By the fifth week of the winter season, the ground-floor clinic two blocks inside Oran’s lower market gate no longer smelled of new pine sawdust. It smelled of simmering willow-bark decoctions, toasted mugwort, clean vinegar-washed linen. The wet wool coats of the river wagon drivers and market women who stepped across the flat cobblestone threshold from morning until dusk.
Seyun arrived on the fifteenth of the month just after the fifth afternoon bell, when Halin was flipping the carved cedar door-sign from Open for Pulse Consultation to Evening Decoction Hours.
Inside, a cast-iron charcoal stove kept the consultation room at a steady, dry warmth that thawed the frost off a visitor’s eyelashes within three breaths. On the upper shelves of the three-drawer medicine room cabinet sat the eight sealed clay pot jars of thrice-sifted Ash Reed spring ash Seyun had brought down from the mountain, each jar labeled in Mina’s square hand with batch weights and patient allocations. At the side intake desk sat sixteen-year-old Halin, his brow furrowed in quiet concentration as he copied his afternoon watching slates into the permanent case register before washing the chalk off the boards.
Mina sat at the main pine check table counting the day’s copper and silver consultation fees into three neat wooden bowls. One for herb restocking, one for coal and rent, and one for the biweekly loan repayment she had scheduled with her brother during that earlier ordeal.
