His second was of a warm breeze in his right ear and a huffing sound. He seemed to be facedown, his left cheek resting on an herbal-scented pillow.
What, he wondered, had happened to him?
Just as it finally dawned on him that he was lying on dampish ground atop leafy plants of some sort, a long wet tongue laved his right cheek and ear.
Opening his eyes, he beheld two… no, four silvery gray legs, much too close.
Tensing, but straining to keep still as the animal licked him again, well aware that wolves littered all Highland forests, he shifted his gaze beyond the four legs to see if there were any more. He did see two more legs, but either his vision was defective or his mind was playing tricks on him.
The two legs were bare, shapely, and tanned.
He shut his eyes and opened them again. The legs looked the same.
Slowly and carefully, he tried to lift his head to see more of both creatures, only to wince at the jolt of pain that shot through his head as he did. But, framed by the arch of the beast’s legs and body, he glimpsed bare feet and ankles, clearly human, then bare calves, decidedly feminine.
By straining, he could also see bare knees and bare…
A snapping sound diverted him, and the animal beside him backed off. It was larger than he had expected and taller. But it was no wolf. On the contrary…
“Wolf dog or staghound,” he muttered.
“So you are not dead after all.”
The soft feminine voice carried a note of drollery and floated to him on the breeze, only he no longer felt a breeze. Doubtless, the dog’s breath had been what he’d felt in his ear earlier. Coming to this conclusion reassured him that he hadn’t lost his wits, whatever else had happened to him.
“Can you not talk to me?”
It was the same voice but nearer, although he had not sensed her approach in any way. But then, until the warm breath huffed into his ear, he had not sensed the dog either. He realized, too, that she had spoken the Gaelic. He had scarcely noticed, despite having spoken it little himself for several years.
Recalling the shapely legs and bare feet, he realized with some confusion that his eyes had somehow shut themselves. He opened them to the disappointing revelation that her bareness ended midthigh. A raggedy blue kirtle, kilted up the way a man would kilt up his plaid, covered most of the rest of her.
“I can talk,” he said and felt again that odd sense of accomplishment. “I’m not so sure that I can move. My head feels as if someone tried to split it in two.”
“You’ve shed blood on the leaves round your head, so you are injured,” she said. Her voice was still soft, calm, and carrying that light note, as if she felt no fear of him or of anything else in the woods. “I can get your sword out of its sling if you will trust me to do it. And I can get the sling and belt off you, too. But you will have to lift yourself a bit for that. Then, mayhap you can turn over.”
“Aye, sure,” he said. If she had wanted to kill him, she’d have done it. And she was too small to wield his heavy sword as a weapon.
She managed without much difficulty to drag the sword from the sling on his back. But when he raised himself so she could reach the strap’s buckle under him, he had to grit his teeth against the pain and dizziness that surged through his head.
Still, he decided by the time she unbuckled the stout strap and deftly slipped it free of his body that little was wrong with him other than an aching head.
“Now, if you can turn over,” she said, “I will look and see how bad it is.”
Exerting himself, he rolled over and looked up to see a pretty face with a smudge on one rosy cheek, and a long mass of unconfined, wild-looking, tawny hair.
Despite the look of concern on her face, her eyes twinkled.
Fin could not tell their exact color in the shadow of so many trees and with an overcast sky above, but they seemed to be light brown, rather than blue.
“Are you a sprite, or some other woodland creature?” he murmured, finding the effort to talk greater now. His eyelids drooped.
She chuckled low in her throat, a delightful sound and a stimulating one.