Page 5

Ermin hums, noncommittal, and Indrie lets it be.

"Do you mind fetching my basket from the mountainside?" Indrie asks him. "I left it by the boulder near the tree line. There's yarrow and comfrey and feverfew in it and I need them before they wilt."

Ermin's eyebrows raise. "You want me to leave you alone here with him?"

Indrie's face softens and he squeezes Ermin's arm. "I don't think he's much of a threat to anyone right now, do you?"

Ermin bites his lip, but he seems to come to a conclusion. He nods and heads out. Indrie is left alone with his patient and the quiet of the clinic.

He goes to the front room and puts the kettle over the fire. He grinds willow bark and peppermint together in his mortar and pestle, working the mixture into a fine powder. He measures it into a cup and adds hot water and lets it steep. The smell fills the room, bitter and sharp and clean.

He checks on the man twice while the tea brews. The first time his breathing is steady and his pulse is even and the bandaging is holding. The second time Indrie leans in to press the back of his hand against the man's forehead, checking for fever, and the man's hand snaps up and catches him around the wrist.

For exactly one moment there's a surge of fear he has never quite gotten a handle on. This isn't the first time it has happened and it almost certainly won't be the last. Patients lash out sometimes and it's something he has always been prepared for. But his mind doesn't always supply him with a patient. Sometimes it supplies him with a hand closing on his wrist in the dark and a blade at his throat, and with being dragged through Valen by a man who had nothing left to lose.

Then the moment passes. It passes faster today than it has in the past, and that's something he finds comfort in. His heart is beating a little quicker than normal, but no quicker than anyone else's would be after a fright.

The man's grip is strong. His eyes are open and unfocused and his whole body is rigid with the tension of not knowing where he is or who is touching him. He's breathing hard through his nose and his jaw is clenched, and Indrie can feel the tremor running out of his hand and into the bones of Indrie's wrist. The man is far more frightened than Indrie is.

"You're safe," Indrie tells him, and his voice comes out low and even. "My name is Indrie. I'm a healer. You're in my clinic in Valen."

The man's eyes find his face and stay there, wild and searching. Indrie holds his gaze without flinching. He doesn't try to pull free. He keeps his body still and his expression open, and lets the man take what he needs from the steadiness in his face.

"You rode in on a horse this morning and you were wounded," Indrie continues, in the same quiet tone. "You're safe here. Nobody is going to hurt you."

The grip loosens by degrees. The man's fingers unclench one at a time, and Indrie can see the moment the fear shifts into something closer to exhaustion. Then the man lets go and sinks back against the pillow. He stares at the ceiling for a long moment with his chest rising and falling beneath the bandaging, and then he closes his eyes.

"There's tea when you want it," Indrie says. "It will help with the pain."

The man opens his eyes again. He turns his head on the pillow and looks at Indrie for a long time, with an expression Indrie can't read, as though he's trying to place something that doesn't fit. Then he nods, a single dip of his chin. Indrie goes to the front room and returns with the cup and helps him sit up enough to drink.

The man takes it in both hands. His fingers are large and rough against the clay, and they wrap around it as though the warmth is the only good thing that has happened to him in a very long time. He drinks slowly, wincing at the bitter edge of the willow bark. Indrie stands beside the bed with his hands folded in front of him and waits.

He doesn't ask the man's name. People offer what they're ready to offer. Some patients walk through his door and tell him everything, their name and their family and the story of the wound and the argument that caused it and the regret that followed. Others sit on his table and say nothing and let him work in silence, and the silence is its own kind of communication.

This man isn't ready. Indrie can see it in the set of his jaw, and in the way his eyes keep moving to the door and the window and back, mapping the room. It's a habit he has seen in warriors before. Whoever he is and wherever he came from, he arrived at the gates of Valen wounded and alone. That's enough for Indrie to know two things: that he needs help, and that he's afraid.

Indrie is familiar with both.

"You should sleep," Indrie tells him. "Your body needs rest to heal properly. I'll be in the next room if you need anything."

The man looks at him with that searching expression.

"Thank you, Indrie," he manages, his voice rough. He settles back against the pillow and closes his eyes.

Indrie pulls the blanket higher and adjusts the pillow beneath his head. He leaves the cup within reach on the small table beside the bed.

He goes to the front room and stands by the fire and lets out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. He turns his wrist over and rubs his thumb across the inside of it. There's nothing there worth worrying about, no ache and no mark, only the memory of pressure. The man didn't hurt him, not even by accident.

He feeds the fire another log and begins sorting the instruments he used, laying them out for cleaning. The shears go in the basin, the needle in the alcohol, the forceps wiped clean and returned to their place. He doesn't rush. Rushing is how mistakes happen.

This is his clinic. He scrubbed these floors and organized these shelves and built this place from a dusty abandoned building into something alive and necessary, and every patient who walks through his door walks out better than they came in. Morgan gave him this. Eskil brought him here. But Indrie made it his, and that distinction matters to him more than he has ever been able to say out loud.

And he isn't afraid of the man sleeping ten feet away. That's the part he keeps turning over. He has had his back to that doorway for half an hour and thought nothing of it. He let a stranger with a soldier's hands close a grip around his wrist, and he talked him down out of it without his voice shaking once. He goes looking for the fear on purpose now, prodding at the edges of the day to see where it gives. It simply isn't there. The door is standing open. Anyone at all could walk through it. His pulse stays exactly where it is.

And yet he hasn't slept in this building after dark in over a month.

He has always told himself the reason is the clinic. That the walls remember what happened inside them, and he has no interest in lying awake listening to the building settle. It's a reasonable explanation and he has never had cause to examine it closely. But he's standing in the middle of that same room in the middle of the day, with the same door propped open and a strange warrior bleeding in his bed, and he's perfectly calm. The explanation isn't holding together as neatly as it did this morning.