I feel every tremor in her body. Every breath she tries to keep even and cannot.
The camp should be closer. It feels impossible that it is not yet.
Then a horn sounds through the storm. Faint. Directional. Camp call.
Good.
I angle toward it.
Shapes begin to appear in pieces. A tent line. A low wall of weighted hides. Two warriors running bent double with ropes around their bodies so the storm cannot take them if a gust throws them off their feet. One spots me and shouts. The sound disappears. The recognition does not.
The outer shelter line opens just enough for me to force us through.
The difference is immediate and brutal. Wind, grit, and noise still there. But not the full killing force of open ground. Warriors close the line behind us at once and move to take Keandra.
I snarl before they even touch her.
No one argues. They drop their hands back instantly.
I carry her myself through the half-secured center of camp, through shouting and moving bodies and low smoke and chaos that parts around me.
Oshara appears at the edge of my tent as if she had been waiting there for the exact second I broke back through the camp line. Her eyes cut over Keandra first, then me, then the blood and grit and cuts on both of us. She says something sharp to the women behind her, and the tent is opened wider.
I duck inside without slowing.
The heat of the brazier hits first. Then the quieter air. Then the realization that we are inside, and Keandra is breathing.
Only then does my body begin to unclench enough for finer awareness to return.
I set her down on the furs carefully, crouching immediately in front of her before she can try to rise. The hide falls away around us in a shower of grit. Her face is streaked, hair half full of dust,lips dry, small cuts visible across one cheek and along her hands where she must have braced against the ground.
My chest goes savage at the sight.
I touch her face. Her throat. Her arms. Fast, efficient, checking for deeper cuts, for broken skin, for anything the storm might have done beyond the obvious.
“Look at me.”
She does, though her eyes are too wide and dazed.
“Where are you hurt?”
For one horrible heartbeat, I think she may say nowhere simply because she does not yet understand the question. Then she swallows. “My hands. My face. I think. I don’t know.”
Good enough. Alive enough to answer.
I turn and bark for water, cloth, salve, and a clean inner wrap. The women already hovering at the edge of the tent move fast. Oshara enters only as far as needed to set down the basin herself before stepping back out again without comment.
Smart.
This is mine.
I take the cloth, wet it, and begin cleaning the grit from Keandra’s face with hands that would be steady in battle and are not steady now.
She flinches at the first pass.
My jaw tightens. “Don’t move.”
The words are rougher than I mean. My whole body is too full of storm and fear and the aftermath of carrying her through it.
