The weft stiffened for a day, and Sella’s diagnosis came first, as it always did, though she had to give it lying on her back on the flags of the Great Hall with her face turned toward the high windows.
She had not meant to lie down. She had been standing, with one hand on the back of her chair and her slate in the other, when the floor went hard. Her knees had locked first, and then her hips, and then the joints of her spine had gone rigid all at once like a green stick snapping in the cold, and she had toppled sideways onto the bench and slid from it onto the stone. She had not hurt herself. The stiffness had caught her before she could fall badly, and it had laid her down with a kind of terrible courtesy, flat and straight, with her arms at her sides and her slate still clutched in the fingers of her right hand. The fingers had been the only part of her that would obey her, and they had obeyed only slowly, a joint at a time.
So she diagnosed from the floor.
“The stiffening is in the limbs,” she said. Her voice came out thin and dry, because the ribs under her breastbone would barely lift. “The joints are locked where the weave is slack. The elbows and the knees and the knuckles of the hands. It is the weave’s answer to a voice with no seat. It…
