Wartface’s thin fingers dug into her armpits and lifted her half-conscious from Huge’s shoulder, and lay her prone.

A wide tree trunk formed one wall of the house and a branch overhead held up its roof. Poles laid side by side made its floor, and grass mats its walls. Her cheek rested on a woven sweet-scented grass pillow. She lay on a bed of bracken ferns.

A boy with two heads and three arms leaned over her. His third arm grew from the middle of his chest.

She blinked. My eyes aren’t working right.

“Ma, she woke up,” the creature’s left head said.

“She looks awful sick,” his right head added.

Wartface scurried to her. “Don’t try to move, jongfreu. We think you have a cracked head, or at least a badly bruised one, and you’ve lost much blood.”

The woman had one warty-faced head, and only two arms.

“Do I see a boy with two heads?” Rotaida winced as waves of pain shot through her.

“Hush, hush, dierbaar. Just rest,” Wartface said. “Drink this and rest.”

She propped Rotaida with her back against the tree trunk, and held a wooden bowl filled with amber liquid to her lips. Rotaida, remembering the witch Morag’s potion given to drove the Saxon soldiers berserk, hesitated.

Wartface reassured her. “It’s a broth of a white willow’s inner bark.”

“Oh, if it is only willow . . .”