Thornwyn Mossbrook's Arc

Chapter 17 of 38

The riders were gone north. Thornwyn lay in the hollow with the arrow in her thigh and counted to a hundred before she moved. Blood had soaked the wool of her leggings and pooled under her knee. When she pressed the wound with two fingers, fresh red welled around the shaft. The cold had slowed it but not stopped it. She had no cloth, no needle, no yarrow. If she lay here until dark, she would not wake. She rolled onto her side and set her teeth. The shaft had gone in the meat and not the bone. She broke the fletching off close to her skin. Then she gripped the arrowhead where it pushed against the back of her thigh and pulled it through. She made a sound she did not know she could make. The hole ran clean now, front and back, and both mouths bled. She needed pressure. She needed a binding. She had neither. She had a staff and a forest and a body that was cooling too fast. She put her palm flat on the ground and asked the woods for what she could not carry. Sphagnum answered first, a soft mat of it under the fern, frozen at the top and living below. She dug it out with her fingers. She packed one handful into the front of the wound and one into the back. The moss took the blood and swelled against the muscle. She tore a strip from the hem of her cloak with her teeth and bound the leg above and below the packing. It was not enough. Moss would slow the bleeding. Moss would not stop the rot that came after a dirty shaft through cold meat. She set the staff across her lap and called. The air near her feet thickened. Antlers took shape first, then the heavy shoulders, then the wolf's jaw and the deer's soft eye. The chimera stood in the hollow with steam rolling off its flanks. She had sent it west with the girl at dawn. It had come back for her. She caught its foreleg and dragged herself up its side. Her bound thigh screamed. She hooked her elbow over the withers and swung her good leg across. The chimera held still under her weight. "West," she said. "To the piebald. Find her." The piebald deer knew wound-work. The piebald deer had watched her stitch its own lung and had watched her hands move. The girl was with it. The elf was with it. There would be fire and boiled water and a needle in the elf's pack. The chimera moved through the drifts at a walk that ate ground. Thornwyn pressed her face into the coarse fur at its neck and let the blood in the moss clot as the woods went past. She had bought the girl a west road. Now the west road was carrying her back.