We're half a mile past the crossroads when Kovren stops.
I almost walk into him. He's gone rigid, head turned toward the tree-line, one hand raised in a gesture that is unmistakably military. Stop. Be quiet.
I follow his gaze. A birch tree at the road's edge has been torn open. Not cut, not broken by wind. Torn. Four gashes raking down the trunk, deep enough to show white wood underneath the bark, each one as long as my forearm. The sap is still running.
Fresh.
Kovren looks at the marks for a long moment. Then at the forest beyond them. Then at me.
“Walk faster,” he says.
I don't argue.
We find another troubling sign half a mile down the road.
The cart is on its side in the ditch, one wheel splintered and listing badly on its axle, the whole thing half-buried in mud. A man sits against it, holding his leg at an angle that tells me everything I need to know before I'm close enough to see the bone. A woman is crouched beside him, one arm around a girlof maybe five or six who has her face pressed into her mother's shoulder.
The man sees Kovren first.
His whole body changes. I watch the blood drain from a face already gray with pain, watch his good leg brace against the ground, watch him try to push himself in front of his family with one arm while the other cradles a leg that won't hold weight.
“Stay back.” His voice cracks on it. “We don't have anything worth taking anymore. Just the cart. Take it.”
Kovren stops. Ten feet away. He doesn't move closer.
I step around him.
“I'm a healer.” I hold my hands up, palms out. “Your leg needs setting. Can I look?”
The man's eyes go from me to Kovren to me again. The woman's arm tightens around the child. The girl peeks out from her mother's coat, red-eyed, sniffling.
“He's with me,” I say. Not an explanation, exactly. Just a fact.
“What is he?”
“Tall.” I'm already kneeling, already pulling my pack off. “And useful, which is good, because I'm going to need someone to hold you still while I work on that leg. How long ago did it happen?”
The man blinks. The question pulls him out of the terror and into the pain, which is where I need him.
“Bandits. Took the horse and our goods. Cart tipped. My leg was underneath. Maybe two hours.”
Two hours with a compound fracture. He's lucky the bone didn't tear through an artery. He's luckier I'm here.
“What's your name?”
“Petre.”
“Petre, I'm Maren. This is going to hurt, and I'm sorry about that, but the sooner we start the sooner it's done.” I look over my shoulder. “Kovren. I need you.”
He hasn't moved. Still standing at his ten-foot distance, hands at his sides, making himself as unthreatening as nine feet of Bogatyr can manage. Which, honestly, isn't very.
He comes when I call. Two steps, three, and he's beside me, and I can feel the family flinch. All three of them. Even the girl, who probably doesn't understand what he is, but understands the size of him, the strangeness, the way he fills space.
“I need you to hold his shoulders,” I tell Kovren. “Flat. Still. When I set the bone, every part of him is going to try to move. Don't let it.”
He kneels. The ground dips under his weight. Even on his knees, his head is level with the standing woman's. She takes an involuntary step back. He positions his hands on Petre's shoulders, and I watch his fingers spread wide, careful, adjusting until the grip is firm without being crushing. Each of his hands covers Petre's shoulder entirely, thumb to fingertip. The same hands that could snap bone without trying, holding a stranger still as gently as they held my wrist last night.
Petre is rigid with terror. Not from the pain. From the massive hands on his shoulders, the face above him that isn't human, the amber eyes that are looking at him with something that might be concern.
