The air was thick with rosemary and salt, curling into the room like a hand trying to soothe. It did little good. You lay curled, one hand pressed firm to your lower belly, the other fisted in the linen of your cloak. The pain came in tides, like the sea—sharp, pulling, receding just long enough to make you think it was gone before crashing back again. You'd stopped keeping track of time. The sun had slipped behind the hills; the oil lamp burned low.

Then, soft footfall.

You didn’t lift your head. Didn’t need to. Only one man walked like that—measured, deliberate, as if every step was part of some plan no one else had yet deciphered.

There was a pause at the threshold. You could feel Odysseus there, a presence like smoke in the doorway. Then the faint creak of knees as he crouched, slowly, like he thought you might spook.

"Ithaca hasn’t sunk into the sea," he said lightly. "I can only assume your silence isn’t some plot to overthrow me."

You huffed. Or tried to. "I’m bleeding," you said.

"You’ll have to narrow it down," he replied, deadpan. "You’ve bloodied your knuckles on worse."

His brow arched. Something in his gaze shifted—not alarm, not disgust. Just that sharp, unerring intelligence flicking behind his eyes as things rearranged themselves in his head. Then it settled.

"Ah," he said. “That kind. Is it bad?”

No response from you was his answer.

Odysseus clicked his tongue, soft and fond, the way one might at a horse too proud to limp, even with an arrow in its flank.

"You always do try to gut it out," he murmured, more to the quiet than to you. "As if will alone could wring the pain from you."

He reached into the satchel slung over his shoulder and drew out a bundle—linen, warm stones, and a draught he’d bribed the camp medic for, brewed with things he couldn’t pronounce. He pressed the cloth-wrapped heat to your belly, gentle as sunrise.

"Let me guess. You haven’t eaten either."

No answer. Not that he expected one. Odysseus smiled anyway, a small thing, worn but sure.

"I’ll fix that too."