The tent flap dropped behind Drevha and it was just the two of them.
Daniel kept his hand on the shoulder. The warmth was still there, faint and present, and he was still thinking it as adrenaline because the alternative required a framework he didn't have yet. He focused on what he could work with: the joint, the angle, the way she was holding the arm slightly away from her body with the careful stillness of someone who had learned exactly how much movement was too much.
She was waiting.
He moved around to face her properly for the first time and got the full effect of her, which was considerable.
She was tall even sitting down, the armor adding architecture to what was already an angular, precise frame. Her hair was ink-black and pulled up in a severe knot secured with what appeared to be a long metal pin, two straight strands framing a face that had been built for severity — high cheekbones, a strong jaw, a scar running clean through her left eyebrow that she had clearly never felt the need to explain to anyone. Her eyes were a pale grey, almost silver, light enough to look cold at rest, and they were currently resting on Daniel with the focused patience of someone who had been waiting longer than they found acceptable and was not going to say so.
She did not look like a person who complained about pain.
She looked like a person who considered pain a logistical inconvenience and had moved on.
"Right," Daniel said. He sounded, he thought, like a man who did this every day. He was going to keep sounding like that until it stopped working or something better occurred to him. "I'm going to need you to tell me exactly when it happened and what you felt."
She looked at him.
"The shoulder," he added, in case that was ambiguous.
"Third match," she said. "Overhead strike, blocked at the wrong angle. Felt the joint shift."
"And you finished the match."
"Yes."
He did not ask why, because the answer was visible in the way she was sitting. "How many more matches today?"
"One."
"You're planning to compete."
This was apparently not a question worth answering. She waited.
Daniel took a breath and turned to the supply station, buying himself three seconds to think by appearing to assess his options. He opened the satchel. The contents were as unidentifiable as they'd been on the road, but he had the advantage now of being in a medical context, which meant he could at least make educated guesses about categories. The roll of bandaging. The metal instruments, one of which looked like it might be used for examination purposes in the way a tongue depressor looked like it was used for examination purposes. The glass vials.
He picked up the vial that was closest to the color of something anti-inflammatory and set it next to the bench where she could see it, which would do nothing except make him look like he had a plan.
He turned back.
"Pain scale," he said. "One to ten."
Her expression did not change. "Irrelevant."
This was going very well.
"I need a baseline," he said, which sounded medical enough that he believed it slightly himself. "For comparison after treatment."
A pause. She appeared to be deciding whether this was a reasonable request or a waste of time. "Four," she said, with the tone of someone making a concession they found unnecessary.
"Good." He pulled the examination tool from the satchel and held it in a way that suggested he was about to use it purposefully. He had no idea what it was for. It was approximately the size and shape of a blunt stylus, smooth metal, and one end was slightly wider than the other, which gave him nothing useful to work with. He set it back down. "I'm going to examine the joint directly. Tell me if the pressure changes the pain level significantly."
She nodded once, a minimal acknowledgment, and he moved to her side and put both hands on her shoulder.
The joint was — he could feel it. That was the thing that kept happening, the thing he was trying not to think too hard about because thinking too hard about it might make it stop: when he put his hands on her injury, he could feel it in a way that went past pressure and heat into something more like understanding. The shoulder was wrong in a specific way, sitting a fraction out of place with the surrounding tissue pulled tight to compensate, and his hands knew where it should be.
He said, "The qi flow seems a little restricted here," because he'd heard the word qi approximately twice since arriving and it was the most medical-sounding thing available to him, and pressed carefully along the line of the joint the way his hands were telling him to press.
Orrath's breath changed. Not much. A slight controlled adjustment, the kind of breath that happened when something unexpected occurred and the person experiencing it had good reason not to show it.
"Does that—"
"Continue," she said.
He continued.
He worked along the shoulder with both hands, following the sense of where the blockage was, pressing where it told him to press, which happened to be a sequence of points that he would later learn corresponded precisely to a classical technique for clearing meridian restriction around a traumatic joint displacement. He did not know this. He was going on instinct and the peculiar warmth in his palms and the fact that every time he pressed somewhere useful she went very slightly still in a way that was different from her general stillness.
"There's some — tightness here," he said, pressing along a line he couldn't have named. "In the — surrounding pathway."
She said nothing.
"I'm going to work on that before I address the joint itself." This sounded like something a person would say. He was fairly confident it was also correct, in the way he was occasionally confident about things without knowing why, which was a pattern he was going to think about later when he had bandwidth.
He kept working.
The warmth in his palms had deepened. He was aware of it the way you were aware of a sound that had been in the background for a while and suddenly your attention found it — steady and present and resonant in a way that seemed to go past the physical. It moved from his hands into the shoulder and he tracked it, automatically, the way you'd track the progress of a knot loosening under pressure.
He pressed one final point at the back of the joint, where the sense of wrongness was most concentrated.
Something shifted.
He felt it clearly, a release, like a door opening that had been stuck, and it went through his hands and through the shoulder and through her and the warmth spiked once and then settled into something even and quiet. He didn't notice the spike. He was watching the shoulder and the shoulder looked right now, the line of it correct in a way it hadn't been when she sat down.
She did not react.
He waited.
She moved the arm. Slowly at first, testing, then in a wider arc, then overhead, the full range, and set it back down and looked at the wall opposite.
"The pain level," he said.
A pause.
"Zero," she said, which was the most uncertain he'd heard her sound. She was looking at the arm like it was providing information she hadn't expected.
Daniel nodded as if this was the intended outcome, which it was, sort of, and began putting instruments back in the satchel so he had something to do with his hands.
"I'd recommend avoiding overhead strikes for—" He tried to remember what a reasonable recovery timeline would be and failed. "A day or two."
She stood.
He waited for her to say something. She didn't. She tested the shoulder once more, a small private check, and turned and walked out of the tent without a word, the tent flap falling closed behind her.
Daniel stood for a moment.
He looked at the treatment bench.
He sat down heavily on the floor.
Not on the bench. The floor, because the floor was already there and getting to the bench would have required more structural commitment than he currently had. He sat with his back against the supply station and his hands in his lap and focused on breathing, which was working fine, he just wanted to confirm that.
His palms were still warm.
He looked at them. Turned them over. Nothing visible. Just his hands, same as they'd always been, slightly cold-prone in winter, nothing remarkable.
He'd done something to that shoulder. He was not entirely sure what. He was fairly sure it was the right thing, given that she'd left with full range of motion and an expression that suggested she was revising her expectations, but the mechanism was not clear to him and the warmth was not something he had an explanation for and the way the release had felt, that specific sensation of something clicking back into correct alignment under his hands, was not a sensation he'd felt before today.
Later, he told himself. The same way he'd been tabling things all morning. Later, when the immediate situation wasn't actively ongoing.
He looked at the satchel.
The tent flap opened.
Drevha appeared in it, clipboard in hand, checking something, moving at the same steady, efficient pace she'd been moving at since he arrived. She looked at the empty bench. She looked at Daniel on the floor. Her expression registered this, filed it under healers are occasionally like this, and moved on.
"Good work," she said. "Four more to go."
Daniel opened his mouth.
She was already gone, the tent flap dropping back into place behind her, footsteps receding at pace.
He sat on the floor in the empty tent.
He looked at the satchel sitting on the supply station.
He said, "Four more," to the empty air, in the tone of a man confirming information he had been given and had not yet worked out what to do with.
The tent was quiet.
Outside, distantly, the crowd noise rose and fell.
He got up off the floor.