There was a crow. Mei Lin followed the crow.
It was sitting on a low branch about half a mile off the road, patient over something on the ground she hadn't seen yet. She stepped off the path and walked up under the birch, and the crow did not move when she came close, and that was how she knew.
She knelt anyway.
He was young. Human. A hunter, by the boots and the quiver. His bow had got lost on the way. His shirt was dark with blood, most of it already drying. The wound was low on his side and half a day old, and he had dragged himself under the tree in the last hour.
She put her paw on his throat. The pulse was there. Small. Running out from infection now, not the cut. She could smell it. Rot just getting started, and the warm-copper edge of blood that had stopped bothering to come out.
She called water spirits anyway. She called them hard. Please. She hadn't said please to them like that since the cart on the ridge.
They came. They tried.
Some wounds you don't close with water.
She knew it the moment her hands touched him. You feel the difference between a wound the spirits can argue with and a wound they can only sit beside. This was the second one. The infection was everywhere already. The spirits could ease the edges. They could not take him back.
She stayed anyway.
Riptide over the wound, slow, just to keep it from hurting more than it had to. A small Healing Rain that cooled the sweat on his face, because the fever was making him burn. She put her paw on his chest, over his heart. She did not speak. She had nothing useful to say.
He opened his eyes once. They didn't settle on her. They settled on something past her, above the birch.
"Is my brother there?" he said.
"Yes," she said.
He closed his eyes. A little while later the pulse under her paw stopped. She kept her paw there until she was sure.
The crow took off. She watched it go.
She could not carry him. She could not bury him, not properly, not alone. So she did what grandmother had taught her for a body in a place you could not carry it from. She laid him straight. Closed his eyes. Folded his hands on his chest. Took the arrow he'd been carrying in a waist-quiver and set it crosswise over his collar.
Then she walked the clearing picking up stones. Big enough that a wolf would have to work. Small enough that she could move them. She built them over him slowly. When the pile was high enough that the birch would not be able to forget what it had stood over, she stopped.
She planted a water totem next to the cairn. Just for the night. She wasn't going to leave it. But for one night the spirits would sit with him, and in the morning she'd take the totem back and walk on.
She sat down against the birch. Her shoulders shook a little. She did not try to talk them out of it.
The crow came back after a while and sat on the branch above her.
"I know," Mei Lin said to it.
It did not answer. She hadn't expected it to.
She stayed until dark.
— Mist