Tallow read the first line aloud. He read it in the plain voice, the one he used for minutes, and he read it to the four of them standing in the clerk’s alcove with the pour-book open on the table between them and the lamp burning on its stand. He read the trade first, and then the line-number, and then the day, and then the mould, and last of all the word in the fifth column, which he had to tilt toward the lamp before he could make it out. Poured.
The words went round the four of them like a cold draught through a shut room. Sella felt them go. She saw Brannoc’s shoulders stiffen at the sound of his own trade, and Ysra’s lips move on the number, and Tallow’s voice falter for half a breath on the last word before it steadied. Nobody spoke. The alcove was small and dry and smelt of old paper, and the silence in it was thick, as though the room had been waiting two hundred years to be told what it held and had only now been given permission to listen.
Sella did the diagnosis. It was her trade to name what had happened to a body before the body was allowed to grieve it. That was the discipline. A bonesetter who let a family weep over a fracture before she had said where the fracture was would be a bonesetter who had failed the family, however tender her hands. So…
