The cold air in the forge shop was motionless except for the slow, ragged rhythm of Doma Reel’s breathing.
Four shallow, rapid gasps that barely lifted the left side of her chest. It was followed by a long, choking pause of five seconds where the room seemed to freeze. Then a violent, shuddering convulsion that ran through her entire frame as her chest muscle fought against the blood pooling in her collapsed right lung.
Brant Sallow had set the nickel-plated dressing metal tongs down on the anvil. There was no point in probing for cut vessels. Every try to apply pressure to the subclavian artery only sped up the escape of air into her neck tissues. Instead, the orderly simply held a folded towel soaked in cool well water against her cracked lips. She wiped away the dark foam that bubbled from her mouth with every expiration.
“The pulse is fading at the wrist blood vessel,” Brant muttered, his two fingers pressed against the cold tendon of her left wrist. “It’s thready. Less than thirty beats a minute. The outer breath flow is failing.”
Len Vey held Doma’s left hand in both of his.
His sound right fingers wrapped around her palm. At the same time, his injured left hand, stiff within its beeswaxed cedar splints, rested beneath her cold knuckles to support the limb. The skin of her palm was thick, calloused by thirty years of handling forty-gallon iron kettles, chopping frozen rutabagas, and scouring grease from copper wash-boilers…
