The camp, when they reached it near dawn, was larger and more orderly than anything the stories back home had prepared her for. Lodges were arranged with purpose, cook fires already tended. A stillness lay over the whole place that Naomi recognized instantly as the particular quiet of a community holding its breath. Word of her arrival had run ahead of her, and by the time she dismounted, a small crowd had gathered, faces ranging from cautious curiosity to open distrust.
An older woman stepped forward first, tall and unhurried, her eyes assessing Naomi with a thoroughness that made her feel measured down to the bone. "I am Waikapi," she said in careful English. "I have tended Ohetika since he was a boy with a fever. I do not know why my medicine should suddenly need help from a stranger who is not even one of our own healers."
"I don't doubt your skill," Naomi said honestly. "I only know what a sealed wound does to a body when the poison beneath it has nowhere to go. If I'm wrong, you've lost nothing but an hour. If I'm right, you may still lose your chief to pride instead of the wound itself."
Something flickered in Waikapi's dark eyes, insult perhaps, or the beginning of respect. Naomi could not yet tell which. After a long moment, the older woman turned and led her toward the largest lodge without another word. Naomi understood, in the language two healers share regardless of what tongue they were raised speaking, that it was permission.
Chief Ohetika lay on a pallet of furs. Even in the low lodge light, Naomi could see at once how grave his condition was: skin gray beneath its natural warmth, breath shallow and fast, a fever sweat soaking through the blanket someone had piled over him against a chill that came from the poison in his blood and not the cold outside. He was younger than she'd expected for a man leading a whole people, broad through the shoulders even wasted as he was by fever. His face, even in sickness, held an unmistakable dignity, as though some part of him refused to surrender the bearing of a leader even while his body fought for its life.
She knelt and examined the wound at his side, and her worst fear was confirmed within moments. The flesh around it was hot and taut, the skin sealed shut over a pocket of infection with nowhere left to drain, exactly as she had seen twice before and lost a man to once when she had been called too late. "I need it opened," she said to Waikapi. "Now, tonight, or the poison spreads to his blood and no medicine on earth will matter after that."
Waikapi's jaw tightened. Behind her in the doorway, a young warrior Naomi would later learn was named Mato had gone rigid with suspicion, his hand resting near the knife at his belt. "You would cut him further," he said, "when he is already dying of a cut?" "I would save his life," Naomi said, meeting his eyes without flinching, because she had learned long ago that fear shown to frightened men only fed their fear further.