“He's not going to hurt you,” I say. “Look at me. Focus on me.”
“Maren.” Kovren's voice, low. “Quickly.”
He's right. The swelling is getting worse. I feel along the break, map it with my fingers. Clean fracture, displaced but not shattered. I can work with this.
“Petre. Deep breath. Now.”
I set the bone.
Petre screams. His body bucks, every muscle firing at once, and Kovren holds him. Steady. Immovable. Not a flinch, not ashift, just that absolute stillness that keeps a thrashing man from driving broken bone through his own flesh.
The girl starts crying. The mother pulls her close, turns her face away, but she's watching me over the child's head with eyes that are calculating, not panicked. Measuring what I'm doing. Whether I know what I'm doing.
“Almost done.” I'm splinting now, working fast, binding the leg between two straight branches I stripped while I was talking. Cloth strips torn from what's left of my bandages — no alcohol to clean them with, no herbs to pack the wound, just cloth and sticks and whatever skill buys me. “Kovren, ease up. Slowly.”
He releases Petre's shoulders with the same care he used to hold them. Petre slumps back against the cart, panting, face slick with sweat, but the leg is straight. The bone is set. The color in his face is shifting from gray to merely awful.
“The cart,” the woman says. First words she's spoken. Her voice is steady. Flat. The voice of someone holding everything together by will alone. “Can you help with the cart?”
She's not looking at me. She's looking at Kovren.
He glances at me. I nod.
He stands, walks to the overturned cart, and lifts it.
Not struggles with it. Not heaves it.Lifts it. One hand on the bed, one on the frame, and it comes up out of the mud with a sucking sound and settles onto its wheels. The damaged one wobbles but holds.
The woman stares. The girl stops crying, mouth open, tears still wet on her cheeks.
“That wheel won't last,” Kovren says. “But it might hold up if you don’t go far.”
He says it to the woman. Not to me. Direct, practical, the first time I've heard him speak to someone other than me since the ditch.
The woman nods. Once. Sharp. “We're headed back to Gorvani. It's not far.”
“How far?” I ask.
“Half a day. Maybe less.” She looks at Petre, at his splinted leg, back at me. “They need a healer there. The last one died in the spring. People have been going without.”
A village without a healer. A village with supplies I desperately need. “Can he ride in the cart?”
“If someone pulls it.”
Kovren is already moving. He lifts Petre, one arm under his back, one under his knees, and sets him in the cart bed so carefully that Petre barely grunts. Then he looks at the cart tongue, the harness meant for a mule or a horse and wraps one hand around it.
“I'll pull,” he says.
“You have four wounds held closed with my stitches and a fever I barely got under control last night.”
“I'll pull,” he says again. Not arguing. Stating.
The woman hasn't looked away from him. The fear is still there, in the way she holds her daughter, in the way she keeps her body between the child and him. But something else is there too. Not trust. Reassessment.
I crouch beside the girl, who's watching me from behind her mother's leg. She has enormous brown eyes and a scratch across one cheek from the cart tipping.
“That looks like it hurts,” I say, pointing at the scratch.
She nods. Solemn.
