She learned how he had once walked three days without food to bring back a lost child. She learned how the scar above his eyebrow came from a fall as a boy that his own father had teased him about for years afterward. Waikapi told her these things in the quiet stretches between fever checks, watching Naomi's face as she listened. Naomi understood the older woman was testing something in her that had nothing to do with medicine at all.
"You care for him already," Waikapi observed on the second night, not unkindly. "I see it in how you watch him breathe." "I care whether any patient of mine lives," Naomi said, though even as she said it, she knew it was not the whole truth. She suspected Waikapi knew it, too.
"In my town," Naomi admitted later into the low firelight, unprompted, surprising herself with her own honesty, "they call me witch because my mother taught me cures the church didn't sanction and because I never married. And because I know which plants ease a woman's pain in childbirth better than any doctor they've sent us. They come to my door at night the same as your men did and pretend in daylight they've never met me. I had begun to believe that was simply what I was for."
"A shameful necessity." She looked down at Ohetika's fevered face. "No one has ever thanked me for it. Not once, not out loud." "Then we will be the first," Waikapi said simply.
Something in Naomi's chest, some old and guarded thing, loosened for the first time in longer than she could remember. It was near dawn on the third day that the fever finally broke, Ohetika's skin cooling beneath her hand so suddenly that for one terrible heartbeat Naomi feared the worst. Then she found his pulse steady and strong beneath her fingers, his breathing settling into the deep, even rhythm of true sleep rather than fever's counterfeit. She sat back on her heels and wept quietly, the exhaustion of three sleepless days finally catching up with her all at once.
She had barely allowed herself that moment of relief when Mato burst into the lodge, breathless, his earlier suspicion of her entirely forgotten in the face of a graver threat. "Riders. Settler militia, a half day's ride out, moving fast. Word reached them that our chief lies weak and dying."
"They mean to strike before he recovers his strength, while we are still grieving and unguarded." Naomi's blood went cold because she knew exactly the kind of talk that bred such raids. She had heard it herself before she left, men working themselves into a fury over rumors and old grievances, needing only an excuse. "How many men do you have fit to defend the camp?"