From her high drafting stool behind the public counter of the renovated Survey Office, Ivara Quill watched Len Vey unbuckle his leather panniers.
She watched with the cold, cold and exact care of an elder land-mapper who had spent seven years learning the exact physics of an altered skeleton. A person lost a limb or suffered a load-bearing deformity. Then, ordinary observers saw only the deficit. The empty sleeve pinned to the coat, the limp in the gravel, or the thick, puckered scar where a surgeon had pulled out bone splinters.
Ivara didn’t look at the deficits. She looked at the compensating shape.
She noticed how Len handled the twenty-two-pound canvas mail-sack. He didn’t make the common mistake of an injured novice. Attempting to reach across his torso with the weakened left hand to snatch at the leather shoulder strap. That kind of awkward, cross-body lurch forced the left shoulder girdle into a sudden internal rotation, twisting the collar bone and placing fifty pounds of sideways tearing force directly across the unhealed inner bone-web.
Instead, Len used his sound right hand to grasp the heavy rawhide lifting loop. With a smooth, hip-driven movement fueled by Surefoot and Carrying Balance, he hoisted the sack to the level of his solar nerve web, then brought his left forearm up horizontally against his ribs.
