Ferrin held him. He stood in the half light with a stranger's grief soaking through his shirt, and his own face was wet too, and he did not move until the man had cried himself out.
Bram backed out of the tent and stood in the gray air with his hand pressed over his mouth.
Hanne found him there a little later.
She carried a pail of cooled water and a stack of clean cups, her sleeves rolled to her elbows, her gray hair loose from its pins. She looked at him for a moment, and at the tent flap behind him, and set the pail down.
"They would not let me do that, you know," she said. "Sit with the dying. They said my teacher said it was better to keep your distance."
"Hanne—"
"Forty years I believed I was right." She wiped her hands on her apron. "Forty years. And a girl from a village of beasts sat down at my table and told me, politely, that I had been letting people die of thirst."
