I did not follow him home.

  I happened to walk in the same direction. The path led toward the village and the village happened to be where I was going. Not to the village — past it. Through the area. In the general vicinity. Any resemblance to following was coincidental and should not be interpreted as interest.

  The boy limped ahead of me. At some point, he'd stopped trying to talk. The ankle had finally asserted itself over his enthusiasm and each step cost him a wince that he tried to disguise with a kind of forced nonchalance. He was bad at nonchalance. Most twelve-year-olds were.

  The village appeared gradually — first the smell of cooking fires, then the sound of a dog barking, then the buildings themselves, emerging from the tree line like teeth from a gum. Small. Wooden. Tilting slightly in directions that suggested either poor carpentry or optimism about the wind. The roofs were thatched with river grass that needed replacing three seasons ago. A few scraggly fields bordered the western edge, their furrows muddy and sparse with the dregs of a harvest that hadn't been worth the planting.

  But the smoke smelled good. Woodsmoke always did — I'd never gotten tired of it, not in any century, not in any language. Something about fire and evening air. One of the few combinations the world hadn't found a way to ruin.

  Children played in the dirt near the well. A woman carried water on a yoke. An old man sat on a stump, mending a fishing net with hands that moved like they'd been mending nets since before the net was invented. A girl, maybe six, chased a chicken between two houses, shrieking with a joy that had nothing to do with the chicken and everything to do with being six. None of them looked up as he passed. He was a fixture. Part of the scenery.

  I stayed at the tree line. Far enough to be unremarkable. Close enough to hear everything, because hearing was not something I chose to do — it was something that happened to me, the way gravity happened to rocks. The village breathed at me: smoke, sweat, fermented grain, the sour undertone of poverty that smelled the same in every century.

  His house was at the edge, close enough for me to peek inside. If the village was modest, this house was the thing that modest looked down on. One room, or maybe two if you were generous with the word "room." Walls of mud-packed wood. A door that had warped in its frame and needed to be lifted before it could be pushed. The roof sagged in the middle like an apology.

  He went inside.

  The door didn't quite close. It never did. A thin slice of firelight leaked out and made the dirt outside glow a sickly orange.

  The cough reached me before anything else.

  It was not the cough of a cold, or a seasonal illness, or a man who had swallowed wrong. It was a deep, liquid sound — the sound of lungs that had stopped being lungs and started being something else. Wet. Rattling. Each breath drawn through fluid that shouldn't have been there. The cough built, climbed, peaked — and then the choking that followed was worse, because the choking was the body trying to reject what it was producing and what it was producing was blood.

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  Silence. A thin, wavering silence that was really just the space between coughs.

  Then the boy's voice, close to the sick man, gentle in a way that I had not heard from him before. The bravado was gone. The questions were gone. What remained was something careful, something practiced. He had done this before. Many times.

  "I brought something, Baba. From the forest. New herbs — different from last time."

  A rustling. Fabric. The creak of a pallet that was too thin to be called a bed.

  A man's voice, weak, threaded with the residue of coughing: "Good boy."

  I didn't need to see the chest to know what it held. I had lived through plagues that consumed empires. A man with failing lungs in a village without healers — I knew how that ended. The body knew. The family knew. Even the boy probably knew, somewhere underneath the stubbornness.

  The fire crackled. Small — they were rationing wood, or couldn't gather enough. I heard the boy move inside the house. The hollow scrape of a lid being lifted: the provision chest. Then the dull sound of wood against wood, the lid closing again. No rustle of grain. No shifting of dried goods. The chest was empty, or close enough that the difference didn't matter.

  The boy crouched by the fire. I could hear his knees against the packed earth floor, the quiet sounds of preparation. A clay bowl. Water from a gourd. Then the herbs — the ones from the forest, the ones I had watched him pick that morning. The ones that were wrong. At least not poisonous, but not the ones he needed either.

  He didn't know they were wrong. He worked with the focus of someone performing surgery, separating stems from leaves, discarding the parts that looked questionable, keeping the parts that looked least questionable. He crushed them between two stones with the kind of determination that substitutes for knowledge. He dropped the fragments into the water. Stirred.

  The liquid would have been clear if the herbs had been right. It was cloudy.

  A woman moved in the background. Thin — her silhouette against the firelight was all angles, shoulders like a clothes hanger, hands red and rough from labor. She watched the boy prepare the medicine. She said nothing. There was no reproach in her silence, but no hope either. She had the exhaustion of someone who had watched this ritual repeated enough times to know its conclusion. She had stopped believing that herbs would help. The boy hadn't.

  "Here, Baba."

  The sound of liquid against lips. A sip. A swallow that took effort. Then a cough — quieter this time, the body's reflexive protest. And then a sound that was worse than any cough.

  A laugh. Small, warm, grateful.

  "Tastes bad. Must be working."

  The father's joke. The small kindness of a dying man pretending that his son's efforts mattered. The lie that both of them needed and neither of them believed and both of them maintained because the alternative was a silence that neither could survive.

  I stood outside. The evening air carried the smell of the failed remedy — bitter, vegetal, useless. A smell I recognized from a thousand villages across a thousand years. Different herbs, different bowls, different fathers. The same quiet determination of children who refused to let arithmetic have the last word.

  I turned around. Walked back toward the forest.

  The boy would be fine. The father would not. The winter would come and the herbs would run out and the cough would deepen and the chest would stay empty.

  I told myself it didn't concern me. That was the phrase I used — concern, as if the issue were professional distance and not the sound of a child saying Baba in a voice that carried no expectation of failure.

  I stopped. Stood in the dark between the village and the trees. Listened to the silence that followed the coughing. Somewhere behind me, inside the house with the warped door, the fire popped. The girl with the chicken had gone inside. The old man's net was folded on the stump.

  Nothing about this was different. Nothing about this dying man distinguished him from the millions I had watched come and go. Nothing about this boy set him apart from all the other children who had stood over sick parents with the wrong medicine and the right intentions.

  I believed that for about thirty steps.