Ysabet looked down at her hands before she answered.
Her left hand—the useful one that held ropes, pared hooves, and stitched her rough reed-board notebook together—lay open on her knee, calloused and smeared with chalk. Her right hand lay half-curled in her lap. The two smallest fingers stayed bent toward the scarred palm where the observatory’s false healing had burned her, and the middle joint had been throbbing steadily since the rain started at noon.
All the way from Bent Reed, people had asked her what Pip was, or whether it was dangerous, or what price she would take to hand it over. Nobody except Ashaun had ever asked straight out what Ysabet was hoping to buy with everyone else’s bruised ribs and ruined livelihoods.
“When I bought you out of that fish crate,” Ysabet said slowly, keeping her voice low so it would not wake the mouse now curled under the dry grass in its box, “I told myself I was just keeping a frightened animal away from a man with a heavy ring. Since then Chaska sold her boat at a loss, Osha lost her home and her library, Kiv burned his whole life behind him, and Ashaun has been carrying a blade that hurts her to touch.”
