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Elowynn was too tired to be patient. “Yes. Stop doing that!”

He looked down at her then, and for a moment she saw the argument forming. He would say they had no time. He would say others needed help more. He would insist he was fine, even while blood continued leaking through the hastily made bandages from her skirts.

She lifted one brow and he closed his mouth.

Lora exhaled in relief. “Oh, thank the stars. I was preparing to start yelling, and I have very little strength left.”

“You always have strength left for yelling,” Alyra murmured.

“That’s because I’m committed to my gifts.”

The exchange coaxed a weak, bewildered laugh from one of the children nearby. The sound was small, but everyone heard it. Lora turned toward the boy and offered a crooked smile, and the child clung to it as though she were a light in the darkness.

Elowynn’s chest ached.

Lora had a way of making people remember they were still people even while the world tried to reduce them to fear.

The woman from the clinic came forward with a satchel clutched against her chest. She was older than Elowynn by perhaps ten turnings, with red curls escaping from a scarf and soot smeared across one cheek. Her eyes flicked once toward Caelyn’s face before she focused on his wounds.

“What happened?” the woman asked. She never once flinched away from him.

“Glass and crystal from an observatory window,” Elowynn answered. “The shards have been removed, but the wounds need proper cleaning and binding with something better than torn silk and backwashed alcohol.”

Korvel scoffed from nearby. “Hardly backwash,” he grumbled.

“Everyone backwashes,” Lora piped up.

The woman’s eyes moved over the improvised bandages. “That silk is worth more than everything in this shelter.”

“It was irritatingly expensive,” Elowynn said. “You can have the whole thing if you can find me something more practical to wear.”

Lora’s mouth twitched. “You really hated that gown, huh?”

“I hated what happened in it,” Elowynn said. That hushed the conversation more effectively than she meant it to.

Korvel looked away from her.

Elowynn felt the tension in Caelyn change. She could sense anger gathering beneath his exhaustion. Before it could become anything more, she touched her hand against his side, grounding him as much as steadying herself. His attention returned to her at once, and whatever violence had begun to surface, eased beneath the touch.

“Sit,” the woman said, pointing toward an overturned crate near the wall.

Caelyn obeyed only because Elowynn moved with him and made refusal impossible without knocking her aside.

The moment he lowered himself, pain etched along his face and sweat gathered on his brow. The ruined doll remained in his hand, and when the woman reached to take it so she could work, his fingers closed around it and he pulled it back.

The woman hesitated.

Elowynn reached instead. “Caelyn.”

He looked at her, and the expression on his face nearly undid her. He looked consumed by grief with nowhere to go. Grief so raw it made him seem younger.

“She gave it to me,” he said. The words were barely audible.

“I know,” Elowynn whispered.

“She was a child.”

“I know,” she repeated.