was the hurry? He could kill himself any time.
Survival in the forest proved to be even more of an ordeal than Dael had expected: an unending struggle against pain, cold and hunger. Try as he might, dragging himself over the uneven ground with the aid of a staff he had made, he could find nothing to eat. Even animals were few and far between in this cold weather - not that he’d have been able to kill them, even if he had managed to find them. After a fruitless day’s searching, he curled up in the hollow core of a dead tree, taking his roughly made staff, a stout fallen branch, with him as his only means of defence, and shivered through the hours of darkness.
On the second miserable day he was lucky enough to come across a squirrel’s winter cache of nuts, which he smashed open with a rock, devouring the fragments greedily. On the third day, however, he found nothing but the rigid body of a crow lying beneath a tree. It had been dead for so long that even a single mouthful of the raw and stinking flesh made him too sick even to attempt any more.
That was the day it started to snow. When he’d awakened that morning, he had felt colder than ever, and there had been a thin sprinkling of white over his leaf-pile. Later, as the day drew on towards evening, the snow began to fall in earnest, filling the air with fat, swirling white flakes as he staggered onward, growing colder and weaker with every hour that passed.
As dusk was deepening the shadows, he stumbled across the settlement. He emerged into a clearing to see a cluster of rough shelters: vague shapes in the swirling snow, much like the one from which he had been banished. Dael’s heart leapt. Another colony of humans. These folk didn’t know he had been cast out. Surely they would help him. With a cry of joy he lurched forward across the rough, hummocky ground of the clearing. As if in answer to his cry, lights appeared as people bearing torches emerged from the doorways of the dwellings, and a group of men, women and children stepped out to greet him.
All at once, Dael knew that something was very wrong. Surely he should be able to smell the smoke from the settlement’s fires? And why were these people approaching in such eerie silence? Surely they should be calling to him, asking him who he was, speaking to one another, making some sound?
Just as the moon rose above the trees, a swirl of snowflakes blew across the clearing and obliterated the figures. Dael’s feet caught on one of the hummocks and he went down hard, screaming with agony as he jarred his broken arm. Measuring his length in the snow, he came face to face with a little girl. She lay sprawled on the frozen ground with her skewed limbs half-buried, her ice-encrusted skin the same colour as the drifting snow. She seemed to be looking up into the sky - save that one eye had been picked out by the crows, and the other was obliterated completely, for the entire left side of her face had been sheared away by what looked like one enormous bite.