He'd been meaning to do it properly for a while.

  Not the way it had been going — Sora appearing at the healing spot each morning and asking questions as they occurred to her, and him answering as he worked, and her collecting information in whatever order it arrived. That had been fine. That had been how it started, and it had produced a twelve-year-old who could identify nine plants correctly, clean a surface wound without being told to, and hold a child steady during a crisis without flinching.

  But it wasn't a curriculum. It was accumulation, which was different.

  He'd been thinking about Dr. Okafor lately — sharp in his memory the way everyone was sharp now, her face clear as a photograph. She'd had a saying she repeated every first day of a new rotation, standing at the front of the room with her arms crossed and her eyes moving across the residents like she was already sorting them: "You can learn medicine by surviving it, or you can learn it by understanding it. One of those produces doctors. The other produces people who've seen a lot and still can't tell you why."

  He looked at Sora across the healing spot, currently re-rolling hide strips with the focused energy of someone who had been waiting for him to say it was time to begin.

  She'd been waiting. She always knew when something was coming.

  "Today," he said, "we do this properly."

  She looked up immediately. "Properly?"

  "From the beginning. Everything in order." He sat across from her and pulled the herb bundles toward him. "Not just questions. A system."

  She put down the hide strips. Her whole posture shifted — not excited, exactly, but attentive in a different way. The way she got when something was being offered rather than just happening.

  "System," she repeated, filing the word.

  "System," he confirmed. "Ready?"

  She crossed her legs and put her hands in her lap. Obviously I am ready, what do you think I've been doing.

  He started.

  He went back to feverbark first, even though she knew it.

  "Tell me feverbark," he said. Not what is feverbark — she'd answer that in one line and move on. Tell me. Everything.

  She looked at it for a moment, then began. She named it, named its use, named the preparation — boil in water, drink warm, not cold. Then she paused, thinking, and added: the bark from younger branches worked faster than old bark, and the smell when it dried told you if it had gone bad before the color did.

  He hadn't taught her that last part.

  "Where did you learn that?" he asked.

  "Mora," she said simply.

  He sat with this. Sora had been watching Mora the way she watched him — quietly, from a small distance, collecting. Of course she had. He'd have been surprised if she hadn't.

  "Good," he said. "That goes in the system too. When Mora teaches you something, you tell me. When I teach you something, you tell Mora." He paused, making sure she was following. "Two teachers. More knowing."

  She nodded slowly, working through the logic of it. Then she said, "Mora say same?"

  "I'll ask her."

  She accepted this with the practical patience of someone who understood that some things required negotiation between adults before they became real. "Next one," she said.

  They went through the full set. Every herb he had, one at a time, and he asked her not just what it was but what it did and why and what happened when you used too much and what happened when you used it wrong and what you'd look for to know if it was working.

  Some of it she had. Some of it she didn't — she'd answer up to the edge of her knowledge and then go still and wait for him to fill in the rest, which she then repeated back once to confirm she had it, and he believed her because she hadn't gotten one wrong that she'd claimed to know.

  The sleepweed question she answered with the flat accuracy she'd developed for dangerous things: small amount, rest; wrong amount, pain; too much, no waking up. She'd absorbed the severity of it early and kept it close. He appreciated that about her — she didn't minimize the things that deserved weight.

  "Bleedleaf," he said, holding it up.

  "Bleeding. Outside wound. Pack it or make a paste." She tilted her head. "But not the gut."

  He paused. "What?"

  "Dorn say. Bleedleaf for outside. Not inside. If man hurt inside, bleedleaf in the belly—" she made a face that communicated both wrong and bad outcome efficiently.

  He stared at her. Dorn had told her that. Dorn, who had watched Theron treat enough wounds in the past months to have picked up the principle — topical hemostasis was not the same as internal bleeding management — and had apparently passed it to Sora in whatever conversation had happened at some point that Theron hadn't been there for.

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  He made a note to have a longer conversation with Dorn about what else he'd been quietly observing and teaching.

  "Correct," Theron said. "Dorn is right."

  Sora looked quietly satisfied in the way she looked when information she'd received from one source got confirmed by another. Building the cross-references. He recognized the habit because he'd had it himself at twenty-two, that particular pleasure of a fact finding its second source.

  "Smart man," she said, about Dorn.

  "Don't tell him," Theron said. "He already knows."

  She grinned and moved to the next herb.

  The wound-cleaning came after midday.

  He'd been building toward it deliberately — theory first, then practice, which was the sequence that had made sense in medical school and made sense here too. You needed to understand what you were doing before your hands could do it correctly, because hands that didn't understand just repeated the motion without catching when the motion was wrong.

  He set out the materials: clean water, a piece of fresh hide, the small clay bowl, feverbark for the wash.

  "We're going to practice," he said. "On hide first. Not on a person."

  She looked at the hide strip. "Why hide first?"

  "Because when you practice on a person, a mistake hurts someone. When you practice on hide, a mistake hurts nothing." He paused. "You want to make your mistakes on hide."

  She picked up the hide strip and looked at it with new seriousness, as if it had become a thing with stakes.

  He walked her through it once. Water first — and he made her say why. Cleans the surface before anything else goes on it, so you're not pushing dirt deeper with the herb. Good. Then the feverbark wash, applied carefully, covering the full wound area — not patting, pressing, which was different. Then the bleedleaf if bleeding, held with pressure, not wiped. Then the clean bind.

  She watched with the stillness she reserved for things she was memorizing in sequence rather than just absorbing.

  "Now you," he said.

  She tried.

  The first pass was too fast — she went from water to herb without waiting long enough, and the pressure on the feverbark wash was uneven, heavier on one side. He didn't interrupt. He let her finish, then said: "What was wrong?"

  She looked at what she'd done. He watched her face work through it — not defensive, genuinely looking. She found the pressure issue first. Then, after a moment, the timing.

  "Yes," he said. "Again."

  She did it again. Slower this time. The pressure more even. The timing better — she counted something under her breath between steps, which he hadn't told her to do and which was exactly the right instinct.

  He said nothing. Let her find the rhythm herself.

  Third try was good. Not perfect — her hands were still learning where to be, the fine positioning that came from repetition — but the principles were all there, applied correctly, in order, for the right reasons.

  "Good," he said.

  She let out a breath she'd been holding, which she'd probably been holding since the first try.

  "You were counting," he said. "Between steps. Keep doing that."

  She looked slightly caught — like she hadn't meant for him to notice.

  "It's good," he said. "It means you're thinking about the time, not just the action. That matters."

  She filed this, visibly. Added it to whatever column it belonged in.

  Dorn arrived in the late afternoon with the inevitable fish and a look that said he'd been nearby for a while and had been watching.

  He sat at the edge of the healing spot's overhang — his usual position, present without being inside it — and started cleaning the fish without being asked and without acknowledging that he'd been observing for the better part of an hour.

  "She is good?" he said to Theron, nodding at Sora.

  "She's good."

  "I know." He said it the way he said things that he'd already decided were true. Not proudly — just settled. Like confirming a fact he'd filed some time ago.

  Sora, who had been reviewing the herb layout one more time, looked at him. "You knew?"

  "I watched," Dorn said, and shrugged. "Dorn watch everything. Dorn just don't always say."

  Sora looked at Theron. Theron looked at Dorn.

  "He really does," Theron said. "We talked about this."

  Dorn grinned and went on cleaning the fish. Sora shook her head slightly with the expression she used when the two of them were being mutually unreasonable, which she'd developed as a specific expression for this specific purpose over the past weeks.

  They cooked together as the evening came down — Dorn tending the fire with the ease of a man who had done it ten thousand times, Sora managing the fish with a focus that suggested she'd decided cooking was also something to learn correctly and not just approximately, Theron adding what he had to the water and trying not to over-season by instinct.

  It smelled good. Simple and good.

  It smells like home, he thought, and then caught himself, and then let it be both things at once without having to choose.

  After they ate, Sora wanted to go through the herbs one more time.

  He didn't argue. He held them up and she named them, and this time he asked the harder questions — not just what they were but edge cases, complications, what you'd do if you had two things happening at once and only one treatment available. She got more right than he expected and wrong in the ways that told him what to teach next, which was the most useful kind of wrong.

  Dorn had stretched out by the fire, not quite asleep, listening in the half-attending way he listened to things he found comfortable. Occasionally he added something — a hunter's detail, a practical consideration that came from the field rather than the healing spot — and Theron incorporated it without remark, and Sora noted it without remark, and this was its own small thing, the three of them building something between them without naming it.

  The camp settled around them. Fires burning down. Children called in. The sounds of the evening going quiet in layers.

  Sora was mid-sentence about feverbark storage when her voice slowed, then stopped. He looked down.

  She'd fallen asleep.

  Not dramatically — just gone, between one word and the next, her head dropping to rest against his arm the way it had been resting near his arm for the past hour, the last inch covered without her noticing. Her breathing was deep and even, her hands still loose around the feverbark bundle she'd been holding.

  He sat still.

  Dorn opened one eye, looked at the situation, closed it again. His mouth curved slightly.

  Theron looked at the top of her head — the dark hair that never stayed where it was put, the particular way she'd gone slack the way children went slack when they finally stopped, as if sleep had been waiting patiently for the last of the day's work to be done.

  His daughter had fallen asleep on him like this. Ben too, when he was small, that specific weight of a child who has decided they are somewhere safe and there is nothing else required of them tonight.

  It had been a long time.

  He sat with the fire warm on one side and Sora's weight against the other and the camp breathing quietly around him, and he thought: this is what a day is supposed to feel like. Not every day. Not always. But sometimes. A day that ends with something built and someone asleep against your arm and the fire doing its quiet work.

  The stars came out above, the strange ones, in their unfamiliar patterns.

  He watched them and didn't move.

  It was enough.

  It was, he thought — and meant it fully this time, without the effort it had taken to mean it in the early weeks — more than enough.