The cart went first.
Mei Lin had been watching the wheel for three miles. She'd meant to call up to the farmer and hadn't, because how do you tell a stranger his wheel is about to come off without sounding like you're predicting a disaster. The axle jumped on the downhill curve and the cart went sideways.
The farmer rolled clear. The ox bellowed and pulled loose of the yoke.
The kid did not roll clear. She had been sleeping on the hay. Mei Lin saw one small foot stuck under the edge of the tipped bed and felt her own stomach go somewhere else for a heartbeat.
She was already running.
She thought in weights. The cart was heavier than she was. The wheel was heavier than her shoulders. Gravel did not hold when you pushed against it. But the road was wet at the edges from the night's rain, and the ditch was running.
Water she had.
She planted her hand flat on the gravel and asked the wet below the road to come up under the tipped cart and hold it, for exactly as long as it took her to get one shoulder under the bed and one hand onto the kid's foot. The spirits were slower than she wanted. She said, out loud through her teeth, "Please. Now. Please."
A pulse of cold rose through the gravel. The cart shifted a finger's width. That was enough. She drove her shoulder under the bed and lifted, and she wasn't strong enough on her own, but she didn't have to be.
Riptide left her hand before she finished deciding to cast it. The spell wrapped around the kid's ankle, then the knee, then up to the ribcage, cool and fast and insistent. She pulled the kid out and onto the road on her lap and the cart came down behind them with a sound like a door shutting in a house somebody else lived in.
Too close. She did not let herself think about how close until later.
The kid was breathing. Too fast. Eyes unfocused. A bruise was blooming on her thigh where the bed had caught her. Nothing obviously broken, but grandmother had taught her to watch for quiet after a fall. A quiet kid is a kid deciding something, and you argue with them before they finish.
"Hey," she said. "Hey. Look at me. Look at me."
The kid looked.
"Good. Excellent. Top marks. I am going to do some very boring shaman things on your leg now and I need you to not be impressed, because I am not doing them for an audience."
The kid did not react. That was fine.
She called the water spirits again, gentler this time, and laid them over the bruise. A second riptide, slower, the way grandmother had taught her to work when the fright was the wound you were treating. The kid's breath evened out. Her pupils came back to the right size.
The farmer arrived at a run, pale, with dust in his beard and the ox's rope still in his hand. He looked at the cart, then at his daughter on the road, then at the Pandaren sitting cross-legged with his daughter's leg across her knee.
"Is she..."
"She's alright. She's going to have a bruise the size of a small country for a week. She needs a bed, a warm drink, and her mother."
"Her mother's been gone a year."
"Then you. Just you. Sit on the porch with her and tell her a boring story until she falls asleep. Boring. Do not make it exciting. She has had enough exciting."
He sat down on the road because his legs had stopped working, and she pretended not to notice.
She fixed the cart too. Badly. She was a shaman, not a cartwright. She got the wheel back on and asked the earth spirits to hold the axle for a mile, and she told the ox, very seriously, that it had done well and should probably consider a change of career. The ox was not moved.
The farmer tried to press a coin purse into her hand. She refused, cheerfully and twice, and walked on down the ridge road with apple-juice on her chin from a piece of fruit he had also tried to give her.
A mile later she passed a cairn for somebody who had not been lucky on the same curve, a long time ago. She did not know the name. She left a flat stone on the top of the pile and walked on.
— Mist
Grandmother used to say: water does not ask if the child deserves it. Water runs to the cup that is closest to empty.
She said it the day I cried because I had healed a boy who had been mean to me. I was six. It was the first time a lesson landed while I was still angry about it. It has landed every time since.