“How did you manage to do this?” he asked quietly, letting the soothing qualities he put into his voice lull her a little more. “This kind of injury doesn’t usually happen all at once; didn’t you notice anything wrong earlier?”
“Well, my back had been bothering me for a while,” she replied with obvious reluctance, “but I never really thought about it. My fami-I’ve always had a little problem with my back, you know how it is, tensions always strike at your weakest point, right?”
“True,” he replied, wondering why she had changed “my family” to “I.” How would revealing a family history of back trouble reveal anything about her? “And your back is your weakest point, I take it?” He thought carefully before asking his next question; he didn’t want to put her more on the defensive than she already was. “I suppose you must have seen how busy all the Healers were, and you decided just to ignore the pain. Not necessarily wise, but certainly considerate of you.”
She grunted, and the skin on the back of her neck reddened a little. “I don’t like to whine about things,” she said. “Especially not things I can’t change. So I kept my mouth shut and drank a lot of willow. Anyway, after the defensive at Polda, one of the Sixth Wing gryphons was brought in with some extensive lacerations to its underbelly, delirious, and when I tried to restrain it, it nearly went berserk.”
Interesting. Resentment there. As if she somehow thought that the gryphon in question had been acting unreasonably.
“Who was it?” Amberdrake asked.
“What are you talking about?” she replied suspiciously.
“Who was the gryphon?” Amberdrake repeated mildly. “I knew about Aubri’s burns, but I didn’t know anything about a Sixth Wing gryphon with lacerations. I was wondering if it was Sheran; if it was, I’m not surprised she reacted badly to being restrained. She was one of the gryphons that Third Wing rescued just before Stelvi Pass. Ma’ar had them all in chains and was going to pinion them. We don’t know what else he did tp them, but we do know they had been tortured in some fairly sophisticated and sadistic ways.”
There. Make her think of the gryphon in question as a personality, and not an “it.” See what that unlocks.
“It could have been,” Winterhart said slowly, as if the notion startled her. “There was a lot of scar tissue I couldn’t account for, and it was a female. . . .”
Amberdrake probed the injury again, before he spoke. “Ma’ar saves some of his worst tortures for the gryphons. Urtho thinks it’s because Ma’ar knows he thinks of them as his children, not as simply his ‘creations.’ “
“I didn’t know that.” Silence for a while, as the flames of the lanterns overhead burned with faint hissing and crackling sounds. “I like animals; I was always good with horses and dogs. That was why I became a Trondi’irn.”
“Gryphons-‘ He started to say, “Gryphons aren’t animals,” then stopped himself just in time.
“I thought gryphons were just animals, like the Kaled’a’in warhorses. I thought they only spoke like the messenger-birds . . . just mimicking without really understanding more than simple orders.” She sighed; the muscles of her back heaved and trembled a little beneath his hands, and he exerted his powers to keep them from going into a full and painful spasm. “I kept telling myself that, but it isn’t true. They aren’t just animals. I hate to see anything in pain, and it’s worse to see something that can think in a state like that gryphon was.”
“Well,” Amberdrake replied, choosing,his words with care, “I’ve always thought it was worse to see an animal in pain than a creature like the hertasi, the gryphons, the kyree, or the tervardi injured. You can’t explain to an animal that you are going to hurt it a little more now to make it feel better later. You can explain those things to a thinking creature, and chances are it will believe you and cooperate. And it has always been worse, for me, to see an animal die-especially one that is attached to you. They’ve come to think of you as a kind of god, and expect you to make everything better-and when you can’t, it’s shattering, to have to betray that trust, even though you can’t avoid it.”
“You sound as if you’ve thought this sort of thing over quite a bit,” she said, her voice sounding rather odd; very, very controlled. Over-controlled, in fact.
“It is my job,” he reminded her with irony. “You would be amazed at the number of people who come to me after a dreadful battle with nightmares of seeing their favorite puppy dying on the battlefield. Part of what I do is to explain to them why they see the puppy, and not the friends they just lost. Only I don’t explain it quite that clinically.”
There wasn’t much she could say to that, so after a few breaths, she returned to the safer topic. “Anyway, I was trying to treat the gryphon, and I’d gotten bent over in quite an odd position to stitch her up without tying her down, when she lashed out at me with both hindlegs. She sent me flying, and I landed badly. I got up, felt a little more pain but not much, and thought I was all right.”
Good. The gryphon has gone from “it” to “she.” That’s progress anyway.
“But the pain kept getting worse instead of better, right?” he probed. “That’s the sign you’ve done something to one of those spinal pads.”
“I think that’s one lesson I’m not likely to forget very soon,” she countered, with irony as heavy as his had been. “But as you said, the Healers were all busy with injuries worse than mine, and I don’t believe in whining about things as trivial as a backache.”
“I would never call telling of extreme pain whining,” was all he said.
She relaxed a little more; minutely, but visible to him.
“This is going to need more than one treatment,” he continued. “If you can bring yourself to resort to a mere kestra’chern, that is.”
The skin of her neck flushed again. “I-you are a better Healer than I am,” she replied, with painful humility. She hadn’t liked admitting that. “If you would be so kind-I know what your fees are for other things-but if you can spare the time-“
“To make certain the Healer of my friends is in the best of health, I would forgo the fee a king would offer for my services,” Amberdrake replied with dignity. “When you are in pain, you can’t do your best work; you know that as well as I do. Skan is not the only gryphon friend I have, and I want my friends to have nothing less than the finest and most competent of care.”
“Ah,” she said weakly. “Ah, thank you.”
He examined the injury again. “I’ve done all I can about this spinal pad right now,” he told her truthfully. “I need to finish that massage, and then you can go. I think you’ll feel some difference.”
“I already do,” she admitted.
He rubbed some fresh scented oil into the palms of his hands to warm it, and started soothing the muscles of her back he had not reached earlier. They had gone into spasms so often they had become as tense and tight as harp-wires, and as knotted as a child’s first spun thread.
She gasped as the first of them released; quivered all over in fact. Amberdrake was quite familiar with that reaction, but evidently she wasn’t.
“Oh!” she exclaimed and tensed again. “I-“
“It’s quite all right, don’t move,” he ordered. “It’s the natural reaction to releasing tensed muscles. Ignore it if you can, and try to enjoy it if you can’t ignore it.”
She didn’t reply to that; interesting. The last commoner he’d made that particular remark to had said, with dangerous irony, “What, like rape?” It was a natural thought for the ordinary soldier, who all too often found him or herself in the position of victim.
But there was no tightening of Winterhart’s neck muscles, no tensing at all to indicate that thought had occurred to her.