said, “Don’t be so daft as to refuse. Someone wickedly attacked you, and that arrow knocked you headfirst against yon tree. You hit hard enough to make you bounce back and fall as you were when I found you.”
“Sakes, lass, if you saw all that, did you not also see who shot me?”
“I saw none of that,” she replied.
Looking narrowly at her, Fin said, “If you saw none of it, you cannot possibly know how I fell. Sakes, I don’t know that much myself.”
“Nevertheless, that or something like that is what happened,” she insisted. “This arrow that Boreas found made the gash in your forehead because the blood on it is still sticky. You have a lump rising here by your ear”—he winced when she touched it—“and I see bark in your hair and down the collar of your shirt. Also, the sleeve of your jack is torn, and I see more bits of bark on your arm. The event depicts itself, sir. Moreover,” she added, pointing, “he shot from across the burn.”
He had to admit, if only to himself, that if she was right about the rest, she was right about the direction of the shot.
Deciding that he had lain long enough on the damp ground, he sat up and then had to hold himself steady and concentrate hard to fight off a new wave of dizziness. He tried to do so without letting her see how weak he felt.
Meeting her twinkling gaze, he grimaced, suspecting that her powers of observation were keener than his ability just then to conceal his feelings.
“That dizziness will pass if you give it time,” she said, confirming his suspicion. “But you would be foolish not to come with me, because one can easily see that you are in no fit state to continue on your own.”
The dog moved up beside her, eyeing him thoughtfully. Just looking at it reminded Fin that Highland forests sheltered many a wolf pack. The beasts would soon catch scent of his blood if he did aught to start the wound bleeding again.
“Would your kinsmen so easily welcome a stranger?” he asked.
“My lady mother welcomes all who come in peace,” she said. “In my father’s absence, I warrant she will be fain to have a strong man at hand, even overnight.”
He realized then that she was of noble birth and that he ought to have known it despite her untidiness. Commoners rarely owned wolf dogs or spoke as she did.
“How far is your home from here?” he asked.
“ ’Tis in the glen just over yon hill,” she said, pointing toward the granite ridge above them to the northeast. “We’ll go through the cut above those trees.”
“Then I will gratefully accept your invitation.”
Smiling in a way that made his body stir unexpectedly in response, she picked up his sword and sling and stood back to let him get to his feet.
When he stood and reached for the sword, she said, “I can carry it.”
“Nay, then, I do not relinquish my weapon to anyone, woman or man.”
He saw a flash of annoyance, but she handed him the belt. He strapped it into place and took the sword from her, feeling its weight more than usual as he reached back and slipped it into its sling. But he did so, he thought, without noticeable difficulty. She did not seem to notice, but he felt new tension between them.
The hill was steep, and it proved harder than he had expected to follow her up through the forest to the ridge. The waves of dizziness persisted, and halfway up, he began to feel weary, almost leaden. To be sure, he had traveled far that day.
But such profound weariness was abnormal for him.
When they reached the scree-filled cut below the sharp crest, the going grew easier. Still, the loose rocks underfoot and a number of huge boulders in their path required vigilance to avoid a misstep.
Fin stopped gratefully when the lass did but assured himself that naught was amiss with him but his recurrent dizziness and the strange lassitude. The sweeping prospect of the towering, still snowy Cairngorms beyond was spectacular.
“There,” she said, pointing. “We need only row across the loch.”
He looked down to see a curving, mile-long, deep-green loch that looked like a shard from a lass’s looking glass, reflecting the wild beauty of heavily forested slopes and a few steep granite ones that surrounded it like the steep sides of a basin.
Following her gesture southeast to a much nearer point, his gaze fell