She still ached from the night before. It was the night she returned to Terrastella and joined in the revel Asterion had put on. She drew and laughed and painted and danced. Then in her room she had wept in her bed, with joy and with worry.
 
Lysander was gone, pursuing the life debt he was owed, seeking his vengeance. It was his moment beneath the sun and Florentine gave him that. She stopped, stood back and let him go. Yet she did not think that a child would come in his absence. She did not think as she let her broken wing dampen her spirits that a child would come and make nothing be about just her or Lysander anymore.
 
What good is a once queen with a broken wing and a broken heart? It is such a thought that drives her back up into the treetop walkways of the hospital. The last she had been here was as a dying queen with no memory of who she was. Such somber thoughts have the girl moving slowly along the wooded walkways. Emerald light gleams from the ceiling of leaves and tangled branches.
 
There is art in the hospital. Art of the Ilati, art of the woodland, and the art of healing. Florentine’s wing is bound tight to her side, the cloth dirtied and ragged. Her breath stutters in her lungs but she smoothes it out in a breath and lets a wing press against her side. Stopping at a door, she moves to knock and she might have done, had the healer not already noticed her.
 
An answering smile pours like caramel across her lips and her head bobs, “Hello… Are you Samaira?” The flower girl pauses for a moment, swallowing down memories of blood and agony from the last time she was here. “I broke my wing a while ago and I was told that you might be able to heal it for me?”
 
Sunlight filters through the boughs turning her glittering gold. “My name is Florentine, by the way. May I come in?”

@Samaira 

The brush of feathers over her shoulder was as welcome as a cool breeze in winter. Though her muscles tighten as momentary fear slips sharp and brilliant through her left side – what if the touch was not as soft as a sigh but enough to press just where her muscles and bones ached at their most intense?
 
But Florentine was a healer once. Once… for a moment she remembers that girl. The younger Flora, fresh into womanhood yet still clinging to her childhood as if it were cloth she could not untangle from her torso. That was before she was an emissary and then a queen. That was back when things were just so… simple. When she hunted out the healer in the Swamp and begged to learn all that she knew.
 
But she was now broken beyond her own help. She was so very different to that young girl who did not know what love was like – how blistering and wonderful and utterly consuming it could be. The girl who did not know what horrors the world could create – Florentine was not afraid of monsters, for the greater monsters were what they made for themselves and for each other. Her wing was broken by the very creature she brought back from death. Ruth. Oh that kitten, she still remembers how fragile that dying cat felt in her arms. Florentine was just a child then, buoyed by naivety and a belief she could help all. It had served her that day, and she would not have done anything differently. She would still have willed her own young healing into that other baby creature. They were children together, she and Ruth. But Ruth returned, changed by Time magic into a beast – the largest Florentine had ever seen. They did not recognize one another, and Ruth struck her from the sky as if she were little more than a moth. But it was not Ruth who brought on Florentine’s depression. It was not she who made the once-queen feel dark as death.
 
That was all Florentine.
 
Yet Florentine smiles, for healing was everything. Her gaze travels thoughtfully over Samaira’s wings. Each seemed whole and perfect, unblemished. “Oh, really? I would never have known.” And Flora’s eyes are bright with hope. “Who healed you then?”
 
The healer gestures toward the bandage that wrapped about her slim torso. “Please.” Florentine murmurs and then, sheepishly she laughs, “I am sorry it is so dirty. I travelled from Denocte only a couple of days ago and I have not found a suitable replacement for this bandage yet. So it is a little road-worn.”
 
But all of Florentine is as rough and wild as the woodland that surrounds the hospital. Her mane is as wild and free as the grasses and roots that grow in beautiful tangles. Her flowers are like those that bloom within a free meadow.
 
There is a silence that descends upon them, as the bandage is unwound, the degree of her twisted wing revealed, nothing like it once was: once whole and working and beautiful. The muscles are fatigued, weary with misuse the bones fused, bent and wrong. Florentine sighs softly as she looks to it and then away, as if ashamed – in part. “I wish to get it fixed-“ She begins in a small voice, a whisper, a confession. “So I am healthy for when my child comes.” Her smile is small, shy, quite unlike her usual open manner. But maybe that is the nature of first confessions, of the first realization of motherhood. They are enough to make one shy, nervous. Besides, she needs someone to tell, especially since Lysander is not around.
 
Her lashes lower across her cheek, deep and rich. They shadow her face in a fan and Florentine gathers her breath as her eyes close. When they open they are brighter, more joyful. “There is some movement…” And her wing lifts a bit, but not enough. Slowly she moves it through its range of motion, always a bit but never enough. Then with a sigh she returns it to its place. “And now it aches… Do you think you might be able to heal it?”

@Samaira