Sella gave the diagnosis first, as she always did, and the comfort after, and she had never once in her life got the order the wrong way round. It was the only rule she kept that the Chamber had not voted on. The living had a right to know what was broken before anybody told them it would mend.
The bolt had gone into the meat of the shoulder above the collarbone, angled upward, and it had missed the bone by the width of a thumb. She had her hands on the place before the barge’s pole-men had finished carrying Wren up the Lowgate steps, and she knew by the give of the flesh and the hitch in the girl’s breath that the shaft had come out clean at the back, the head having been snapped off in the marsh-reeds and left behind. That was luck. Luck did not make a shoulder better. It only made the work less bloody.
“Lie still,” she said. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt. I know it hurts. It hurts like a mule’s kick and it’s going to go on hurting until the spring.”
“You’re cheerful,” said Wren, from the pillow, through her teeth. Her face was the colour of tallow and there was marsh-mud in her hair, and she had both hands clamped round the edge of the bed-frame as though it were a boat that might drift away if she let go.
