Senn walked across the flat stone threshold of the clinic without having to brace his knee for a single stair. His seven-year-old daughter held the left tab of his wool coat and his five-year-old son held the right, both children looking around with wide eyes at the clean pine benches and the rows of brown clay pot herb jars.
Seyun, who had stopped by at noon with a basket of turnips and barley from the market stalls, stepped back beside the herb cabinet to give the family the floor. Meanwhile, Halin right away brought two small stools and a handful of warm chestnuts to the waiting bench for the children.
As Senn unfastened his outer coat and sat upright on the low check bench so Mina could inspect the laced leather-and-ashwood spinal brace beneath his shirt, Seyun remembered the dark snowstorm below the Hollow Summit in the middle of the winter escape. That night, when the interrupted pillar pressure had begun tearing at Senn’s older dorsal scars, Senn had looked at Seyun in the falling snow and chosen to walk back up the mountain into Vaska Ren’s custody rather than die in a drift and leave these two children without a father. Because Mina and Seyun had honored his right to make that choice—giving him the breathing pause to carry back into captivity until they returned on the twentieth day to disconnect all seven leftover beds—the man was sitting in this room today with his children eating chestnuts three feet…
