Her mouth moves. The beginning of a small smile. "No. They're not."
I hand her a fresh batch of petals. "Purple-edged. Sort them. Then crush."
She sorts. She's faster now. She's seeing the difference without comparing.
I lean back on my palms and watch her work. The pestle sounds different in someone else's hands. Heavier on the downstroke. She'll fix that.
"The ratio," I say. "For the final paste. Two parts carrier oil—that's the rendered fat in the jar on my shelf—to one part extract. But if the petals are high-potency, like these, you go three to one. Sometimes four."
"How do you know which ratio?"
"You test it." I hold up my forearm. The inside, where the skin is thin. "Dab a small amount here. If it burns within ten seconds, it's too concentrated. Dilute. If nothing happens after thirty, it's too weak. Fifteen seconds, mild sting—that's the sweet spot."
"You tested it on yourself?"
"Who else was going to volunteer?"
"Keer Jr., apparently."
I look at her. She looks at me. Her face is perfectly flat.
"Was that a joke?"
"Absolutely not."
"That was a joke."
"I don't make jokes."
"You and I are going to get along."
She goes back to crushing, and the clearing shifts.
Keer.
He's crossing the clearing toward the animal pen, not toward me. Checking the setup. His eye sweeps the temporaryfencing, the goat rails Bram reinforced, the chicken cages stacked against the rock formation. He stops. Looks at the rooster.
Don't look at him. The paste. The potency window. The ratio—
He turns. Finds me across the clearing.
I'm sitting in a pile of flowers with purple hands and a mortar between my knees and Dara next to me and his eye drops to my hands and stays there one beat too long. Two beats.
"The cage needs a better latch," I call out, because silence is worse. "Bram rigged a temporary one but it won't hold if he gets worked up again."
He walks over. Three people are between us, then two, then none, and he's standing over my workspace, blocking the light. Every wolf within smelling distance knows exactly what my body is doing right now, which is betraying me completely.
My neck goes hot.
Dara is right there. Focus on the paste. Focus on Dara. Focus on anything except his hands—
What his hands did in the dark against tree bark.
How they'd feel on my—
Don't.
The paste. The paste is important! Lives depend on the paste.
