The sprig rode against Ysra’s chest in a sling of gate-leather, and Sella could hear it breathing from three paces away. It was not a loud sound. It was the small wet click of a thing with gills drawing water through a slit in its side, and it came at a steady pace, one click for every four of Ysra’s footsteps up the slope. Sella had counted them since the culvert. She had not told Ysra, because Ysra would have started counting them too, and then the two of them would have been a pair of clerks on a hillside, and the hill would have had the last word.
The sprig was the size of a loaf of the Kitchen’s bread, with a hollow in its middle the exact shape of the shard it carried. It was pale grey, the colour of wet bone, and its surface was laced with fine dark veins that ran toward the hollow and stopped there, as if the shard had been wired into it. Brannoc had shed the thing in the gate-yard the morning they left, with a grunt and a shiver and a look of enormous surprise, and he had handed it to Ysra as a man hands over a child who has been sick in his coat. It had one day of mind. It had been given that day by its seat, the way every sprig was given its day, and the day was not yet over.
