And suddenly, she was freezingly cold, with stones biting into her back, ribs and head aching horribly, lungs afire. Coughing up water—

And laughing, even as her lungs burned and her heart pounded.

“Jennie!” David caught her up in his arms, babbling, crying, holding her and pounding her back to help her cough up the rest of Lake Keystone, all at the same time. She managed to get her arms around him, still alternately laughing and coughing. He stopped pounding just long enough to kiss her, and she tasted the salt of his tears mixed with the river water.

Mooncrow covered her with a blanket, wiped her face and hair with a towel, saying nothing, but grinning with tears on his face.

And David just held her, as if he wanted to keep her there forever, his shoulders shaking with fear and cold and grief-turned-joy.

And she—she let him.

She and Mooncrow kept glancing at each other all during the ride home, and giggling. I’ll have to explain it to poor David, she thought, more than once; he obviously thought they were both still hysterical. He just drove; he had no intention of stopping until he got them both home, and he kept his eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel, even though he clearly would much have preferred to trade places with Mooncrow in the backseat.

But Jennie shared a joke with her grandfather that would be very hard to explain; it wasn’t so much a joke as it was a state-of-mind. Relief, for one thing. A knowledge shared; the absurdity of how she had been blocking herself, and how easy it had been once she saw what Mooncrow had been trying to tell her.

“Heyoka,” she would say to him, and they’d both break up. “Heyoka yourself,” he would reply, and it would start all over again. In fact, they really didn’t stop laughing until they got home, which was just as well, since as long as she was laughing, her head didn’t hurt quite so much.

David insisted on carrying her into the house, still wrapped in Mooncrow’s prize blanket. Her grandfather followed, as David carried her to her room and laid her gently on the bed.

“Take these,” he ordered, handing her pills and a bottle of orange juice.

“What are these? Time-release contrary-capsules?” she asked, and set him snickering again.

“No,” he replied, through the little snorts. “Vitamins, aspirin, and antibiotics.”

She raised a rebellious eyebrow at that, but David took them from Mooncrow and sat down on the bed beside her, holding out the juice. “You either take them, or I give them to you,” he said sternly. “Mooncrow is right; you don’t need pneumonia on top of everything else. And when you get done taking the pills, you go to sleep—”