The pain was an exquisite discovery Catalina had never before known... and would have preferred to have kept ignorant. Her legs, normally strong from a lifetime of dancing and horseback riding, were suddenly unable to keep her upright.
The tall man, Jim, told her to lean against him while Garrett helped guide them along the narrow corridors.
Her head swam and she may have passed out briefly, twice, on the way down the stairs.
The carpenter's room was down The hall, to the left.
The first explosions of cannonfire roared outside. Catalina thought she was going to be sick.
The two men nudged the door open, to reveal a tall, skinny man in a leather apron. He was clean-shaven and had a mop of unruly blond hair atop his head. He was sanding the stalk of a musket when Jim & Garrett brought in Catalina.
"Neville, this girl's been injured."
Neville put down the musket & sighed, "It has begun already, then?"
Jim nodded, "We are taking heavy fire. You are... going to be busy."
Neville cleared the table before him and instructed, "Lay her here. What's wrong?"
"Eh, shrapnel, methinks. Probably a good hunk of wood."
"You're not sure?"
Jim shifted and pulled at the bandana around his neck, "Well, no. Because of the location of the... injury."
Garrett grimaced as they placed the girl on the table, and motioned toward Catalina's left leg.
Neville rolled his eyes and pulled out a boning knife, "Oh, for the love of..."
He used the knife to neatly slice away a section of Catalina's dress, "Now is not the time for chivalry, gentlemen. I need to see the wound for myself."
There on the table before the men, lying prone, and with the entirety of her leg exposed from waist to ankle, Catalina moaned.
Garrett quickly looked away.
But Jim looked on in horrified Fascination at the length of timber sticking out of the girl's thigh. It was equal to his forearm. Blood seeped from the wound, but not excessively.
"The wound is sealed by the very thing which caused it," Neville explained, "once I remove the shrapnel, she will most likely bleed like a stuck pig."
Jim finally looked away when he noticed the sliver throbbing with her heartbeat.
"Do you, um, need us for anything, Neville?"
"Nah."
"Then, we'd best get, um... going."
Neville nodded, moreso to himself than to the two men standing in his room, "Yeah. Be an easy enough removal. My only worry is infection. She might die in a week, even if I remove every piece of wood from her leg."
A cannonball struck the ship just above Neville's quarters, and a cloud of splinters and dust blanketed Catalina on the table, from the ceiling above.
Neville nodded, "And that."
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