The wrist turned white on a morning when the wind came off the Caul and the gate-leaf was quiet.
Brannoc felt it before he saw it. He was sitting in the windlass chair with his hand resting on the cold iron of the crank, not turning it, only keeping the fingers there as a man keeps his hand on a dog’s neck to let it know he is still awake. He had done that every morning since the bloom began. It was the only thing the gate asked of him that he could give without shame. And that morning, for the first time in a whole season, the cold in his wrist did not feel like a grey stone sunk in the bone. It felt like warmth.
It was a small warmth. It came up from the crush, where the bone had broken and been set and broken again, and it spread outward into the new weft the way the sun spreads over a field in the first hour after frost. He lifted his hand and turned it over in the grey light from the gate-arch, and he watched.
The grey had gone. It had gone from the wrist and the back of the hand and the first two knuckles, and where it had been there was a clean pale colour, like the inside of a shell. At the place where the break had been, a small hard ridge ran across the bone, a fraction higher than the rest, the…
