The bone-room lay at the back of the Undercroft, past the Keystone’s niche and the low arch where the cellar damp came through the mortar in dark beads. Sella had kept her ledger there since the first winter, when the Hands had only just learned to count their own limbs. It was the one room in the Hold where nobody argued with her. The skeletons did not object to being measured. They lay in their rows along the walls, each one on its own shelf of cut stone, each with its skull turned slightly toward the door as if it had been listening for someone to come in and say its name.
Sella liked them better than most of the living. They had nothing to hide from her, and their injuries were all of them honest.
She had the ledger open on the reading-stand, and she had the lamp at her left elbow, where it would not tip into the page. The lamp was a good one, brass, with a clean chimney. Pell had given it to her in exchange for a bone-setting in the autumn, and she had said that it was the first thing she had ever been paid for that did not come with a diagnosis attached.
