Down in the hospice treatment room, the afternoon light coming through the oiled paper casement smelled of boiled willow bark, lye soap, and wet wool.
Seyun sat on the wooden check bench with his left trouser leg slit to the knee and his foot resting on a low pine stool. Across from him knelt Mina, her sleeves rolled to the elbows and her dark hair pinned tightly out of her eyes. Sixteen-year-old Halin stood at her right elbow holding the scrubbed pewter instrument tray. A small bowl of warm willow-bark wash, a curved bone needle threaded with boiled silk, iron metal tongs, and a fresh clay jar of Bel Sar’s stone spring ash.
Mina didn’t scold Seyun for going up the scree trail when the stray pale blade struck. She didn’t lecture him about the four-session training schedule that the unscheduled rescue had just interrupted. Since their mother died under the hands of a sect healer who talked grandly while missing a lung infection, Mina reserved her anger for dishonesty and carelessness, never for wounds taken doing necessary work.
Instead, she worked with brisk, cold and exact exactitude.
She used the iron metal tongs and a linen swab soaked in warm willow-bark decoction. She irrigated the three-inch slanted gash across the outer belly of Seyun’s left calf, picking out four tiny grains of grey limestone grit that the shale shard had driven into the muscle tissue.
