"I have done this exact thing for men in my own town who would have died within the week otherwise. I am not asking you to trust me blindly. I am asking you to let me show you and to judge me afterward by what you see with your own eyes." It was Ohetika himself, drifting in and out of the fever's grip, who settled it.
His eyes opened, glassy but lucid enough to take in the standoff around him. His voice, when it came, was rough but carried the unmistakable weight of a man used to being heeded. "Let her work," he said. "I would rather die trying to live than die refusing help out of pride."
Waikapi's shoulders dropped, not in defeat but in the particular relief of a healer grateful, despite herself, not to bear the whole weight of the decision alone. "Tell me what you need," she said to Naomi. From that moment on, she worked at her side with a competence that made Naomi grateful, deeply and immediately, for every year of the older woman's experience. The work that followed was neither swift nor gentle.
Naomi did what she could to make it bearable: boiled water, clean blades, poultices of yarrow and crushed juniper she had carried in her bag since leaving Miller's Bend, and a steady hand that did not shake even as Ohetika's jaw clenched hard enough to crack against the pain. Waikapi held his shoulders steady and murmured something low and rhythmic in her own tongue, not quite song and not quite prayer. Naomi found the sound of it settled her own nerves as much as it seemed to settle his. When the wound finally opened and drained, the relief in the lodge was almost a physical thing, a held breath finally released.
Even Mato, watching from the doorway, allowed something like awe to cross his face. Ohetika surfaced from the worst of the pain only once, his eyes finding Naomi's through the haze of fever and exhaustion. Though his voice was barely a thread of sound, she heard him clearly enough. "Who are you?" he rasped. "To come so far for a stranger?"
She did not have a ready answer, only pressed a cool cloth to his brow and told him to rest. But the question followed her through the long hours afterward because she was no longer entirely certain herself. Draining the wound was only the first fight. The fever that followed was its own battle.
For two days and two nights, Naomi barely left Ohetika's side, sponging him with cool water, coaxing broth and willow bark tea past lips gone cracked with fever. She watched the rise and fall of his chest through the dark hours with an attention that had long since stopped being purely professional. She learned in those long hours the shape of the man beneath the chief. Even delirious, he murmured concern for his people rather than himself.