Hesri blinks up at him, calm and placid. "Isn't that what it's like to use a sword? I've wondered, but the girls mostly aren't very good, and Lashan says I'm being silly if I ask."

Then Vena is here, scrubbed pink and still damp-haired, carrying a bowl of cream. "Sorry - they were so slow!" She thunks the bowl down next to the slaughtered peaches and dips a piece in the cream before stuffing it in her mouth. Then another. And a third, indistinctly telling Guts, "Try it!"

The rich savor and faint mellow sweet of the cream and the sharper sour-sweet of the peaches go really well together, if he does. Fruit and dairy are a good combination.

Vena chews ferociously, swallows, wipes her mouth, and then says, "Are you being crazy about fire again? What's it this time? Here." She's going to feed Hesri some more cream-dripping peach chunks, which Hesri dutifully takes, the dreamy look fading.

"You'll never let me live that down, will you?" the older girl asks, with something between wistfulness, awkward self-awareness, and amusement. She glances at Guts and says, "I was delirious when I was first brought here and... I may have told a few people I was going to burn the infirmary down."

"She didn't have hair and was all over maggots!" Vena says gleefully, having moved on to briskly washing and drying Hesri's hands.