The outer shelter felt smaller that night, tightly packed by the cold dark outside and the urgent arithmetic of the hours that remained to them. Kezra sat by the low hearth, her travel journal open across her knees, her charcoal stick moving in swift, economical strokes as she drafted the working schedule for Day Eighty-Two.
Beside her, Paxa Sel held an unlit animal fat candle. She used the faint, red glow of the dying willow embers to inspect Kezra’s ears with a horn-tipped spreader tool.
“The tympanic membrane in your right ear is clear,” Paxa murmured. Her fingers surprisingly was warm and steady against the chilled skin of Kezra’s temple. “No tiny blood vessel engorgement, no fluid behind the drum. But the left canal is inflamed—dry, red, and shaking with that nonstop sympathetic tinnitus. You’ll take five drops of sweet almond oil mixed with powdered marsh-mallow root before you lie down. It won’t cure the nerve damage. But it will soften the lining and cushion the drum against the concussions of tomorrow’s hammers.”
“I can handle the hammers, Paxa,” Kezra said, without looking up from her schedule. “What I can’t handle is losing forty-eight hours to an enemy patrol. Look at the timeline.”
