Seyun carried an armful of split pine logs on his left shoulder as Mother Renn had instructed. He pushed open the heavy plank door of the hospice kitchen. Then he stepped into the warm smell of boiled barley, dried mugwort, and beeswax animal fat. After the biting frost of the lower practice yard, the heat from the clay stove made the skin of his cheeks tingle. He stacked the pine billets neatly in the woodbox beside the hearth and hung his staff on the wall pegs near the entrance.
At the long scrubbed-pine table in the center of the room, Pera and Senn were sorting washed linen bandages into three flat wicker baskets by width. Each time Senn reached across the table to smooth a roll of cloth, the leather-and-ash chest brace Mina had fitted around his ribs gave a soft, rhythmic click. Across the room, tucked under two quilted wool blankets on a low straw pallet beside the warm stove wall, Senn’s two young children—the boy and girl for whose sake he had walked back up into Vaska Ren’s custody during the snowstorm—slept with their foreheads almost touching.
Inside the hospice kitchen, the air smelled richly of toasted barley, simmered mutton bones. The pine-scented pine knots burning in the clay stove. At the far end of the room, behind a hung wool blanket that partitioned off the quiet recovery corner, Steward Osen Tal lay asleep on a low cot with fresh linen bound around the deep flank wound he…
