Dawn found Liora in the healer's hut, the hearth throwing a cautious warmth across the blankets. She could move now, small liberties at first. A turn of the head, the lift of a hand. Nyssa hovered, steady and efficient, tending the dressings with the business of saving what could be saved. The other women worked in practiced silence. For Liora, even breath felt like a small reclamation.
She swallowed broth and let Nyssa fuss. The healer's hands were precise, the small clucks and motions offering an apology in work. In the corner lay Liora's cloak, dark, trimmed with silver braid folded like a promise. It sat there while the world made repairs, an emblem of what had been taken.
Afternoon narrowed to the rhythm of the hut, warm compresses, fresh linens, the slow loop of bandaging. Nyssa spoke in the short phrases of care. Liora let herself be tended, collecting a fragile steadiness. She fell into a quiet that was not peace, but not despair either, only the close, practical attention of people who knew how to keep bodies from unravelling.
Then the courtyard doors slammed open.
Vanya entered without fanfare, her shadow long and exact. Guards cut the air into a precise order behind her; there was no doubt as to who she was. Nyssa straightened, the linen in her hands folding into a small, nervous motion. "The Luna..."
"Time's up," Vanya said. Her voice was flat, final. The guards did not need another word. They seized the pallet, hauled Liora out with rough efficiency. Nyssa stepped forward, palms lifted in the old habit of a healer wanting to hold a life a moment longer. "You cannot—" she began.
Vanya's smile was a small, sharp thing. "Do not presume to teach me mercy, healer. You mend because I command it. You forget that at your peril." Her eyes brightened with the easy cruelty of someone who could order pain like a household task. The hut's air clamped down as men moved Liora toward the cart.
Nyssa's face went pinched with a regret she had not allowed herself to breathe. She opened her mouth and closed it. "We swore to save," she whispered, but it was almost lost. The oath mattered little to one who held authority.
They carried Liora back to the eastern tree as if the wood itself had been waiting. The rope came down with familiar hands. Liora's arms were bound again and the knots were tight, practiced. She did not fight. The fatigue had braided with a kind of refusing silence that kept words from spilling out. She turned her face to the bark and watched the sky as if its indifferent color might be an answer.
Vanya circled the courtyard like a conductor. She called on the older women, those who had the blessed smallness of authority in the kitchen and stores and gave them a task that felt like cruel theatre: "Grind the pepper. Bring boiling water. Wash her clean." The women blinked, then warmed to the order, their faces lighting in the way people do when given a sanctioned role in punishment.
They ground pepper until the air stung their eyes. Laughter, thin and brittle threaded through the work as they carried bowls into the courtyard. Vanya sat nearby on a low stone and watched the scene with a calm that made watching worse than any shout.
When the first splash of pepper water hit Liora's shoulder there was a sound that sharpened the day. The spice bit, and the wetness pulled at the welted skin. She did not cry. The pain flared and ebbed in steady waves, a fresh bruise that made breath catch. The women poured again and again, dabbing and rubbing as if the ritual cleansed more than blood. Their voices made plans for seed and gossip, the casual sense with which they perfunctorily applied pain let them pretend this was simple work.
Nyssa moved at the edges, putting clean cloths on Liora where they could. Her hands worked in the measured way of someone trying to make order of a moral trouble. She kept her face neutral, but her fingers trembled. She had not imagined such obedience would hollow her.
Liora's memories returned in ragged shards as the day narrowed. She remembered the smell of the cloak itself, how the fabric had once held the scent of pine and distant kitchens, how the silver braid had rubbed against her collarbone like a small complaint. She remembered folding it carefully, laying it over the chair in her chamber, running a hand along the hem when the night threatened to tilt into something harder. The cloak had been a piece of ordinary dignity: it covered her when she went out and it made her feel, in small ways, that she belonged.
Nyssa lingered at the edge of the courtyard after the ropes were set. Her hands would not stop moving, laying out fresh linen, stoking the small brazier tucked near the tree where they placed a few herbs that had not burned clean. The healer's mind turned the motion into a litany against impotence: clean the wound, dry the skin, restore warmth. Each order she obeyed felt like a stitch over a wider wound in her conscience. She had joined the Luna's station once for safety and the promise of protection, but now the price of that bargain scraped at a part of her that had not yet calcified.
"Make sure the water is well mixed," Vanya said, speaking to the elderly women as though they were cooks preparing a dinner. Her words were casual, precise. The women glanced at each other with a quick flicker of something like complicity, as if to say they had chosen to be on the side of the one with power and had been rewarded with a role that allowed them to unleash what they had long kept small. Their hands moved fast now, dipping and stirring until the pepper gave the water a clouded tint that smelled sharp and bitter.
The pepper operations turned the courtyard into theatre. Someone produced more bowls; another woman muttered a line about "then we will plant beans in spring" and they all laughed as if the matter were already settled and easy. Their laughter made Liora understand one more thing, cruelty lives on a diet of small acts that do not seem like cruelty when passed around like bread. It grows when neighbors nod and when girls learn that to be safe is to choose the side with spoils.