The traveling clinic had been Vella's idea, born from watching sick families stagger through the gate after two days on the road.
"If they can walk that far half-dead, we can ride it healthy," she had argued at breakfast, already packing her kit, and nobody could find a hole in that logic worth defending.
They left at first light with Cassie's party as escort, Ash riding his usual post on Hajin's chest while Juna ranged ahead of the horses. Loccy stayed behind planted at the mine gate, holding a parade stiffness she had invented for the occasion.
The last thing they saw leaving town was her waving the hammer overhead like a flag.
The first village sat half a day out, a cluster of maybe forty homes behind a stockade wall that had been patched so many times the original timber was a rumor. What stopped Hajin was the board mounted beside its gate, rows of small notches carved in weathered lines, one for every season the village had survived.
