He'd gotten off the floor, restocked what he'd used from the satchel — which was nothing, technically, since he hadn't actually administered anything — and was standing at the supply station trying to read the labels on the vials by matching the characters to each other when the tent flap opened.
It opened the way when the weather arrived. Not dramatically, not with force, just with the immediate sense that the atmosphere of the space had fundamentally changed and was not going back.
"— and the judges were right there, right there, looking directly at the exchange, and she used a stabilization technique on the back foot that was clearly a momentum redirect, which is a spiritual assist, which is explicitly prohibited in the open division, and I am not saying I would have lost otherwise because I wouldn't have, I won, but the principle of the thing—"
The woman was already most of the way into the tent before she finished clearing the entrance, still mid-sentence, one hand gesturing to illustrate something that had apparently occurred at a significant personal affront to her. She was tall and broad-shouldered and radiated a particular energy that Daniel associated with people who had been in motion for so long that stillness had become a foreign concept, like a current that ran hotter than the surrounding water.
Her hair was auburn, thick and wavy, pulled up in a high ponytail so aggressively tight it looked like a structural decision, with strands escaping around her face that she shoved back with a brisk efficiency that suggested she'd given up on winning that particular fight some time ago. Her eyes were amber-brown and quick, moving around the tent in the way eyes moved when they were cataloguing exits and advantages out of old habit. Her armor was a burnished copper-gold, layered at the chest, and bore several dents she had clearly decided were decorative.
She looked at Daniel.
She had not stopped talking.
"— so I filed a formal objection after the match, which they'll ignore, they always ignore, but at least it's on record. Left knee." She dropped onto the treatment bench with the ease of someone who had been on treatment benches before and found them straightforward. "Probably fine. Took a bad landing in the second round, and it's been a little stiff. You're the new medic."
This last part was not a question.
"Yes," Daniel said.
"Good. The last one was useless." She was already rolling up the leg of her training gear to expose the knee, not waiting for instruction. "I mean that medically, not personally. He had decent enough bedside manner. Just kept telling me my qi circulation was fine when it very obviously wasn't."
"Right," Daniel said, and moved toward the bench.
He had not introduced himself. She had not asked. He was not sure she'd noticed this as a gap.
He looked at the knee. It was mildly swollen, the kind of swelling that happened in the hours after an impact when the joint was deciding how serious it wanted to be about the whole thing. He'd seen knees like this. He'd had knees like this, briefly, after a poorly considered attempt at recreational basketball in his mid-twenties. The principle was familiar even if the context wasn't.
He put his hands on it.
"So you're from—" she started.
"Can you bend it for me?"
She bent it. "I haven't seen you around the compound before today. Drevha said you were delayed on the road, which, fine, things happen, but it would have been helpful to have at least one session before the tournament started—" She bent the knee further, testing the range herself. "Does that—"
"A little less," he said, because she was moving faster than he could track the joint, and she slowed down with the slightly impatient air of someone who considered moderation a compromise. "There. Hold that."
He worked along the side of the knee, following the sense of where the tightness was. It was less urgent than the shoulder had been — no displacement, just the kind of accumulated strain that a joint collected over a long day of high-impact movement and then stopped processing correctly. He pressed along a line behind the kneecap, and she kept talking.
"I don't have another match until tomorrow morning so there's time to work on it properly, which I appreciate. The last medic would have just wrapped it and told me to rest, rest, like rest is an available thing—" A pause. "What are you doing with your thumb there?"
"Checking the — meridian flow," Daniel said, because he'd heard meridian once, from Drevha, and it seemed applicable. "Around the joint."
"Hm, it's tight?" she said.
"Along here." He pressed the line. "Has been for a while, probably."
"I've had that issue since I was sixteen," she said, with the tone of someone reporting a longstanding territorial dispute. "Old sparring injury. Never fully cleared."
"That tracks." It did track, in the sense that what he was feeling had the quality of something settled and chronic rather than new, layered in a way that was different from Orrath's acute injury. He followed it back from the knee toward the hip and then further, through a pathway he couldn't have named, and somewhere along the way he stopped consciously directing his hands and let the warmth in his palms do the work because it seemed to know where it was going.
She had stopped talking.
He registered this distantly, the way you registered a sound stopping that had been continuous long enough to become background. He was focused on the pathway, following it, working through a blockage that had been there so long it had almost become structural, pressing carefully and then less carefully as the resistance gave way.
The warmth spiked.
He blinked.
She was sitting completely still with both hands flat on her thighs, staring at them. Not stiff, not frozen — still, in the specific way of someone paying total attention to something internal that wasn't usually available for inspection. Her eyes were wide and fixed on her own palms with an expression he'd never seen on her face, because he'd known her for approximately twelve minutes, but he was fairly confident it wasn't an expression she wore often.
Ten seconds passed.
"Are you okay?" he said.
She looked up at him.
"What did you do?" she said. Not loud. Not accusatory, exactly, though something was sharpening in her voice. It was the tone of someone who had just received unexpected information and was deciding how to categorize it.
Daniel straightened. He kept his expression neutral with the same effort he'd been applying since he arrived, which was getting slightly easier with practice. "Standard treatment. The knee—"
"I just broke through a sub-stage," she said. She said it with the care of someone reporting something they were still processing. "Right now. While sitting on a treatment bench for a knee injury. I have been trying to break through that sub-stage for three months."
"That's—" He searched for a response that was true and also didn't land him in a difficult position. "Not uncommon, actually. When chronic blockages clear, the overall flow improves. That can—"
"Who told you that?"
"It's a standard—"
"What school did you train at?"
"The—" He had passed several signs on the road. He had not read them. "I trained regionally. The southern—"
"What did you do to my knee?" She was looking at him now the way she'd been looking at her hands, with that total attention that had nowhere to go but the subject. She was not upset. He would have been able to handle upset. She was interested, which was different, and he had the specific feeling of a person who has just become a project. "Exactly. Walk me through the technique."
"It's a pressure-based approach," Daniel said. "Targeting the — surrounding meridians to address the root restriction rather than the surface presentation."
"That's a description, not an explanation."
"It's also," he said carefully, "proprietary."
This landed. She looked at him for a long moment, amber eyes doing the cataloguing thing, and he held the look with the expression of a man who had not just made that up, who had entirely legitimate reasons for saying that, who was a real and credentialed healer standing in his own tent.
She got up off the bench. She tested the knee — bent it, straightened it, shifted her weight onto it, did a small controlled rotation that should have produced some discomfort and apparently didn't, based on her expression, which moved through surprise and then something more complicated and then settled into the narrow-eyed assessment of someone who has encountered a puzzle they intend to solve.
"Proprietary," she repeated, like she was tasting the word for truthfulness.
"Standard practice," he said.
"Mm." She picked up her outer training layer from where she'd dropped it on the bench. She shrugged into it. She looked at him one more time with that focused attention and he looked back and they remained in a brief standoff that she ended by nodding once, the nod of someone concluding a first phase.
She walked toward the tent entrance.
She paused.
She turned back.
"I'll probably need a follow-up," she said. "On the knee. For monitoring purposes."
"Of course," he said, in the tone of a healer who scheduled follow-ups for knees regularly and found this unremarkable.
She looked at him one more moment, like she was taking a final measurement, and left.
The tent flap dropped.
Daniel stood in the resulting silence for approximately three seconds and then turned to the treatment bench and put his forehead down on it, because the treatment bench was the right height for this and he was running low on the particular energy required to maintain the expression of a competent professional who knew what he was doing.
The bench was cool against his forehead.
He stayed there for a moment.
Outside, the crowd noise rose.
Three more to go.