The question Ryker had left him with — and the question he'd written in his notebook, which amounted to the same thing in different clothes — was still sitting with him three days later when he noticed the old man's throat.

  He hadn't been looking for it. He'd been moving through the camp in the way he'd developed over the past weeks, the loose unhurried circuit that wasn't quite a medical round and wasn't quite a social visit and was functionally both. He stopped to talk to people. Asked after the arm, the wrist, the persistent cough. Accepted food when it was offered and declined when it wasn't and tried not to make any of it feel like an inspection, because it wasn't an inspection, except that it was, a little.

  The old man was one of the elders who sat near the main fire on cold mornings, the ones whose bodies had earned the warmth. He had a name Theron could approximate but not quite pronounce — something in the back vowel range that Dorn produced effortlessly and Theron could only manage with obvious effort, which the old man found funny every single time. He had a good laugh for a man his age.

  He also had, Theron noticed, a swelling at the front of his throat that had no business being there.

  He looked more carefully without appearing to. Soft, symmetric, the skin over it unchanged — not an abscess, not a growth in the malignant sense. The classic shape. He'd seen it before in a medical school global health rotation, in regions where iodine didn't reach the food chain, and had been told by the attending: "You'll forget everything else about this week. You won't forget what a goiter looks like."

  He hadn't forgotten.

  He spent the next three days paying different attention to people's throats, which was, he would have freely admitted, an unusual thing to spend three days doing. But the old man wasn't the only one. Three of the elders had visible swelling, varying degrees. Two of the older women. One man in his forties who hunted with Ryker's group and who Theron had always assumed was simply thick-necked until now.

  Iodine deficiency. In an inland tribe without reliable access to seafood, living through a winter that had probably compressed their diet further — it made complete sense. It had probably been here for years, building so gradually that nobody had noticed because there was nothing to compare it against.

  He thought about it for a day. Then he went to the river.

  The river didn't have the kind of shellfish he'd have preferred — no proper mussels, no clams of any size worth mentioning. What it had were small freshwater mollusks, the thumbnail-sized ones that clung to rocks in the slower sections near the bend, which Theron had observed the children collecting occasionally and discarding, apparently not worth eating by themselves.

  He collected a full pouch of them.

  Dorn watched this from the bank with the expression he reserved for things Theron did that were clearly purposeful and completely opaque.

  "Shells," Theron said, holding one up.

  "Yes," Dorn said. "Small ones. Not good to eat."

  "I know. Not eating them." He dropped it back in the pouch. "I need the shell. Crushed."

  Dorn looked at the pouch. Looked at Theron. "You need... crushed shell."

  "For the food. Mixed in."

  A pause. "You want to put crushed shell in the food."

  "Yes."

  Dorn appeared to weigh several responses. He settled on: "Why."

  Theron tried to explain iodine, which was a word he didn't have in any language available to him, in a world where the concept of mineral micronutrients had not yet been articulated. He pointed at his own throat. Then at the old man by the main fire. Then he made a swelling gesture with his hand around his neck.

  Dorn looked at the old man. Looked at Theron. "Maren's throat?"

  "It will get worse without help. And there are others." He pointed toward the camp. "Come. I'll show you."

  Dorn came. He was useful for this — he knew everyone, knew which conversations required delicacy and which didn't, knew who would let Theron check their throat without making it into a thing and who would need it framed differently. They spent most of that afternoon moving through the camp together, Theron pointing quietly, Dorn nodding with the slow accumulating expression of a man revising something he'd previously not thought about.

  "I didn't see it," Dorn said finally.

  "It happens slowly. Years, probably. Nobody notices slow things."

  "Can you fix it?"

  "Slow the getting worse. Maybe some improvement." He held up the pouch. "Crushed shell in the cooking pot. Every day. It helps."

  Dorn looked at the pouch. "Every day."

  "Yes."

  "People will think you're strange."

  "People already think I'm strange."

  Dorn considered this and found it accurate. "Yes. Okay."

  The first cooking pot it went into belonged to Juran's mother.

  This was Dorn's doing — he'd decided, with the practical instincts of a man who understood social architecture, that starting with someone whose trust in Theron was already unconditional would produce the least resistance and the most visible modeling. Juran's mother accepted the small handful of powder with the calm of someone who had watched Theron do stranger things and had them work, mixed it into the evening stew without comment, and served it to her family.

  Nobody noticed. The stew tasted like stew.

  By the end of the week it was going into four cooking pots. By the end of the second week, Theron had quietly enlisted two of the women who ran the communal cooking — not by explaining iodine, which remained unexplainable, but by showing them Maren's throat and telling them, simply: "Without this, it gets worse. With it, maybe it doesn't." He didn't promise improvement. He promised the alternative was worse, which was true and which he could stand behind. They'd looked at each other and at him and then at the powder, and one of them had shrugged in the way that meant fine, if you say so, and that was the end of the negotiation.

  He had been worried it would be harder. He was learning that trust, once fully given, operated differently than the provisional kind — it didn't require re-explanation every time.

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  He found her watching him one afternoon during the health audit.

  He'd been crouching beside one of the older women, Sefa, checking her throat with the careful pressure that told him what he needed to know — the swelling softer than the old man's, caught earlier, better odds — and when he stood and turned, she was there. Standing at the edge of the camp's inner ring with her arms crossed and her eyes on him, a woman who had to be past sixty-five, with white hair worn in the single braid of someone who'd decided one thing was enough. Her face had the specific quality of extreme age in people who'd spent their lives outdoors — deeply lined, but not collapsed, the structure still present underneath.

  She didn't look hostile. She looked like someone watching a thing they'd already formed a view about and were seeing whether the thing would do anything to change it.

  He'd seen that expression before. Twice, in fact — on the chief of surgery who'd interviewed him for his first attending position, and on his wife's mother, who had decided early on that he worked too much and had never really updated this position regardless of evidence. Both assessments had been, in their ways, correct.

  He straightened and nodded at her. She didn't nod back. She looked at him for another moment, then looked at Sefa, then walked away at the unhurried pace of someone who had somewhere to be and was in no particular rush to get there.

  "Elta," Dorn said, appearing at his elbow.

  "Who is she?"

  Dorn seemed to consider how to explain this. "She remembers," he said finally.

  "Remembers what?"

  "Everything." He said it simply, without exaggeration. "How the tribe moved before Korr's father. The names of people who died before you were born. The old ways — which plants in which season, which prayers for which weather. When Mora forgets something, she asks Elta." He paused. "Mora does not forget many things."

  Theron looked at the space Elta had occupied. "She doesn't like me."

  "She doesn't know you." Dorn's tone suggested this was an important distinction. "Elta takes time. She took four years to accept Korr as chief, and Korr grew up here." He shrugged with one shoulder. "Don't worry about Elta. Do your work. She will watch."

  He said the last part without any sense that being watched was a problem. Dorn had a gift for making the things you couldn't control sound like reasonable arrangements.

  Theron went back to his work.

  The food storage problem was less elegant than the iodine problem and more annoying in the specific way of logistical inefficiencies — the kind of thing that was clearly wrong once you looked at it and yet had been working well enough for long enough that changing it required an argument with inertia rather than with people.

  The tribe's storage was grouped by type and by owner — each family's dried meat here, their root vegetables there, their smoked fish beside it. Which made social sense. Which made, from a spoilage standpoint, no sense at all, because it put the things with the shortest shelf life next to the things with the longest, and the airflow in the storage shelters ran in exactly the wrong direction to preserve anything except what would have kept anyway.

  He spent two afternoons reorganizing. Not taking things — he was careful about that, careful not to make it feel like he was touching what wasn't his — but demonstrating with his own small stores first, then asking Juran's mother to watch, then asking her to show two of her neighbors what she'd seen, and stepping back while the knowledge moved sideways through the camp without him attached to it.

  By the third afternoon it was moving on its own and he was no longer required, which was the best outcome.

  Dorn observed all of this with the thoughtful expression of a man filing things for later consideration. "You teach the teaching," he said, at one point.

  "What?"

  "You don't want to do it yourself. You want someone else to do it and someone else to learn from them." He nodded slowly. "Smart."

  "It's not—" Theron started, and then stopped, because it was, actually, exactly what he was doing. "Yes," he said. "That way it doesn't stop when I'm not there."

  Dorn looked at him with the expression that meant something had landed. He didn't say anything else. He filed it, the way Dorn filed things, into whatever internal system produced his occasional observations about the nature of things.

  Korr came to the healing spot on an evening when the cold had settled in properly and the camp had drawn close around its fires.

  Not unexpectedly — Theron had become fairly good at reading when Korr was making his way somewhere with intention — and not with any urgency. He stopped at the boundary stone and waited, which was Korr's version of knocking, and Theron looked up from what he was doing and gestured him in.

  He came in. Looked at the organized supplies, the herb bundles in their correct positions, the cleaned implements, the small fire that kept the overhang warm. He looked at it the way he looked at most things — as though taking inventory, checking that what he'd been told and what existed matched.

  Dorn arrived two minutes later with the precise timing of a man who had seen Korr heading somewhere and wanted to be nearby. He sat down at the edge of the overhang and pretended to be resting, which convinced nobody.

  Korr said something.

  Dorn translated without the usual performance: "He wants to know. Why you do all this."

  Theron looked at Korr. The chief met his eyes with the patient steadiness of a man who had asked a genuine question and was prepared to wait as long as the answer required.

  He thought about it honestly. In his old life he'd have had a practiced answer — the kind residents gave at interviews, about service and vocation and the privilege of medicine. Clean, true enough, slightly rehearsed. He didn't have that here. He had whatever he actually thought, which he hadn't examined in a while.

  He said: "Because I can." He found the words slowly, in the tribe's language, checking each one. "I know things that help. If I keep them to myself—" he shook his head. "That's wrong. That's waste."

  He paused. Then: "And because you're my people now."

  He hadn't planned the second part. It arrived the same way true things sometimes arrived — without warning, and without requiring confirmation once said.

  Korr looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded — slow, once, the nod that wasn't agreement or approval but acknowledgment. You have said a thing and I have heard it and it will be placed where such things are placed.

  He stood, and left, with the economy of a man for whom a question asked and answered was a thing fully completed.

  Dorn watched him go. Then he looked at Theron with the expression he sometimes had when something happened that he'd predicted and still found satisfying.

  "Good answer," he said.

  "I meant it."

  "That's why it's good."

  The snow came that night.

  Not heavy — a first dusting, the kind that covered the ground lightly and made the camp look cleaner than it was and would be gone by midday. But real snow, the first of the season, and Theron woke to it before dawn and lay still for a moment listening to the silence that snow produced, which was the same in this world as it had been in the last one, which he found oddly comforting.

  By the time he'd built the fire up and the morning was properly underway, Sora had arrived and was reviewing herb names from her notes with the methodical focus of someone who took inventory seriously and didn't consider herself finished until it was right. Kael sat beside her, following along in the way he'd developed of absorbing things without appearing to, which Theron suspected he'd been doing his whole life in contexts entirely unrelated to medicine.

  Dorn appeared mid-morning with cured fish and the news that Ryker's hunting group had found tracks and would be out for two days, which he delivered with the casual authority of a man plugged into information networks Theron didn't fully understand.

  Mora's tea arrived just before midday, carried by the quiet young woman who brought it every day and who Theron had never quite caught the name of. He drank it by the fire and watched the snow outside the overhang, which was doing the thing snow did — making everything it covered look decided and still.

  He thought about the question Korr had asked and the answer he'd given — the part he'd planned and the part that had arrived without warning.

  Elta was somewhere in the camp with her arms crossed and her private assessment already formed. Dorn had said she takes time, in the tone of someone for whom time was not a problem.

  It wasn't, he realized. Time wasn't a problem. He had whatever this place had to offer, and it had already given him more than he'd expected, and the cold outside the overhang was the cold of a winter he was inside of rather than exposed to, and the people making noise in the camp were his people, for whatever that was worth across two worlds and whatever distance existed between them.

  Sora looked up from her notes. "Feverbark or sleepweed for a cough that's dry, not wet?"

  "What kind of dry?"

  She thought about it. "Scratching kind. Not the rattling kind."

  "Feverbark for the inflammation. Sleepweed only if they can't sleep because of it."

  She wrote that down. Kael was listening without appearing to, which meant he'd have it too by tomorrow.

  Outside, the snow kept falling, light and even. Inside the overhang, the fire held its ground.

  His first winter in this world, and he was warm. He was supplied. He had people who brought him fish and tea and questions, and an old woman watching him from a distance, and a chief who had asked him something real and accepted the answer without ceremony.

  He was, in every sense that counted, okay.