A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Twelfth Entry - Broken Things

{ValyforgeDarkLight has just cruised through all the previous chapters since this morning and has voted for every one. As of right now I am dedicating this chapter to her so she can see I've been appreciating her love. :) 15 January 2014}

I woke up to excruciating pain, even though I had had worse. I was still wrapped in my blanket, but managed to flop over onto my back so I was no longer crimped at the waist. I bit down on a cry of pain, screwed up my face, and reminded myself that the pain would eventually pass. I would grow numb to it, as I had the first time I’d cracked these two ribs. I had already been down when my father had kicked me, which I had earned by lashing out at him, letting my temper and my exhaustion and my hunger weaken the barriers I had spent years growing between my mind and the anger I had long harbored. Two kicks and two breaks. I had spent time away from school and home for this one, too.

I couldn’t free myself from my soft woolen blanket, nor could I move enough to take the tray of food and water that had been slid underneath my door. I didn’t sing, I barely breathed, the fire in my right side was so great. My eyes burned, but as usual they were dry.

About an hour after I woke a guard by the name of Oloran passed by. When he saw that my food was untouched and I was still lying in the middle of my cell he stopped at the doors. “Mabyn, are you well?” he asked

“No,” I said tightly, as it was hard enough to move the air required to make sound. “I have two cracked ribs.”

He instantly stood straighter, even if I had yet to see an elf slouch, much less a guard. “Can you stand?”

“Only if I must.”

“I will return.” With a light scuff as he pushed off of the stone he left at a run, and there was silence again.

I just barely heard the whispering of their feet as he returned with five others—another man and four women. They opened the door, and the men took up positions at my head and feet and the women split themselves between my left and right. Oloran lifted my head and shoulders by an inch at the same time as the four women evenly spaced their hands and lifted me from my ribs to my hips, just enough for the sixth guard to unwrap and clear away my blanket. They waited for him to take up the weight of my feet and then the six of them moved me, perfectly flat and supported, onto a narrow cloth stretcher that was twice as long as I was. Then the four women disappeared and went in four different directions, running, as the two men lifted me on the stretcher.

“We are taking you to the healer,” Oloran told me from above me as they lightly climbed the steps as quickly as they could without jostling me. They were hurrying. I don’t know why. My ribs weren’t going anywhere. But it hurt too much to try to tell them that, so I just laid there with my hands resting limply on my stomach, sucking in the hurt and pummeling it into a small dark corner of my mind. That corner was going to overfill someday. It was already cramped. It could only take so much abuse before it threw it all back up onto me. Maybe that’s what it was doing now; I certainly felt as though my ribs were imploding.

One of the women had apparently gone to warn the healer, who had a firm bed covered in a down blanket waiting for me. Oloran and Mirinel, the female guard, remained while Nesetha, the healer whose name I had finally learned, covered me with a sheet and gently worked my tunic up beneath it so she could lay her warm hands against my skin.

As soon as she did so I felt my lungs ease back into shapes they were supposed to hold, no longer pinched and in pain. I closed my eyes, still biting my lips together, as she worked what I was beginning to call her elven magic. There were herbs and poultices involved as well, but I could neither see what she was doing nor understand so I didn’t bother remembering her processes. All that mattered to me was how significantly they worked.