Len Vey lay on his back upon a narrow pine cot in the corner of the former Tram dispatch office, his eyes fixed on the whitewashed timber rafters overhead.
His braced left arm rested comfortably across his stomach, cushioned upon a folded square of dark blue wool blanket. The cedar slats had been retied that morning with clean linen tape. The wood was smooth and rigid, holding his fractured forearm bone in straight, unmoving traction. Beside his left hip, his hand lay relaxed, the gray-pale fingers no longer twitching with the reflex, electric spasms that had tormented his forearms during the nine days of the hunter’s pursuit. His cracked ribs still ached with a dull, steady heat. But the sharp, stabbing agony that had accompanied every breath during the climb from the Star tower had subsided into a manageable soreness that allowed full, deep expansions of his lungs.
Beneath his head lay a plump pillow of duck down, enclosed in clean white muslin that smelled of wild lavender and dry sunshine. Martha Holt had brought it from her grandmother’s cedar chest that afternoon. She set it on the cot while Len was in the chart room with Bram. A courier who climbs a mountain on two cracked ribs doesn’t sleep on straw ticks, she had said. She refused his objections with an authoritative wave of her soup ladle.
