The warm vessel’s face had begun to drift. Sella saw it first as a softness at the mouth.
She had been sitting on the tiles at the foot of the tenth row for most of the afternoon, with the bone-ledger open across her knees and the lamp beside her, and she had been looking at the face in the clay the whole time, because she had decided that a bonesetter who looked away from a wound to spare herself was not fit to set anything. The face had been still when she came. It had been plain and tired and steady, the lines above the brows as sharp as a clerk’s, the eyes half closed as if the owner were listening to a long column of figures being read aloud. Then, somewhere between one breath and the next, the mouth had changed.
It had not moved. It had only softened. The line of the lips had lost its firmness, and the corners had drawn up a fraction, very slightly, toward a smile that the clay had never been shaped to make. Sella stared at it and did not look away. She had seen a sleeper’s face do exactly that on the bed-boards, when a dream turned from a grief into something gentler and the body had not yet decided whether to follow it.
