Jenny: A Roman's Hand

The Guttersnipe attended to Domitia with a frown cutting at her brow, not sure she was liking the girl's edging approach. But before she could say anything, Jason was rising from the table and coming to meet them, Frip tagging at his heels. Up close, she saw he stood as tall as Domitia's man, if not quite as stocky, and as fair as the face of the sun on African sands where Cathair was the eerie shadow of a Standing Stone. She looked at their hands. With Jason, she measured everyone against him by their hands. Jason's, while long and clever, were strong from handling horses, and big. Cathair's were large in their own right, but did not possess that delicacy as though they had an acute mind of their own which the surgeon had. She measured everyone, and everyone fell short, and, knowing she was smug, she liked it that way.

"Well, Guttersnipe, my sweet, did you have a good rest?" he asked in Iceni.

She replied in the same, "I did. I was having the most lovely dream when I was made to wake, but the sleep was good."

Frip thrust his way under Jason's hand, looking to be petted. The young man smacked his hand repeatedly against the dog's side to appease him. "Truly? In what little sleep I got last night, I was having the most lovely dream too."

She did not grace him with a reply, for looks and tones carry across language barriers and she was conscious of the presence of the other two. Instead she sank down on her knees to take Frip's big black, shaggy head in her hands. The dog began to thrum like a cat deep in its chest. "It seems we have all been dreaming a bit," she murmured.

The surgeon turned to Cathair and Domitia. "Unlike Gaius," he said in Latin, "I am not typically introduced to people with their blood pouring over my hands." He held out one to the young warrior, still coarse and scarred from the scrubbing he had given it to get the blood out from under his fingernails. "I am Jason, the Guttersnipe's man, and a doctor for just about anything living in the valley."