They brought him in on a hide sling.

  Four men, moving fast, the kind of fast that meant someone had made a decision and committed to it before they'd fully stopped running. Theron heard them before he saw them — the particular sound of weight being carried urgently, feet working harder than they should have to, a low continuous sound from the center of it that was a man trying very hard not to make more noise than he was already making.

  He was up and at the edge of the healing spot before they reached him.

  The hunter's name was Juran. Theron knew him by face — mid-thirties, one of the regulars who came back from hunts with good hauls and told stories about it at the fire. He'd never had reason to come to Theron before. He had reason now.

  The break was bad. Theron saw it immediately, the way he'd learned to see things immediately in rooms where not seeing quickly enough had costs — the lower leg, below the knee, the bone not just broken but displaced, the skin tented grotesquely at the shin where the end of it had tried to come through. It hadn't quite, but close. The leg was wrong in the specific way that made people nearby look away.

  The four carriers did not look away. They were hunters. They'd seen things. But their faces had the careful blankness of men who were dealing with the sight of a friend's bone by not thinking about it directly.

  "Here," Theron said. He pointed at the flat ground beside the boulder. "Set him down. Slow."

  Dorn was there — he'd appeared again, which was simply something Dorn did in emergencies, materializing at the edge of things the way a good nurse appeared at the start of a difficult procedure without being paged. He said something to the carriers and they moved the hide sling carefully to the ground, lowering Juran in the practiced way of men who understood that gentle mattered.

  Juran's eyes found Theron immediately. Wide. Not panicked — he was past panic, into the place beyond it where the body understood something serious was happening and stopped wasting energy on fear. Just wide, and watchful, and waiting to see what the healer would do.

  The camp had gathered. It always gathered — sound traveled, people moved toward urgency. Theron registered them at the edge of his attention and set them aside. They were there. They were watching. It didn't matter right now.

  "I need space," he said, to Dorn.

  Dorn turned and said something short and authoritative and the nearest cluster of people moved back three steps. Not far. But enough.

  Theron knelt beside Juran and started working.

  The assessment took thirty seconds. Displaced fracture, tibia, two inches below the knee. The fibula probably cracked too — the swelling was wrong for it not to be, and there was a bruising already spreading up the calf that said something important about what had happened to the tissue underneath. The skin was intact, barely. The bone hadn't come through. That was the only thing in the situation's favor, and he intended to keep it that way.

  He looked up at Juran.

  "This will hurt," he said, in words Juran probably had and hand signals that left no room for misunderstanding. "I need you to stay still."

  Juran's jaw tightened. He nodded.

  "Very still," Theron said. He held up a hand, flat, rigid. Like this.

  Another nod.

  He looked around. He needed — straight branches, two of them, longer than the leg, roughly the same thickness. He'd prepared some in the past week, a habit of preparation that had felt excessive at the time and now felt like the most sensible thing he'd ever done. He found them behind the boulder and brought them over, set them beside Juran's leg.

  He needed to clean the wound site first. There was a gash on the shin above the break — impact wound, rock or ground, debris in it. He took his bone-handled knife and the small clay jar of water he kept boiled and covered, and he cleaned it with the focused thoroughness of a man who had watched infections kill people that broken bones hadn't.

  Juran made a sound through his teeth. Theron kept working.

  Then the hide strips, pre-soaked in water so they'd tie without slipping. He laid them out in the order he'd use them. Dorn had come close without being asked, close enough to hand things over, and Theron noted it and said nothing, just extended his hand when he needed something and trusted Dorn to read what he needed.

  Dorn read it correctly every time.

  This was the thing about Dorn that people missed if they only saw the bad jokes and the fish: he watched. He'd been watching Theron for weeks now, watching the way you watched something you'd decided was worth understanding. He'd retained. When Theron reached for the first hide strip, it was already in Dorn's hand, already at the right distance.

  He wasn't a trained assistant. He was something better — a man who paid attention.

  "Thank you," Theron said, quietly.

  Dorn said nothing. Just had the next strip ready.

  Setting the bone was the part that the crowd would remember.

  He'd told Juran twice more to stay still. He'd talked him through it the way he talked through difficult things — not with false reassurance but with information, the genuine step-by-step of what was about to happen, because people bore hard things better when they weren't surprised by them. Juran had listened, and nodded, and gripped the edge of the hide sling with both hands until his knuckles went pale.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  There was a version of this that was slow. This was not that version. A displaced fracture needed the bone moved back before the swelling closed the window for it, and the window was already narrowing, and slowness in this particular moment was not a mercy — it just extended the worst part.

  Theron found his grip. Both hands. Felt the position of the break through his palms the way fifteen years of surgery had taught him to feel things, the specific educated pressure of a surgeon's hands that his wife had always called unsettling and his patients had always called steady.

  He reduced the fracture.

  Juran screamed.

  It was a short sound. Controlled, as much as a man could control something like that — a hunter who'd bitten down on worse, probably, and knew that noise didn't help. But it went through the crowd like something physical. He heard people flinch behind him, heard a woman's voice catch, heard a child somewhere at the back that someone quickly shushed.

  He kept his hands exactly where they were until the bone was where it needed to be. Then he held it there and spoke to Dorn without looking up.

  "Branches. Now."

  The branches appeared. Dorn had them angled right, one on each side of the leg. Theron began to splint.

  He worked fast. Not rushed — fast the way precision was fast, each movement going where it was meant to go, no correction needed. The branches positioned, the hide strips wound and tied, the tension checked and rechecked. Not too tight — that was its own problem, cutting circulation, trading a break for something worse. Firm. Stable. Enough to hold the bone in place while the body did the work he couldn't do for it.

  Juran had stopped screaming. He was making a different sound now — the low, continuous, involuntary sound of a man at the edge of what he could hold, which was somehow harder to hear than the scream. But he hadn't moved. His hands were still locked on the hide sling. He was still.

  "Good," Theron said, to Juran specifically. "That's done. The worst part is done."

  He didn't know if Juran understood the words. But Juran looked at him, and something in his face changed — not relaxing, not yet, but hearing the tone of it.

  The crowd was very quiet.

  The sleepweed tea took time to brew properly, and while it brewed Theron talked to Juran. Not about anything in particular — he talked the way he'd always talked to patients coming out of the worst of a procedure, filling the air with sound so the silence didn't fill it with fear instead. He talked about the camp, about the morning light, about the fish Dorn had brought yesterday and whether the ones upstream were bigger or the ones downstream, which was a question he genuinely didn't know the answer to and had been meaning to ask someone.

  Juran didn't understand most of it. But Theron watched his breathing slow, fraction by fraction, as the voice in the air told him: the dangerous part is over. The person helping you is calm. You can afford to be a little less afraid now.

  He gave him the tea in careful doses. Not enough to put him under — enough to take the worst edge off, let the muscles around the break stop fighting against themselves. He watched Juran's face as he drank it. Watched the slight release when it started working, the shoulders coming down an inch, the grip on the sling loosening.

  "Keep still," Theron said again, with the gesture. "Don't move the leg. Days. Many days."

  Juran looked at his splinted leg and seemed to be doing arithmetic about how this was going to affect his life. He didn't look happy about the conclusion. But he nodded.

  "You'll walk," Theron said. He pointed at Juran's leg. Then he mimed walking — two fingers, moving forward. He did it slowly at first, then normal, then without thinking about it. He'd seen enough broken legs to know: set right, given time, the bone knit and people walked. Not always perfectly. Not always quickly. But they walked.

  Juran watched the mime. Something moved behind his eyes.

  "Walk," he repeated, carefully.

  "Yes."

  Dorn sat with Theron through the first stretch of night.

  The camp had mostly gone to sleep. Juran was out — not fully, surfacing occasionally with small sounds that Theron checked and read and decided were pain-normal rather than fever-starting. The fire was banked low. Everything was quiet in the way it only got quiet after something had happened and the day was finally done with it.

  "How is he?" Dorn asked.

  "Good. For now." Theron looked at the splint. He'd checked it four times. He was going to check it a fifth. "No fever yet. That's what I'm waiting for."

  Dorn nodded. He was quiet for a moment, which meant he was building toward something.

  "You have done this before," he said. Not a question.

  "Many times."

  "In your before-place."

  "Yes."

  Dorn looked at Juran, then at the splint, then at his own hands. He had a hunter's hands — scarred, thick-fingered, built for grip and force. He turned them over slowly.

  "My father," he said. "Broke the same. Long time past. Before you." He touched his own shin, the same place. "He did not walk after."

  Theron was quiet.

  "Mora did what she could," Dorn said. It wasn't an accusation. Just fact — the way Dorn delivered most facts, cleanly, without extra weight. "She didn't have your knowing. Nobody did." He looked at Juran. "Juran will walk."

  "He'll walk."

  Dorn nodded once, a small complete motion. Then he looked at the fire.

  "Good that you're here," he said.

  It was the same thing he'd said by the river, after Tira. Good that you're here. But this time it had different weight — not the relief of a particular moment, but something wider. Something that had been building for a while and was only now finding words.

  Theron looked at the fire too.

  "Yes," he said.

  Mora came just before dawn.

  He heard her before he saw her — the small particular sounds she made when she moved, the soft clink of the clay cup she carried almost everywhere. He'd learned them by now. He'd learned the sounds of most people in this camp, which happened when you paid attention and slept light and spent enough time in the same forty square feet of ground.

  She came to the edge of the healing spot. Looked at Juran — one long assessing look, the kind that covered everything, the kind that said she knew what she was reading even if she'd learned to read it differently than Theron had.

  Then she looked at him.

  He was sitting with his back against the rock, legs out, a position he'd been in long enough that his lower back had opinions about it. The clay cup she carried had something in it that smelled like warmth and something green and underneath it the faint sweetness of dried berries.

  She held it out.

  Not to Juran. To him.

  He took it. The clay was warm against his palms. He brought it to his face and let the smell arrive first, the way his wife had always told him to do with tea and wine, let it tell you what it is before you decide what to think about it. It smelled like a good decision.

  He drank.

  Mora watched him drink with the expression she wore when something was happening that she'd expected. Not quite satisfaction — more like the quiet recognition of a person who'd placed a guess correctly and was noting it without making much of it.

  He finished. Set the cup on the boulder.

  She nodded once.

  Then she turned and walked back toward her tent, her footsteps small and even in the pre-dawn quiet, and didn't look back.

  Theron sat with the empty cup and the cooling air and the sound of Juran breathing steadily beside him, and he thought about the distance Mora had just crossed and what it meant for a woman like her — a wisewoman, careful, slow to trust — to cross it.

  He'd earned something here. Not just with Juran's leg.

  With her.

  He put the cup down carefully and checked Juran's forehead.

  Cool. No fever.

  He sat back, finally, and let his eyes close.

  Good day, he thought.

  Then he slept.