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It had always given Numair a bit of a flutter whenever he saw someone with wings.
Wings in themselves weren't rare, per se—those that carried the gene made up enough of Scanra and northern Galla that there were always a few in most major cities, be they merchants or immigrants—but those with hawk wings were. He wasn't sure he'd ever heard of one before.
The person they belonged to looked about thirteen, a lost waif of a girlchild with a tumble of smoky brown curls and big blue eyes. Daine, Onua had called her, and behind the heartbreak, she had a kind of steel in her that he liked immediately.
The wings in question were brown, paler and more intense than the color of her hair, dappled light and dark on the outside and checkered cream and black on the inside. They weren't bedraggled, precisely, but messier than most avian-inclined individuals tended to leave the house looking; a feather here and there going astray, dust over the gloss, and more unkempt by the base and in odd patches down the sides.
The last bit confused him until he saw her carefully preening herself as they got ready to bed down the first time they camped together.
As it turned out, when your wingspan was easily twice your height and your flight feathers barely cleared the ground when fully spread, there were always a few spots you forgot or couldn't reach. Even just the parts she could reach took her an hour to sort out.
It made his heart ache—no one was truly meant to be alone, but having feathers with no one to help you sort them out seemed like salt in the wound. You had to walk around just advertising it, and there was really nothing you could do about it. It wasn't like they ran salons for this sort of thing.
He refrained from saying anything for most of their journey, but on the last night before they would arrive in Corus, he broke.
"Can I help?" he offered about twenty minutes into Daine's nightly session, watching her contort her spine in a vain attempt to straighten out her scapulars.
Grooming was an intimate thing, something you did with family members or lovers, not near-strangers, but he couldn't find it in himself to stay silent. At the very least, she deserved the dignity of walking back into civilization with neatened wings.
But if she thought his offer odd, she didn't show it. She only hesitated for a moment, like she was waiting for her ears to catch up with her, then shot him a distracted, slightly woebegone frown. "Oh, yes, please."
He got up from his seat and walked to her side of the fire, then settled behind her, cross-legged.
She yanked the back panel of her tunic up out of her girdle without preamble, then pulled both it and her hair over her shoulder, the delicate length of her spine between her wings left bare to the elements.
"You just, um, pull like—" she started, then said, "Oh," as he started finger-combing the soft feathers, tugging the loose ones free and carefully ruffling and resettling the good ones until they fell right again, shaking the dust free and redistributing the natural oils underneath.
He used to do it for Varice from time to time—for years before he realized it had been a hint, the idiot that he was—and she'd given him strict instructions on how to properly treat a lady's wings. They were a bit more sensitive than scalps, but the principles between hair and feathers were roughly the same, he'd found. Be gentle and thorough, go from bottom to top, petting and scratching were welcome as long as you did it right...
Varice had always ended up sprawled over his lap, pink-cheeked and cooing happily as she ordered him to pay more attention to the spots she liked best, curling her toes and kicking her heels or sighing and melting when he did.
Daine had no orders, or any other words at all as she went back to working at her top-level coverts with stiff determination. It was to be expected, considering their (lack of a) relationship, but it brought back that twinge of heartache. She was too young to be this alone.
Sympathy aside, Numair had intended to keep his involvement as brief and professional as possible.
Of course, upon actual inspection, her scapulars were a disaster, and he was promptly sucked deep into fixing them.
Loose feathers, dirt, knots, debris—how long had she been alone now?—and when he was finally done with those, he had a respectable pile of plumage at his side and a lot more wing to either side of him that was in only slightly better condition. Mindlessly, he retrieved the back panel of her tunic and laid it over the exposed skin, then moved on to inspecting tertials and secondaries of her left wing.
It was a surprisingly warm activity for such a chilly March evening. He'd almost expected her to be feeling the chill even more than he and Onua, but her down was plush and soft, trapping a feverish heat under the vaned feathers.
The vaned feathers themselves were impressive, too. One gentle pull had him coming away with a flight feather that was longer than his whole arm, colored in broad, striking stripes of light and dark. He briefly entertained the thought of trying to use it as a quill, then added it to the pile. They would need to burn those to make sure they didn't get used for ill.
He only broke out of it once he ran out of wing to groom. His hands held a thin coating of oil and grit and their camp was strewn with a multitude of feathers, and Daine herself...
She'd stopped helping early on, and now sat still as stone, listing slightly to the side like a broken toy, her eyes glassy and her face absolutely blank.
"...Daine?" he said, worry starting to trickle in. That was a disconcerting look. Had he overstepped? He had kept his distance as much as possible, and she had been crooning quietly as he worked, but—
Daine blinked once, twice, then a few more times, looking like she was coming out of a trance. She gave him a distant nod of thanks, then rose, stumbled over to her bedroll, and collapsed face-down on top of it. There, she pulled in her wings and promptly fell asleep.
There was a beat of silence where he and Onua, who had come back at some point during the proceedings, looked at one another.
"Poor girl needed that," said Onua with a slight smile. "You did a good thing. Gods know I'm useless with feathers."
Torn between rueful and proud, he inspected his hands, then got up to find a rag without answering.
Onua went to tuck Daine in properly, and then together, they collected the feathers and burned them.
Daine, who had previously proven to be a light sleeper, slept like the dead for ten hours straight, then woke up in the best mood Numair had seen her in yet.
He had been prepared to apologize, but a Daine in possession of well-kept wings was a happy and affectionate Daine, apparently. His apology died before it began.
The last leg of the journey was pleasant, and he'd be lying if he said that the crushed expression on Daine's face when he announced that he needed to delivery the reports to Jon didn't warm his heart.
"Just for now," he reassured her, patting her thin shoulder as they stood outside the lower gates. "I’ll see you again soon."
Instead of the nod or return adieu he expected, she abruptly twisted in her saddle and threw her arms around his neck. The shoulder opposite the one he'd just patted blanketed his face and her forearms pressed awkwardly into his back as she half embraced him and half clung to him for support. Her wings folded around him, enshrouding them both in warmth and twilit darkness.
"Thank you," she mumbled into the hair above his ear.
He let out a laugh, startled and pleased, then returned the hug with one arm around her hips; it was the only place he could reach without disturbing her feathers. "You are very welcome."
She stopped him after her lessons a week later and asked for his help again, embarrassed and obviously having gathered a great deal of courage for it. Touched and more surprised than he rightfully should have been, he agreed, and it became regular thing between them after that.
She never quite hit the point of crawling into his lap and demanding scritches, so it took him a few weeks to realize that this was a hint of its own.
Daine had decided that he was her family now.
There weren't many honors in the world greater than that.