The scullion who doubled as servingwoman plunked down mugs of beer and trotted back inside. With hook and splinted hand, Dag clumsily reached, winced, and fell back, and Fawn said, “Ah! The bonesetter told you not to try and use your hand. Five times when I was listening, and I don’t know how many more while I was out of the room. I thought he was going to slap you at one point.” The man had hardly needed Fawn’s encouragement to bind Dag’s arm with quelling thoroughness, having taken the measure of his aggravated patient very quickly. The barest tips of Dag’s fingers stuck out beyond the cotton wrappings. “You just keep it down in that sling there. We need to figure out how we’re to get along with all this.”

Hurriedly, she held the mug to his lips; he grimaced, but drank thirstily. She managed not to splash him too badly when he nodded he was done, and whisked her handkerchief from her pocket to overtake his right arm up to mop his lips. “And if you use your bandages for a napkin they’re going to stink long before six weeks are up, so don’t.”

He scowled sideways at her, ferociously.

“And if you keep looking at me like that, you’re going to make me break out in giggles, and then you’ll be throwing your boots at my head, and then where will we be?”

“No, I won’t,” he growled. “I need you to get the blasted boots off in the first place.”

But the corner of his mouth curled up nonetheless. Fawn was so relieved she got up on one knee and kissed the curl, which made it curve up more.

He vented a long, apologetic sigh for his touchiness. “Third from the left, there”—he nodded to the leather wrap—“should be a sort of fork-spoon thing.”

She pulled it out and examined it, an iron spoon with four short tines on the tip. “Ah, clever.”

“I don’t use it too often. A knife’s usually better, if I have anything at the table but my hook or the social hand.” That last was Dag’s name for the wooden hand-in-glove, which seemed to have little use but disguise among strangers, and not a very effective one at that.

With a slight clunk, Dag set his wooden cuff against the table edge. “Try swapping it out.”

Dag’s most commonly used device, the hook with the clever little spring strip, was set in tight. Fawn, leaning in, had to take a better grip before she was able to twist it out. The eating tool replaced it more readily. “Oh, that’s not too hard.”