The camp came alive around us the moment I strode through the perimeter with my brother's unconscious body carried on a stretcher, and for a heartbeat, the sheer scale of what my people had built pressed down on me with old, familiar weight tents strung between makeshift palisades, cookfires banked low against the coming dawn, refugees rousing from sleep with the particular wariness of people who'd learned that safety was never guaranteed, only borrowed.
"Healer's tent," I barked, and the camp responded with practiced speed, bodies parting to clear a path, someone already ducking ahead to rouse the woman who served as physician, midwife, and last line of defense against every fever and wound that found its way to them.
Arwen kept pace beside the stretcher, refusing every offer to fall ba
