He clenched his jaw and did not look down. "That is not why you are here. I do not care about those chickens or what you were doing in the city a few weeks ago. I am not going to-"
She spotted a figure, a Hawk, standing still beside one of the many doors, watching them approach. Could he stop his king? Her crimes could not have been so bad that she did not deserve a fair trial. Were Ferals allowed such things? "Please help me! Help me! He is going to kill me! Do something!"
He looked to her and bowed slightly to Bain, who nodded, and moved to open the door, eliciting a small tinkle from an overhead bell. Behind the door was a spotlessly clean room, the floor was made of big gray tiles in perfect lines and there were all sorts of boxes on the walls with their own doors. In the center of the space was a padded table with a white sheet over it, a sacrificial altar, and chairs against the wall so others could watch. The desperation she felt numbed all the pain in her shoulder.
"No!" She screamed hoarsely and bucked with all of her strength, breaking free of his arms for the briefest moment before she felt the hands of the guard grabbing her around her middle. The wolfskin fell to the floor and her shirt began to roll down.
"Be careful," Bain warned him.
Another male rushed into the room to help, and Sorren froze when their eyes met. He, too, was a Feral. Relief filled her and she waited for him to attack the Hawk and Peregrine, but instead, he looked down at the blood dripping on the floor and rushed to one of the wall boxes. He quickly pulled out and slipped on a pair of gloves.
"Help me!" She cried out to him, but he continued to pull jars from other doors.
She realized they were almost to the altar, covered in smooth animal skin and supported by a single column, and twisted away as hard as she could. Sorren elbowed the guard in the temple, but Bain quickly grabbed her wrist and pulled her back against his chest, securing her tightly. Sorren could hardly see through the tears and her hair, flying madly about.
"Lay her here," the doctor said, pointing to the table. He rushed over to a cabinet and pulled out a thin tube with a straight wire sticking out of it. She had never seen something like that, but when he depressed the plunger and a few drops sprayed from the end of the wire, she knew that it was meant to be stuck into her skin to deliver some fatal poison just like the darts.
Kicking the guard in the stomach the moment he stood up, knocked him off balance, buying her a second to try to push the table over, too.
Bain shifted her other wrist into his big hand, so he had them both and then reached around her hips. As if she were a giant fish, Bain whipped her up and laid her on the table with a thud, ignoring her cry of pain.
"What did you do to her, Bain?" Asio asked him.
Bain shouted when she bit his forearm and tore it away from her mouth, pressing his shoulder mercilessly into her lower back as Asio rushed back over. Sorren felt the doctor hover over her skin as if looking for the perfect spot before he stabbed her with the wire, making her shriek in fear. It was truly over, just like her nightmare had foretold!
Bain waited a few seconds before slowly easing himself off of her. Sorren shoved him away and hopped to her feet on the table with her hands out before her. She could leap in any direction if they tried to rush back in. She hated the way they watched her, counting how many breaths she had left. Her pained gaze met the liquid silver stare of the king to be, conveying so much to him unintentionally. Distrust, hatred, and a tangible sense of betrayal hit him square in the chest, though he gave nothing away except concern that she might try to jump from the table and hurt herself.
After the battles they had fought in together, some small part of her had actually believed that he would have let her be, or at least tried to make her his female. Sorren had put too much stock in him to think that he would not kill her for something so trivial. It was foolish of her to imagine that Peregrines were anything other than soulless brutes.
Her limbs suddenly became heavier than rocks, knees touching the table as if they had chosen to act on their own, followed by a palm. The muscles worked and then did not, like her connection to them had been broken. She watched helplessly as her arm buckled. Never before had she been unable to control her own body except from fatigue after a hard day of work.
Shaking with the effort to stay awake, to fight the poison, Sorren realized that there was no way out. Not this time. Bain's hand slipped under the side of her face, cupping the back of her head, as she sank down onto her right side. He carefully lowered her skull to the cloth for her. She could not even command herself to flinch away, to escape his touch, even though it scalded her.
"Go," Bain muttered to the puffing Hawk. With a short bow, he straightened his attire and closed the door behind him, leaving only the three of them.
"This is it," she thought, the tears finally escaping and tickling her cheeks. "I am dying...dying in the Peregrine's city. What will Bear think?"
"I shot her," Bain answered his friend, clenching his jaw. He watched her eyes roll back under her lashes and put his hand in his pocket, rubbing his fingers together to rid himself of tingling he felt from touching her. "We made our move, our last chance to do it, and she was getting away. I shot my arrows out to either side of her, but she banked and the arrow was already loosed."
Asio could tell he felt quite badly about the accident. He brushed Sorren's hair over her right shoulder and positioned her wing across his hip. All of the struggling had made the wound bleed again and he carefully dabbed at it with a cloth, opening the sides with his fingers to assess the depth and severity.
"This was yesterday," Bain continued, plopping into a chair without looking away from the wounded female. "I did not know that I had hit her. We searched the rest of the day for her, but when I found the arrow, we knew it was serious. We still had not retrieved her by nightfall and were sitting around camp when she caused a distraction and shot the lot of us with...er...Rutiger said it was frog poison, I think. I thought she was killing me, but I was just happy to see that she was alive. By morning, though, we thought that she was surely dead from the wound, it looked like the arrow had gone through her heart, and went about searching for her body. That was when we found her washing up and grabbed her."
Asio nodded. He wheeled over an IV drip and started her on fluids. He pulled the cap of the needle from his lips. "She helped herself some. I imagine she would have found some way to close it, too. Ferals are very creative. I saw one using ant heads as staples." He paused to wash the cut on her back and rinsed it before he began to stitch the sides together with a thin black string. Each stitch looked like a little bug in itself. "Was the arrow broken when you found it?"
Bain shook his head.
"She pulled it out herself. Strong little thing. It had to have hurt. But it is good that the arrow came out intact. That means I won't need to make the wound any bigger searching for splinters. I will stitch up what I can inside and wait for it to heal before I completely stitch the outer layers. We don't want an abscess. She will need antibiotics and I will also give you painkillers among other things. You must watch for a negative response and tell me if anything changes. I assume that you will not want to transport her here every few days for me to check its improvement?"
Bain rubbed his head. "I think that would be difficult, bordering on disastrous."
Asio grinned, his lips unable to stay together. He made sure the neat row of stitches was clean before he wrapped the area in a light cotton dressing and covered that with a long roll of bandaging, winding it up over her shoulder, around her wing joint and back the way it had come before dipping down under her arm in a figure eight movement. "It is no problem. I will come to you. She will have trouble adjusting to her dressings, no doubt. Just like any wild animal, the sling and wraps will be foreign to her and she will try to take them off, though you must prevent this. The shoulder needs to remain in place. For the wound to heal, she will need bed rest and she should not move her wings if at all possible. Flying is out of the question, of course, but I will clip her wings for-"
"What? Clip her wings?" Bain frowned, his brows pulling together.
"Yes. Ferals, as you now know, are good at escaping. I know that you intend to keep her within your quarters for the immediate future, but if you are coerced into taking her outside or to meet your friends in their apartments, she will seize the opportunity to be rid of you." Asio finished writing out his calculations and checked the fluid rate before finding his worn stool. "Forgive me, my lord, I am not trying to be negative in any way. Most Peregrines have their Feral's wings clipped, if only for the first few years or until they have a child, so they cannot fly away the first chance they get."
"Oh," Bain said, somewhat uncomfortable. He looked at his own dark wings and tried to imagine the feathers chopped in half. "Does it hurt?"
"Not at all," Asio assured him, pulling out a short pair of scissors, rounded at the end. He looked to his friend for approval. Bain pressed his lips tightly together and decided that it was for the best, to keep his female grounded, at the very least so that she could heal. He nodded once, watching as the doctor clipped across the primaries, leaving all else intact. Asio swept the ends of the feathers into a dustpan and threw them away.
Asio waved Bain over as he put his hands under her stomach and neck. "Help me flip her over, will you?"
Bain hopped up and as Asio lifted, he moved her wings beneath her and rolled her towards him. Asio lifted her arm as it fell from the table so that the stitches would not tear, and bent it to a right angle, putting her forearm over her stomach. Bain was left to catch her head, his fingers slipping into her soft hair. She looked so sad as she slept, as though she were still in pain, and he could not help but wipe away the tears on her cool skin.
He was hit with a small pang of guilt at the thought that he had caused all of it and put her head down slowly, pulling his hands away and clasping them behind his back as he straightened his shoulders. It was the posture he had been taught in training, stiff and composed. It did not feel right to see her in such a state. He wanted so many things of her, too many.
When he looked up, he found Asio watching him with knowing eyes. The doctor said nothing as he slipped her arm into a sling and fastened the strap around her neck. Seeing he was not needed, Bain retreated back to his chair.
Asio pushed up the half of the table that supported her torso, elevating it forty-five degrees. He moved to a cabinet with glass doors on the far left of the room and withdrew a glass bottle.
"Spiced rum," he said, producing two glasses. "Medicine for you." He poured them each two fingers, set the bottle on the counter and walked back to his stool, nudging it with his foot against the wall. Bain stared at Asio's feet, pulling himself back into the little things he had missed about his friend. Even though he was a doctor, Asio was still a Feral and refused to wear shoes in his quarters and in most parts of the palace and city.
"It is all I have at the moment, unfortunately," Asio admitted. "It does not seem fitting to celebrate the return of our king with this cheap stuff."
"Trust me, this is a welcome treat. I did not take any to Deepfell with me, nor did I have a single drink when I returned."
"Ah, that must have been difficult. It eases my nerves after a stressful day like nothing else."
"And I am not certain that bringing her in this condition deserves any sort of celebration," Bain muttered, his eyes fastening to the tiny creature once more.
"The circumstances of your return are a bit unusual, otherwise I would be very interested to meet one of my own kind, especially your chosen Feral and wife-to-be. There will be time for that, though."
"Chosen Feral," Bain laughed, slouching in his chair. "You say that as if I had several to choose from. She gave us a hell of a time, because she wanted us gone. It actually made me more determined to catch her and look what I did. I caught her only because I wounded her first, like a deer."
They both watched her slow, even breaths, her chest rising and falling. She did not look like she was capable of causing chaos, much less become the future queen of Incitatia.