The hallucinogenic biddiyara saliva definitely got to Seoyeon, because she had strange dreams about standing in that clearing, the chandelier from her room in Ximo lighting the area above her, with an odd hybrid of her father and a biddiyara standing in front of her and polishing its fangs with one of her mother’s old handkerchiefs.  Creepier still, Captain Park stood beside her, combing knots out of her hair with his fingers and telling her that she was very brave for throwing up before tooting merrily on Baekhyun’s bugle in her ear.  She woke up to find herself clutching at her hair and sat up with a start.

A low, warm fire was burning nearby, giving out just enough light for her to see that she was in what looked to be a completed lean-to made out of sticks along the same design that Captain Park had started making earlier.  The captain himself was lying just on the other side of the fire, silver-blue hair strangely bright.  By the fire, halfway between his side and Seoyeon’s, was a sizable pile of assorted fruits and nuts, including what looked like a set of homemade wooden skewers on top of them.

Uneasy at Captain Park sleeping so peacefully when they’d been attacked last time they’d tried to set up camp, Seoyeon looked around, itching at her arm.  They were enclosed on all four sides, which she supposed was some measure of protection, though the fourth side was Captain Park’s cloak.  It was unfairly free from the dirt and mud encrusted on her own clothes, and Seoyeon scowled at it.  She’d never had to wear the same clothes for three days straight before, and it was actually fairly horrible.  She could feel the grime trapped between it and her skin, and the sweat that had dried onto the material and didn’t take long to dampen again, and at that moment she would have paid quite a lot of money to be able to have a bath.  There was always the stream, she supposed, but she had no idea how far away from it they were (had Captain Park carried her, or had he just finished the lean-to in the clearing they had originally been in?  She remembered nothing after passing out), and after the biddiyaras she really had no desire to go anywhere by herself, just in case.

An unbidden image of Captain Park wielding the flames like a whip suddenly sprang to mind, and Seoyeon shook her head, hard.  She had always found intellectual men, men like Jongdae (except Jongdae was like a brother), attractive — men who were accomplished in things like the arts, or who had a good rapport with animals or children — but there was something about the way that Captain Park had just faced down the monsters without any fear that Seoyeon couldn’t help admiring.  It made her both embarrassed and extremely jealous, because she wanted to be like that too — she wanted to have that fearlessness, but she’d been terrified and run away.

That said, what she’d done had been practical.  She had no fighting skills, and she was injured, and she had absolutely no idea about anything to do with the biddiyaras whereas Captain Park had probably encountered them before.

Unfortunately, none of that stopped Captain Park from being a bit of a badass.

Seoyeon drove that thought from her mind with horror and settled down to change the bandage on her hand, because Jongdae had said that dressings ought to be changed over at least daily for injuries like that.  Her wrist was sore and a little puffy, but surprisingly mobile, and she wiggled it around a little to let it breathe, wondering how long she actually needed to bandage it up for.  That was something Jongdae hadn’t got round to teaching her — in fact, she was pretty sure that when she’d asked, his response had been use your common sense.

The bandage was a little easier to tie the second time round, but it still posed a difficulty to do with one hand.  Seoyeon checked on her ankle after, using water from her flask to wash away dirt from the skin, and tried to figure out what the best course of action for treating it was once again.  She ended up tentatively putting together a small poultice of herbs she knew were supposed to help with inflammation and pain, and then moved on to look at her feet.

It felt very awkward to be sitting there pulling her legs up and around to inspect her feet when there was a sleeping soldier just on the other side of the fire and Seoyeon was only wearing a dress.  She had to shuffle around a bit so that she had light in the right place, and was then faced with the problem of trying to wash the dirt off her feet without getting mucky water on her dress.  Frowning, she looked over to her shoes, which she had placed beside her, and saw that the insides were even dirtier than her feet — no doubt a hangover from walking through the bog on the first day in the Neuma.  She really needed to clean them out, but that would require washing them, and then they would be unwearable until they dried, and as much as her feet hurt, if they were going to be walking again, she wanted to be wearing shoes, not going barefoot.

Stretching her right foot out towards the fire to let it dry in warmth, Seoyeon took a look at the base of her left foot, wh