Edda lay on a pallet of dry rye straw in the bed of Bevin Soot’s freight wagon, her right forearm propped upon a burlap sack of coarse salt to keep the crushed knuckles raised above her heart.
The splints on her middle and ring fingers were carved from split ash laths, bound tightly with strips of raw, unwhitened linen that had been boiled in cider vinegar and smeared with pine pitch to suppress the swelling. The splinting was rigid, but it couldn’t silence the bone ends.
Every time the heavy wagon’s iron-shod wheels struck a raised paving block in the surface trench, the fractured shafts of her finger bones ground together with a dry, grating friction that sent nauseating waves of cold sweat cascading down her neck. The pain was not a sharp sting. It was a rhythmic, iron throb that matched the heavy, measured stride of the four draft mules plodding through the mud ahead.
Her left arm was locked still in its own sling, tucked securely beneath the bib of her leather apron. She had worked eight seasons on the limestone faces of Tier Four, surviving roof slips, misfired powder holes, and flooded drain pits. But she had never felt so utterly, physically useless. A driller with two broken hands was a ghost waiting for an office voucher.
