THOTH & MORVEREN
Thoth maintained his hard stare, completely oblivious to how uncomfortable he was making Danny feel. He did recognise the swallowing, blushing, and darting eyes and physical symptoms of anxiety, but had no idea what might be causing that anxiety. Even to children younger than him, Thoth would never have considered himself intimidating - he was too small, too fragile-looking. Even with the two year age gap, he wasn’t much bigger than Danny. What Thoth failed to see, when he looked in the mirror, was the penetrating gaze he had inherited from his mother and the ferocious, dark scowl he had learned from Joel, his adopted father. It was fortunate indeed that Danny was only treated to the former of these.
When Danny started to speak, Thoth hesitated - naturally disinclined to trust anyone he didn’t know - but his doubts very quickly ebbed away. He didn’t know what type of person this boy was, but he could see with his own two eyes that the sparrow was indeed injured, and the boy seemed genuine in his request for help. Suspicions aside, Thoth was instead filled with a mixed feeling of curiosity and surprise. How had Danny known to come to him for help? Thoth’s reputation amongst the other children was as a loser, and amongst the adults as a troublemaker or ‘disturbed orphan’ - his only positive renown was his position as the prince’s friend. He stared at Danny for a moment even after the other boy finished speaking, then shuffled his feet, inexplicably embarrassed by the request.
“I’m Thoth,” he grunted, and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s Junebell. Morveren is under the desk.”
“Are you being nice?” Junebell called, unable to understand English and clearly not reassured by his tone. He ignored her.
“Sparrow, huh?” He checked as he moved forward and peered into Danny’s hands. Thoth had long since stifled his long-winded ways, apart from when he was nervous, but he still had a tendency to verbalise his thought processes, as he did now. “Passeridae family. Passer domesticus, judging by the shape of the beak and the colouration. Dialect, central Shaman - hmm.” He paused for a moment to try and remember the language. Thoth did speak to the garden birds around the castle, but not as often as he spoke to other animals, and he was a little rusty. Even so, the next sound he proceeded to make was a distinctive chirp, the words themselves lost to his monolingual companion. “Hello, General?” He began in the bird’s own language, using a noticeably softer tone than he had with Danny. “Can you understand me okay? My name’s Thoth. I need you to tell me where it hurts.”
He paused to give her a chance to answer, before gently lifting her out of Danny’s hands and placing her on his second desk, next to an odd contraption. Thoth had manufactured his own magnifying lens using layers of water and glass, built into a wire bracket which had complete flexibility. He yanked the lens over General’s wing and studied it for a moment. Wings were fragile - Thoth knew, he had broken his own a few times - and consisted of many numerous bones. Fortunately, given his own birth defect, Thoth had a particular interest in broken bones and knew what he was looking for. It didn’t take long to spot the slightly misshapen section. As he stared through the lens he narrated what he saw to Danny, casually throwing about the correct medical terminology in a dire, long-winded fashion. What any other person could have said in a sentence, Thoth took a paragraph. All his prior suspicions about the boy completely faded into the distance as soon as his enquiring, scientific nature took the helm.
“...Simple enough fix with an old-fashioned splint,” he muttered at last, pulling open the drawers under the desk to try and find a little splint. There had to be one somewhere. “Aha,” he extracted a tiny piece of wood from the bottom drawer and waved Danny over to a cupboard. “There’s some bandages in there. Get the smallest one. General?” He switched effortlessly to the sparrow’s language. “I’m going to splint you up. That means I’ll use a piece of cloth to bandage this peice of wood to your wing to hold the bones in the right place. It’ll hurt, but it’ll be better in the long-run. If your wing heals with the bones in the wrong place then you may never fly again.”
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