The hospice treatment room was quiet except for the soft hiss of the rapeseed-oil wick burning in its brass saucer and the distant, rhythmic thrum of the northern sky-slit shaking faintly against the window glass.
On the scrubbed pine table in the center of the room, Mina had arranged her instruments with the clean, careful care that had carried their small group from the river wards of Oran to the snows of the Hollow Summit. Three curved bone stitch needles threaded with boiled black silk, iron metal tongs in a shallow dish of spirits, twenty folded squares of boiled linen, a covered jar of willow-bark wash, and four measured packets of Bel Sar’s stone spring ash.
Seyun paused on the stone threshold with Nara’s plain ash staff in his left hand. Then, Mina looked up from the stitch tray and set her iron bandage scissors down on the pine board.
“Come in and sit on the stool for two minutes,” she said. She pointed to the wooden seat beside the table. “Let me check the tension on that forearm splint and the bottom turn of your calf wrap before you climb eight hundred feet of rock.”
Seyun stepped into the small room, leaned the blood-stained ash staff against the limewashed wall beside the door. Then he sat down on the wooden stool.
