The dawn light had strengthened just enough to turn the frost crystals inside the carved depressions a dull, semi-clear silver. Mina knelt beside the fifth station on the Path of Kneeling Stone. She pressed the brass zero-ring of her linen measuring cord against the back ridge of the right knee hollow. There, the kneecap and upper shin bone of the kneeling person had borne down into the slate.
She drew the knotted cord taut across the stone to the center of the palm depression. Then out to the smooth oval hollow where the forehead had rested against the floor.
“When a human being kneels in full prostration with their buttocks resting back toward their heels and their forehead touching the stone,” Mina said, keeping her face angled slightly up so Hall Mistress Soran could read her lips in the grey light, “the maximum distance from the front of the kneecap to the glabella of the forehead is governed by the combined length of the thigh bone, the lower-back and chest spine, and the skull. Even if an adult elder curls their back tightly, the lateral width between the two knee centers and the distance from the elbow print to the wrist print can’t shrink unless you saw the bones shorter.”
