Maren
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 girl of 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.
“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 a shift, 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.
“Want me to clean it? I've got a salve that smells terrible but works.”
She looks up at her mother. The woman hesitates, then nods. The girl steps forward, chin trembling, and holds still while I dab salve on the scratch with the tip of my finger.
“There. You're tougher than most of my patients.”
She doesn't smile, but her chin stops trembling.
We walk. Kovren pulls the cart, and the harness creaks against his grip but holds. Petre lies in the back, leg elevated on a folded blanket, face tight with pain but conscious. The woman walks beside the cart, the girl on her hip, watching the road ahead.
I walk beside Kovren.
His breathing is heavier than it should be.
The fever I beat back last night is climbing again with the exertion, and pulling the cart is costing him.
I see it in the set of his jaw, in the sweat darkening the collar of his leather armor, in the slight hitch in his stride that he's trying to hide and can't.
“You don't have to do this,” I say quietly. “We could rig something else to get Petre. Find a branch, make a travois.”
“It's fine.”
“Your definition of fine and mine are very different.”
“Noted.”
I watch his hands on the cart tongue. The knuckles are white. But the grip is controlled. Measured.
“You're good at that,” I say.
“Pulling carts?”
“Being careful.” I glance at him. “With the man. Lifting him. You didn't jar the leg once.”
He doesn't answer for a few steps. Then: “I've had practice. Being careful.”
“Because you have to be.”
“Yes.”
“Because if you're not careful, you break things.”
“Yes.”
I think about that. About what it means to live your whole life calibrating every touch, every grip, every movement, because the alternative is destruction. About how exhausting that must be.
“For what it's worth,” I say, “you're good at it.”
I reach up and touch his arm, just above the elbow. A brief pressure, the kind of touch I'd give any patient. Reassurance. Professional.
My hand stays a beat longer than it should. The heat of his skin seeps through the leather, and I pull back.
He looks down at me. His eyes are warm in a way that has nothing to do with the fever, and I hold the look longer than I mean to before turning back to the road.
He doesn't say anything. But his stride evens out, and the hitch disappears for a while.
The girl falls asleep on her mother's shoulder. Petre dozes in the cart, waking every time a wheel hits a stone, grimacing but quiet. The woman walks and watches the road and doesn't speak.
When the walls of Gorvani appear through the afternoon haze, the woman stops. Turns to Kovren.
“Thank you,” she says. Stiff. Uncomfortable. But she says it.
He nods. Doesn't speak. But his posture changes, and I think it might be the first time someone has thanked him for anything in a long time.
Gorvani's gates are ahead. Whatever's waiting behind them, we'll deal with it.
But right now, walking beside him on this road, with a sleeping child and a grateful woman and a man whose leg I set because that's what I do, something feels different.
He didn't just carry the weight. He fit into the work.
Followed my lead without questioning it, without posturing, without making it about the oath.
He just helped.
I don't say anything about it. But I notice.