Sella measured the sprig’s day with the candle-clock of her trade. It was a short stick of pale pine that she had cut on the Hold’s second morning in the Mend-room, and she had carried it in her coat ever since, the way a bonesetter carries a splint she hopes never to use. Every breath the sprig drew through its gill-slits, she cut a notch in the stick with her thumbnail. It was not an exact measure. She knew that. A breath was not a second, and a sprig’s breathing changed with the cold and the water and the weight of whatever it was holding. But the notches gave her something to count against, and a diagnostician who had nothing to count against was a diagnostician who had started to guess.
She sat on the top step of the water-stair in the grey light of the second morning. Her feet were in the lake to the ankle, which was cold enough to hurt, and her back was against the wall, and the stick lay across her knee with its notches climbing toward the top like the rungs of a ladder that went nowhere. She had cut a little over two hundred of them since the first dusk. She had not slept, or had slept in the way that bonesetters sleep, sitting up with their hands on the knees of the injured. Ysra had slept for two hours at the wall above her, with her head on her arms and her…
