Fin watched time speed forward. The man named Charlie checked on them every single day. Every. Single. Day. Through the lashings and the silver and the starvation and the labor and every horror a slave kingdom could manufacture for two girls whose crime was existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Two girls. One healer. A slave quarter in a kingdom built on cruelty. And the only thing standing between them and death was a man named Charlie whose weapons were bread and bandages and the specific, quiet heroism of someone who had decided that helping was worth dying for and then got up every morning and proved it.
Fin had commanded armies. He had never seen bravery like this.
Charlie kept them alive the way an engineer keeps a bridge standing: through daily inspection, constant maintenance, and the stubborn, structural refusal to let the thing he was maintaining collapse on his watch.
