Leareth agrees that it seems quite reasonable, although when he's having it copied he might want to redact the chapters about creating creatures for weaponized purposes. 

:That will suit them just as well. I'll need some mice or something to practice on - also I will need to be in a meld without panicking, I can probably do that with you in particular with practice -:

:I am certain that with some practice - and I can do that with people who are not you - I will be able to very reliably do the relevant parts of the meld, Sight and reserves, without going near your actual thoughts. I know a lot of Healers do not have good enough control to promise that: 

:That's good. When can I expect mice?:

:A couple of days? Do they need to be special mice in any way?: 

:I don't think so, I'll just be practicing the skillset, not trying to get specific mouse-results. Though I'll probably have mice in all kinds of interesting colors and whatnot sooner or later:

Giggle. :I look forward to seeing it: 

:Maybe if we're really careful we can prevent it from being too unpleasant for the mice, or whatever I graduate to after that.

I'm getting ahead of myself but would it be weird for you if I wanted to try leaving the monkey's tail on? Amshalan likes having a tail and I could always with some ado take it off if I didn't like it once I moved in.

:Of course, if you like. I would not mind, and I suppose having a prehensile tail could be rather useful, if you started with that kind of monkey: 

:That's what I was thinking! I could also try putting wings on like how gryphons are, if we really take to the art anyway:

:That would be quite something! ...I wonder if gryphons have lighter bones, like birds do, or if they support their weight in the air by cheating with magic. I assume I knew this once but I do not remember: 

Get me sparrows or pigeons or something and I will try making flying rodents:

:It sounds very tricky but I can definitely set you up with that!: 

And within a couple of days there's a nice workshop set up for her, with mice and sparrows in cages. 

She has by then re-read the book and organized all her notes and can get to work turning mice interesting colors, since that seems easiest as proof of concept and also shouldn't hurt them much. They'll have to wait for the new fur to grow in, though.

She does not kill any mice! Although some of them lose some patches of skin before the fur starts growing in again, and need extra Healing, and the fur colour is pretty blotchy on most of them the first round. 

She is not immortal but she is also not sick or in a particularly dangerous place; she doesn't need to be in a terrible hurry. She keeps practicing on mice till she can get them interesting colors without patches of either sort.

She can get there in a couple of weeks of concerted practice, though it takes longer to confirm it since she needs to wait for mice to recover. 

(There is no shortage of new mice to try if she runs out.)

She does want to try breeding the interestingly colored mice to see if they have interestingly colored babies too, though.

She studies sparrow wings, when she's waiting for mouse fur to grow.

Wings are really interesting to look at and draw! They have a lot of delicate specialized internal structures. Incidentally, bird lungs are weird. 

Huh. She watches sparrows fly around with Sight, putting their food and water in various places so they have to flutter to get it.

It takes some practice to capture that kind of fast movement of larger-scale structures with Healing-Sight, but after a while she'll start to have a sense of how the wings attach to the rest of the bird's skeleton, what ligaments and muscles are necessary and would need to be rebuilt or rerouted in a mammal to make flight possible. 

The book has some notes on how to prepare for the actual grafting, by working just with the skeletons of dead animals and mocking them up with soft clay and string to model the body mechanics. 

She supplements with touchsight; it helps. She makes morbid little sculptures.

The morbid little sculptures are educational and Leareth is impressed with her progress. He's also been practicing melds, regularly, with the other Healers here. By the time she feels ready to try wing-attachment on live animals, he's pretty ready to do a meld, with confidence that he won't read any of her thoughts by accident. Belrun is an unusually easy partner, here, he expects her to be very good at containing her mind and not accidentally projecting her surface thoughts a little even when their shields are meshed. 

Wings are a major organ and trying it for real will kill the sparrow, although she can anesthetize it first, either with drugged food or by using her Gift to put it to sleep. 

She does it by Gift; drugged sleeps are a little hard to monitor, another thing to juggle while she's trying to get the wings from point A to point B.

Her Fetching can actually do a lot of the delicate work of hooking up blood vessels and nerves, peeling off tendon attachment points and reconnecting them elsewhere, knitting bones into their new home. Leareth does the rest; he's not that skillful at the mage-work parts of this, yet, it's a specialized craft, but he's been practicing hard too. 

She doesn't kill the mouse who's getting wings, anyway. It'll take a while to know if the graft will take properly. She needs to do some specialized Healing work on the nerve grafts, and of course the targeted Healing-energy that will fix everything properly in place and maybe, if she did it right, result in little winged mouse babies eventually.