Page 17 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

"Yield."

Varak goes rigid under Knox's knee, the muscles in his back bunching, his free hand clawing the granite. His fingers open. His forehead drops to the stone.

He yields.

Knox stands and extends his hand.

The gesture stops every murmur in the camp. The eastern faction shifts, and I feel it more than see it: fifty armed orcs adjusting their weight at once, hands drifting toward weapons.

Knox keeps his hand out.

Varak takes it. Knox hauls him to his feet, and the faction settles, and for a moment nobody in the valley moves.

Knox addresses the factions. Dravik translates, and what Knox says surprises everyone including the brothers standing at his back. He doesn't claim the throne. He names a council of elders, representatives from each faction, Dravik among them, the first collective leadership the Bloodstone clans have seen. I watch the faces of the faction leaders, and what I see isn't anger. It's relief. The bone-deep fatigue of men who have fought for a year over a prize none of them wanted badly enough to die for.

Knox offers them something better than a king. He offers them the chance to put their weapons down.

At the camp's edge, a tent flap opens. King Drogmar sits in the dark inside, visible for a moment, thin and diminished, a man whose body has outlived his authority. He watches his son reshape a kingdom from the ground up, and Knox doesn't turn toward his father's tent. Not once.

Finn hands the cut back. Knox shrugs into the leather and the Feral Sons patch settles against his back, his shoulders shift under the weight. Not the weight of the cut.

Knox sits on a camp stool outside Dravik's tent, and his adrenaline drops. I can see it leave him, the way his shoulders sag and his breathing goes shallow and the damage starts catching up all at once.

I'm twenty feet away, repacking my kit, when I hear it. A hitch on the inhale, the pause at the top where his lungs won't fill all the way, the exhale too controlled. I know the difference between a man guarding cracked ribs and a man whose body is compensating for something deeper.

Knox looks up at me, and his skin has gone gray. Not pale—gray, and I know what gray means.

"Don't talk. Let me look at your left side."

I press my fingers below his ribs on the left, palpating through the wall of muscle, feeling for the telltale firmness that means an organ is swelling inside its lining, pressing outward where it shouldn't. Knox's breath catches, and he grabs my wrist—not to stop me, but because the pain hits hard enough that his body acts before his brain can override it.

Splenic contusion. The capsule is intact. If it had ruptured, he'd be on the ground, pulse thready, skin cold. But the swelling is building under my fingers, the spleen absorbing blood from the blow Varak landed to his left side. A lucky punch from Varak's perspective. A five-minute walk from catastrophe from mine.

"Don't move."

Knox's jaw locks. "I need to finish the council formation. The elders are waiting for—"

"Sit. Down."

The camp goes still. Colt stops mid-stride. Rex turns. Bruiser's head lifts from the campfire, and his eyes narrow. Finn stares at me with his mouth open.

I don't raise my voice. In nine years with the Feral Sons, I've never raised my voice. Not once. Not in any room, at any crisis, at any roadside or clinic visit. The brothers know my voice the way they know Knox's—measured, level, the same whether I'm wrapping a sprained ankle or clamping an artery.

But I just raised my voice.

Knox sits.

"Ice. Anything cold." I point at Colt without looking up from Knox's abdomen. "Stream, snow patch, wet cloth from shade. I need to bring down this swelling before the capsule gives." Colt turns and runs.

"You've got three cracked ribs," I tell Knox. "You know that already. The shoulder dislocated on the fall, and I'll reduce it once your abdomen stabilizes." I meet his eyes. "Your spleen took the body blow. If you stand up and walk across this camp, you could rupture it. You'll bleed internally, and by the time anyone gets you to a hospital in this valley, you'll be dead." I keep my voice level. "So you will sit in this chair and the elders will come to you."

Knox's gaze holds mine. He nods.

Colt returns with cloth wraps soaked in stream water. I pack them against Knox's left side and begin the shoulder reduction—hands on the joint, slow traction, the grinding sound of bone finding the socket that makes Chain look away and Finn swear under his breath. Knox takes it with his teeth locked and his right hand gripping the camp stool hard enough to crack the wooden strut. The shoulder clunks home. Knox exhales.

I wrap his ribs. Suture the lip, three stitches, nylon, clean edges. Check his abdomen again. Stable, but I don't trust stable yet.

I check every thirty minutes. The first hour, Knox's color comes back and his pulse settles and the elders file in and out of Dravik's tent.