The Warden came to the Infirmary on the fifth evening because somebody had told him he was grey, and Sella, who had been looking at him for the better part of a week, could have told him so herself.
He came in without knocking. He had his coat on still, buttoned wrong at the top, and his left hand was held a little away from his side with the palm turned in, as though he had burned it and forgotten about it. He did not sit down. He stood in the middle of the room with the lamp-light on his face and the smell of vinegar and boiled linen all round him, and waited, in the posture of a man who expected to be told the price of a thing before he had been allowed to see the goods.
Sella did not ask him what had happened.
She knew. She had it from Ysra’s warning-book, which Ysra had left open on the Infirmary bench that morning by accident and then come back for, very red in the face, and had not mentioned. She had it from the Watch’s faces on the stair, which were grey in a different way from the Warden’s. She had it from the way the Warden’s right hand kept going up to the back of his neck, and stopping there, and coming down again empty, as though he were trying to find a thing he had put in his collar and could not now feel.
