As best she could tell with her shadow falling across him, he looked to be a strongly-built man in his prime, a head or so taller than she and broad in the shoulders. He wore the sort of loose tunic and leggings common in both village and farm. Hair, glinting red-gold where the light from inside her cottage touched it, tumbled over his face, masking his features.

He wasn't dead. She knew that from the warmth of his cheek against her bare ankle. Nor would Oonat have kept up that low, barely audible growl for a corpse.

Heron sighed again and bent over, mentally apologizing to her back muscles for how they were going to feel in the morning after dragging this fellow inside. She lay the unconscious man beside the hearth and rolled him on his back.

He was younger than she'd thought, though an odd redness, like sunburn, etched a mask on his face. His pulse, though strong, was slow. She touched skin moist with a fine sheen and fever-hot, lips dry and slack. She rolled back his eyelids to reveal irises the color of the sea. His pupils contracted symmetrically to light. His skull felt intact, his spine supple.

Heron opened the laces of his tunic. Healed, whitened scars marked his upper arms, one on his ribs. Sword cuts, she guessed, touching the callouses on his palms. He wore a pendant, a piece of polished rose quartz, drilled with a hole and looped with a leather cord.

She placed her ear against the bare, almost hairless skin of his chest, to listen better. Air whispered through the delicate tissues of the lungs. The heart, like distant thunder, beat too slow, too strong.

There was nothing Heron could point to, other than the elevated body heat, no sign by which she might diagnose what was wrong with this man. Yet she knew as surely as she herself breathed, that he was dying.