“That’s great. Better than a lot of the folks you’ll meet in Lee’s Mill. Simple folks, really, farmers and traders and crafters and the like. They know enough to write a bill of sale and read an order, and that’s all most folk need.”
Athan’s casual, non-judgmental tone brought her embarrassment under control. “And you?”
“Hmm?” Athan glanced down, one eyebrow raised then caught the direction of her question. “Oh, sure. I can read and write. I’m not just a hapless forester, you know?”
Dnara’s embarrassment returned. “I didn’t mean... You seem far from hapless.”
“Why thank you, Lady Thorngrove,” he grinned then rubbed his chin in thought. “So, not a cook, nor cleaner, nor book tender. I certainly don’t picture you with the hogs and chickens... I give up. What were you kept for?”
Dnara tried to answer, but she suddenly realized a truth to a question she’d never been asked. “I’m not sure. I had no assignment to my collar. I was... I was simply kept.”
Athan eyed her as they walked, side by side along the river in the growing morning light. Slowly, his eyes turned forward again. “Perhaps he thought to keep you as a future companion, and not the conversational kind.”
A laugh blurted from Dnara without warning, and she covered her mouth with the mushroom sack. She had to stop walking to catch her breath. Athan stopped and set his heavier bundle down at his feet.
“What have I said?” With his hands on his hips, he stared at her in confusion. “I hardly find the idea of forced companionship to be a laughing matter, my lady.”
Dnara inhaled deep, the earthen scent within the sack making her feel connected to the ground beneath her bare feet. “I agree, but if you had seen my keeper... He is old enough to be my great-grandfather. Older, perhaps. I’m not certain he can have companionship, even with this entire sack of mushrooms.”
“Oh. Well, perhaps he hadn’t figured out what to do with a barefooted wolfchild,” Athan teased then hoisted the bundle up, wobbling a step backwards with the awkward weight of it before he continued walking south.
Dnara followed after. “Need help? We can take turns carrying it.”
“It’s heavy,” he warned. “Not sure you have the arms for it.”
“I’m stronger than I look,” she argued back but not without looking at her scrawny arms.
“Of that, I have no doubt,” he said more quietly.
Dnara stared at his back then trotted to catch up. “I carried a great many heavy things for my keeper. I can sew, too. And I can build a fire without flint.” For every one long step he took, she had to take nearly two as she tried to think of what other uses she had to offer, aside from companionship. “Oh, I do know some medicine. Learned it from a book in my keeper’s library.”
“A book you weren’t supposed to be reading?”
Her back stung with the memory of it. “Perhaps. Still, you plan to carry that bundle the entire two-day journey?”
“Well, I have no plans to carry it in my sleep,” he joked. “But, no. I have a friend waiting who will help me carry it.”
Dnara stopped as fear turned her legs to stone and put a hitch in her voice. “A friend?”
“Don’t worry,” Athan assured. “You’ll like him, I promise.”
Athan’s confident assurance helped put her legs in motion. “What if he doesn’t like me?”
Athan stopped, shifted his bundle then withdrew something from a pouch on his belt. “Here.” He tossed the item to her, which she caught between her chest and the mushroom sack. “Keep that in your apron pocket and he’ll follow you anywhere.”
Dnara stared down at the object in her hands with confusion then jogged to catch up. “A carrot?”
“A carrot,” Athan confirmed through a grin but left the rest to speculation.
4
As Dnara would learn, a carrot can go far to earning a new friend when that friend is a mule.
In the tiny hamlet of Farfield, on a small farm nestled between the river and the last trees of the Thorngrove forest, Athan stopped to do the first of his trading with the resources he’d gathered. The elderly couple were grateful for the medicinal herbs Athan had gathered in the forest and the fieldwork done by Athan’s mule. When Dnara learned of the old man’s back pain, she showed them what she’d learned from the book she hadn’t been allowed to read, adding two plants easily found in the garden and turning Athan’s herbs into a tea.
“The medicine is more easily absorbed into the body this way,” Dnara explained. “And the herbs Athan brought will last you twice as long.”
“It tastes better, too,” said the old man after sipping the tea.
“You remember all this from a book you read?” Athan asked as they sat around the kitchen table, enjoying a modest lunch of bread and jam.
“Yes.” Dnara took a bite, savoring the sweet thickness of the preserved fruit. “I remember everything I read.”
“Surely not everything,” the old woman chuckled.
Dnara looked up to the wood beams and thatch overhead as she chewed. “Just about, although I don’t always know what the words mean.”
Athan eyed her skeptically. “Such as?”
“Well,” Dnara took another bite, chewed and swallowed. “On the next page, the book explains how you can take those same herbs and mix them with something called cin... cin-is-vir-ge-um,” she sounded out the word in a failed attempt to say it correctly. “You make a paste with it and place over burns.”
“Cinisvirgeum is an old word for virgin ash,” the old man said.
Dnara blinked at him, pausing in her next bite. “Virgin ash?”
“Ash from wood that’s clean,” the old man explained. “Not
