Sora had opinions about the herb layout.

  This was not new. Sora had opinions about most things — the correct way to dry feverbark, the best time of day to gather from the forest edge, why Dorn's fish jokes were less funny than Dorn believed them to be. She expressed these opinions with the efficient confidence of someone who had decided, some weeks ago, that Theron valued her input and had been correct about this.

  The herb layout, specifically, she'd been working on since morning.

  "Bleedleaf here," she said, moving it two inches to the left. She said it in her language first, then in his, then pointed at the spot to make sure all bases were covered.

  "It was already there," Theron said.

  "Here-here." She pointed at the new position. Then at the old position. "Not here."

  The difference was approximately two inches. He looked at both positions carefully, because she was usually right about these things and it cost him nothing to check.

  She was right. Two inches closer to his right hand, which was the hand he reached with first. He'd been placing it slightly too far to the center without noticing.

  "Good," he said.

  She nodded with the satisfaction of a person who had known they were right and was glad to have it confirmed. Then she went back to sorting the feverbark bundles, turning each one to check for rot with a thoroughness that he'd had to teach exactly once before she absorbed it completely and applied it without being asked.

  He watched her for a moment. Three weeks since Dorn's lesson, give or take. She was here every morning now, either before him or arriving within minutes of him, settling into the healing spot with the ease of someone who had decided it was partially hers — which, he'd come to accept, it was.

  She'd earned it.

  He picked up the unknown plant from the far corner — purple-veined leaves, still being tested — and turned it over, checking the edges for any change since yesterday.

  "That one," Sora said, not looking up from the feverbark.

  "Still testing."

  "Still." She said the word the way she said all of his words she'd collected — carefully, with the precision of someone storing it correctly. She had a good ear. Better than his at this point, which she found satisfying and he found entirely fair.

  "Still," he confirmed.

  She nodded and went on sorting.

  It was an ordinary morning.

  That was what he thought about later — just how ordinary it was, the specific texture of it. The fire down to working coals, the camp moving through its early routines around them. A woman calling to someone across the central area in the universal tone of I've already told you once. Hunters heading out in a loose group, checking spears. Two children chasing something small and fast that kept escaping them.

  The river sounds carrying up from the bank. Children in the shallows, the happy aimless noise of a warm enough morning and nothing pressing to do.

  Then the noise changed.

  It didn't stop — that was what registered first. It just changed quality, going from loose and directionless to something with an edge to it. High. Urgent. Wrong.

  He was already standing.

  Sora was right behind him when he ran.

  The shallows were chaos.

  A woman kneeling in the water with a child in her arms, the child's face the wrong color — red going toward something darker — her small hands scrabbling at her own throat. The thin terrible whistle of air moving through something that was almost blocked. Other women crowded around, pounding her back, trying to reach into her mouth, doing the things people did when they were frightened and had no other tools.

  Nothing was working. The child's struggles were weakening.

  Theron pushed through.

  "Move. Let me see." Both languages at once. He'd stopped thinking about which one he was using in moments like this — the words that came out were whatever came out, and people understood the tone when the words fell short.

  They moved. He knelt beside the child and his hands were already reading the situation — the specific quality of the wheeze, the color, the clawing hands, the consciousness still there but thinning.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Partial obstruction. Airway clear enough to stay alive, not clear enough to stay that way much longer.

  The mother looked at him. He'd seen that look across fifteen years of trauma work — the moment when a family member identified the calm person as the one who might be able to do something. All of it in her eyes without a single word.

  "I have her," he said, which came out in his own language, but he put his hand on the child's shoulder and let the steadiness of it say what the words couldn't.

  He positioned behind her. Modified Heimlich — child's smaller ribcage, adjusted pressure, controlled thrust —

  Once.

  The child gagged, still wheezing. Nothing moved.

  Come on.

  Again, harder.

  Still nothing. Her face was darker now, struggles going quiet in the wrong way, the way that meant the body was running out of argument.

  Dorn appeared at the edge of the crowd — he always appeared at the edges of things that mattered, it was simply something he did. Theron met his eyes and looked at the child's shoulders. Dorn moved without a word, gripped her steady.

  Theron reached into the child's mouth.

  Two fingers, carefully, following the air passage. Not rushing. He could feel the crowd's tension behind him like a physical thing and he set it down and worked — the bone was there, smooth, angled wrong, wedged in the specific bad way that made it hold instead of dislodge.

  There. Got you.

  He worked his fingers around it. The child gagged. Dorn held her. The mother made a sound he didn't let himself hear.

  He gripped the bone between two fingers and pulled.

  It came free.

  The child pulled in a breath so large and sudden it seemed impossible — all the air she'd been owed arriving at once. Then coughing, hard and healthy, and then crying, the loud indignant kind, the kind that meant I'm frightened and I want to go home and was one of the better sounds he knew.

  He sat back on his heels in the cold shallows.

  He looked at the bone between his fingers. Small. Curved slightly. He set it on the surface of the water and watched the current take it somewhere it couldn't hurt anyone.

  The mother had her daughter, pressing her face into the child's hair, sobbing. The women around them closed in, helping them to the bank. The crowd exhaled — not literally, but the sound of it shifted back into something human-shaped.

  Dorn put a brief hand on Theron's shoulder. Then he waded out and gave the family their space.

  Theron stayed in the shallows for another moment. His hands were steady. They were always steady during. It was after that they developed opinions.

  He stood and waded out and sat on the bank.

  Sora was already there.

  She'd positioned herself a little way down from the water's edge, away from the cluster of people around the mother and child. Not hovering. Just present, in the way she'd learned to be present at the healing spot — close enough to be part of it, far enough to not be in the way.

  She'd watched the whole thing. He knew by her face — not the ordinary Sora face, which ran through expressions quickly and efficiently like a person working through a task list. This was stiller. Something had landed and she was still holding it.

  He sat beside her. Didn't say anything yet. Let the moment be what it was.

  The child's crying was settling now, going from frightened to tired, the sound of someone who'd been through something and was coming out the other side. The mother's voice soft underneath it, the specific low murmur that was the same in any language.

  "Her name?" Theron asked.

  "Tira," Sora said. "Six years." She held her hand out low — small, that height. "Lena is mother."

  He nodded. He didn't know Lena well, but he knew her the way he was starting to know everyone — by face, by the pattern of where she sat at the evening fire, by the children that moved around her.

  Sora was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Lena had other child. Before." She touched her own chest, let her hand fall. She didn't have all the words for it yet, but she had enough. "Sick. Did not live. Two winters."

  Theron absorbed this.

  "You were not here then," Sora said. She looked at Tira and Lena, still on the bank, the child calming in increments. "Now you here."

  He looked at her. She wasn't being philosophical about it — it was just the plain shape of the thing, stated plainly, the way Dorn stated facts. He'd noticed she'd picked that up from Dorn, that particular plainness. Or maybe it was just how she was.

  "Tira will be fine," he said. "Her throat will hurt for a few days. Then fine."

  Sora nodded. She'd already known that, probably — she'd been watching him work long enough to read the outcomes. She was nodding at something else.

  She looked at his hands. He'd rinsed them in the river, the automatic post-procedure reflex. She looked at them the way she looked at things she was deciding how to file.

  "I learn that?" she asked.

  He looked at her. Twelve years old, sitting on a riverbank in a world without any of the tools he'd been trained with, asking if she could learn to pull a fishbone out of a child's throat with two fingers and no margin for error.

  "Yes," he said. "When you're ready."

  "When ready?"

  He thought about it honestly. "When your hands know what to feel for. When you stay calm when it's bad." He paused. "You stayed calm today."

  She considered this. He could see her placing it somewhere — not the compliment, she didn't collect compliments particularly, but the information. The criteria. Something to work toward.

  "I held her still," she said. Not a question. She'd been across the crowd, hadn't she — he tried to remember. Yes. When he'd looked for Dorn she'd already been there, getting into position on the other side without being asked, holding the child's shoulders steady while he worked.

  He hadn't told her to do that. She'd read what was needed and done it.

  "You did," he said. "I needed that."

  She absorbed this with the quiet satisfaction of someone whose help had been real rather than adjacent. Then she leaned slightly, the way she sometimes did at the end of a long morning at the healing spot — not quite against his arm, just near it, the particular Sora proximity that meant she was done thinking and was simply being present.

  The river moved. The camp resettled around them. Tira's crying had stopped entirely now, replaced by the sound of a child being carried home.

  "Theron," Sora said, after a while.

  "Mm."

  "She will remember. Tira." She looked at him with those level eyes. "When old. She will tell — man pulled the bone out. With fingers." She made the gesture, two fingers, careful. "She will tell children."

  He hadn't thought about that.

  He sat with it for a moment — Tira at whatever age telling her children about a morning at the river and a man she barely remembered, the calm in his hands, the breath that arrived when the bone came free.

  "Maybe," he said.

  "Yes," Sora said, with the confidence of someone who considered the matter settled.

  They sat there a while longer, watching the river run silver in the late morning light, and didn't need to say anything else.