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“I am not. Afraid.”
He looked over his shoulder. She was staring at him coldly. “Ah. Ye sounded it.”
“You misheard.” He returned to his searching. “Yarrow needs to be made into a tea,” she pointed out a moment later. “Comfrey wants hot water, too. We’d have to build a fire, and that would be unsafe.”
He crouched beside the ditch and gently pushed under the delicate ferns, brushing them aside. He’d found what he was looking for. “I can make a fire ye wouldn’t see till ye stepped in it, Senna.”
“Oh.”
They followed the narrow rutted path for maybe half a mile, before they skirted back into the forest. They walked until the moon was dipping below the tops of the trees before he stopped them for good. Senna bent her knees and dropped to the ground, unconsciously cupping her injured hand in her good one.
Finian knelt beside her, bending over her hand, pulling it gently from her grasp with soothing, wordless sounds. After a moment, he looked up. “’Tis poorly set.”
She bit her lower lip and scowled. “What does that mean?”
“It means ye can leave it as ’tis and it will heal crooked, if at all. Or I can reset it.” He sat back on his heels and regarded her levelly.
“That doesn’t sound pleasant. What do you know of such things?”
“Nay, ’tisn’t pleasant.”
“What do you know of setting bones?” she prompted sharply.
He lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “Ye learn many things, living as I have.”
“That is your answer?” She scowled. “Pah, you probably know nothing of it.”
“I know more than ye.”
She sniffed.
He sat back. “I suggest ye leave it, then. What does it matter if yer fingers cannot move as ye want them to, and are misshapen without need? Or mayhap oozing pus.”
He settled himself on a hummock beneath the branches of a nearby tree, watching her out of the corner of his eye.
She sat, stiff as a wagon spoke, glaring at a bush some ten paces off. Without her bright, engaging chatter, sleep layered quickly into his blood. Thick, heavy waves of it. He closed his eyes.
“Finian.” Her plaintive voice curled across the meadow.
“Aye?”
“I lost my comb.”
“Ah,” he replied slowly, unsure what response was called for.
“My hair is so tangled.”
There was quiet for a few moments. She played with the hem of her tunic.
“Finian,” her small voice called out again.
He raised his eyebrows, waiting.
“I need a bath.”
He rolled his eyes. “My apologies. I forgot to carry yer tub with us.”
“I do not like how you Irish folk place your rivers and streams. They are most inconveniently arranged. In England, there is one every few yards, at the least.”
