“Nobody is restoring anything while the bone at the top of your thigh is grinding every time you breathe,” Ysabet said.
She handed her lantern to Osha, unslung her pack on a dry flat rock ten feet up the steps, and knelt in the wet gravel on Edris’s left side—keeping his body between herself and the humming black-stone cage. Even at that angle, the low vibration of the bronze clapper made her teeth feel slightly loose in her gums and sent a phantom prickle across the burn scar on her right palm.
Using her small harness knife in her left hand, Ysabet slit the soaked wool of Edris’s left trouser leg from knee to waist. The fracture sat high on the left femur, only a hand’s breadth below the hip socket, swollen hard and purple under the skin where the heavy cage frame had clipped him on the fall.
“Ashaun, give me the two long ash slats from the side of my pack and the roll of wide linen,” Ysabet said, pressing her left fingers carefully above the break to check that the bone end had not pierced the artery in the groin. “Hold his left ankle steady and pull straight toward your boot when I count three. Don’t twist it.”
