“Kalen... Five,” Senn whispered against the wool cuff of Mina’s sleeve, measuring his words into three-syllable rations between shallow, deliberate pauses of his chest muscle. “Mira... Seven. Lower... Timber locks.”
Mina didn’t hurry him or finish his words for him. She kept her thumb resting lightly against his outward pulse to confirm that speaking was not collapsing the fragile interval the hot reed-ash compress had bought inside his fourth rib. Across the narrow pine litter, Seyun leaned in closer to block the swirling eddy of snow with his own cloak. He listened as the twenty-four-year-old carpenter laid out the arithmetic of a life that had nothing to do with ancient sects or sky-slits.
The winter river ice crushed the town timber booms below Oran two years ago. Then, Senn had broken two ribs saving a guild barge and lost his season’s wages. Meanwhile, his chest healed crookedly. With his wife three years dead of marsh fever and his two young children boarding at his younger sister’s crowded house near the lock gates, the Aperture Court’s recruitment poster had looked like salvation: three silver coins paid to his sister’s household on the first of every month, plus free spirit vein treatment at a mountain convalescent shrine.
