Sella went down the Undercroft stair with her bone-ledger in its oilskin and sat on the ninth step, where she could see the Keystone’s face and the shadows of the skeletons in their niches.
It was cold on the stair. The cold came up off the flagstones and through the seat of her skirt, and she did not mind it. A bonesetter who minded the cold of a cellar had no business in one. She had spent more of her life in the Undercroft than most of the Hands had spent awake, and she knew the place as she knew her own hands, by touch and by smell and by the small sounds the old stone made when the Hold settled over it: a tick from the Keystone’s base, a long dry sigh from the north wall, the faint rattle of the chains that hung from the hatch-ring above the stair like the reins of a horse that had been left to stand.
She opened the book on her knees.
The bone-ledger was thicker now than it had been in the first year. It had grown a new section every winter, as a tree grows a ring, and every section had its own careful order: the living first, in her small dry hand, with the marks for the ones who had walked out of the cough and the ones who had walked out of the Hold; then the dead, with their hours and their causes and the bone that had…
