Sella kept her bones in a room under the Chapel, where the floor was cold and the air was dry and the walls had been whitewashed by somebody who had once believed in tidiness. The room was small and square and lit by a single slit window high in the north wall, through which a thin blade of morning light fell across a long bench. On the bench, laid out in rows on linen cloths, lay the bones of the Hold’s injuries.
Idrin had come to have his hand looked at. Sella had told him to come the day after the forge, at the second bell, and to bring nothing but himself, and he had come with his bandage fresh and his mind full of the goat-pens and the grey goat’s head in his lap. He had expected a surgeon’s room, with its trays and its basins and the smell of carbolic. Instead he found a room that smelled of chalk and cold stone and old linen, and a table laid with what looked like the relics of a very orderly grave.
There was a rib. It lay on its cloth with a tag of pale paper tied to one end, and the paper had been marked in black ink with a single word, Korrin, ch 19, and a number. There was a long shinbone, heavy and grey and cracked across the middle, with Gaunt, the forge, 28 written on a tag beside it. There was a knuckle, small and brown and very neat, with a strip of linen wrapped round its base, and a note in Sella’s upright hand that said: Marsh-man, the causeway, carried in Korrin’s pocket. Not his. Kept.
Sella stood at the end of the bench with the black book open in her hands and the pencil in her teeth. She kept her eyes on the book when Idrin came in. She was running her finger down a column of entries, very slowly, with the frown of a woman who has found a sum that does not come out.
“Sit,” she said, round the pencil. “No, not there. That’s the shin. Sit by the window.”
He sat by the window. The light fell on his bandaged hand, and he looked at it, and then at the rib.
“Those are bones,” he said.
“Those are the bones of the injuries,” said Sella, taking the pencil out of her mouth and laying it on the page. “That’s a different thing. A bone is a thing that’s broken. An injury is a thing that’s been done to the body, and it may or may not leave a bone behind. I keep the bones when I can get them. I keep the injuries always. That’s what the ledger is for.”
“You keep the ledger for what?”
She looked at him, then, over the top of the book. Her face was quite calm.
“For the Hands,” said Sella. “They’ll need to know which of their bones were theirs, when they come to look for them. And they’ll come to look. Everybody does. It’s the first thing a Hand asks, when it’s been awake a week: is that mine? I’ve got the answer for most of them.”
“That’s morbid.”
“It’s accurate,” said Sella. She turned a page. “Morbid is a word for something you don’t want to look at. I don’t mind looking. Most of what I’ve got in this room is somebody’s arm, or somebody’s leg, or somebody’s rib that’s been cracked for want of a sensible ladder. And every one of them was in a body that was trying to do a job. That’s not morbid, Highness. That’s a list of the work.”
She came round the bench and stood beside him at the window, and took his bandaged hand in her cold dry fingers, very lightly, as though it were a bird she did not want to startle. She began to unwind the linen.
“Hold still,” she said. “Don’t look at it. You’ll not like the colour.”
He kept his eyes away. He felt her fingers on the bandage, and the slight tug as the linen came away, and then the cool air of the room on the raw skin. It stung. He winced, and she made a small sound of satisfaction, as a woman does when a dough has risen the way she expected.
“The skin’s closing,” said Sella. “Slowly. Too slowly for a prince who wants to hold a sword by Midsummer, but that’s no concern of mine. You’ll get the grey back at the heel, and you’ll have a line across the palm where the iron went through. The first two fingers will work. The knuckle won’t. It’ll bend to a point, and then it’ll stop, like a gate on a rusted hinge, and you’ll learn to hold your cup a different way.” She turned the hand over, looked at the back of it, and then at the palm, and frowned. “The knuckle won’t bend again. Not properly. Not in a year, and maybe never. That’s the diagnosis.”
“And the comfort?” asked Idrin, dryly.
“It won’t kill you,” said Sella. “And the bend you lose is a small price for a prince’s hand. You’ve been holding things too tight for a long time. This will teach you to let a few of them go.”
She laid his hand gently on his knee and went back to the bench. She picked up the black book and the pencil and sat on a stool beside the bones, very upright, and opened the book at a clean page near the back.
“What did you remember?” she asked.
“Remember?”
“Of the first morning. The gate. You said something to me, in the Forge, when I was binding your hand, and I wrote it down on the back of my hand while you were looking at the ceiling. I want the rest of it.” She waited, pencil poised. “Tell me what you remember of the Hold’s first morning, Highness. Every line. Don’t tidy it. I’ll tidy it myself.”
So he told her.
He told her about the Lessary Road, and the grey horse, and Jory counting the cracks in the wall. He told her about the gate-arch and the chain and the palm laid flat against the warm stone. He told her about the Writ, and the doors coming up out of the flags, and the face in the oak, and the name he had lost. He told her about the gatehouse ledger with its blank page, and the disc in the box, and the cold that had come up through the stone when he touched the gate-post. He told her about the chain that drew taut and held, with nobody pulling it.
She wrote each line in the margin of the ledger, beside the bones it might have broken. It was an odd way to keep a memory. Idrin watched her do it with a kind of dull fascination. For the gate-post she drew a small neat circle beside the shinbone. For the chain she wrote a line in the margin next to the rib. For the disc, she wrote nothing at all, but left a blank space beside the knuckle.
Most of the lines were blank. He saw that as she went. Only three had anything beside them at all: the gate-chain’s cold, which had a faint dotted line; the blackened iron of the cellar pillar, which had a tiny cross; and the Writ of the Gate, which had a single heavy stroke that ran down the margin from top to bottom and stopped at the page’s edge.
“What’s the cross?” asked Idrin.
“An injury nobody’s been able to name,” said Sella. She tapped the page with the pencil. “The chain’s cold. It’s been in the ledger since you touched the gate-post, and I can’t find a bone for it. I’ve looked. There isn’t one. It’s not a break. It’s not a wound. It’s something that happens to the weft, and the weft doesn’t have bones, so I’ve had to make a mark.”
“And the stroke?”
Sella looked at the long heavy line, and her face went still.
“That’s the Writ,” she said quietly. “It’s the cost of the Writ. I can’t name it, and I can’t cure it, and I can’t bind it, but I can see where it went.” She shut the book. “The Register keeps the cost, Highness. I keep the mark.”
She got up from the stool and went to the bench, and stood there for a moment looking at the rows of bones on their linen cloths, with her hand flat on the cold wood beside the shinbone. Then she turned round and fixed him with a look that was entirely practical.
“How many living are there?” she asked. “In the Hold. Count them for me. I want the number.”
Idrin thought about it. He counted on his fingers, as he had been taught to count the rooms of a house. “Three,” he said at last. “Me, and the cook, and the reed-cutter with the splint in the cellar. The Hands are not living, whatever the Register says, and that includes you.”
Sella shook her head slowly.
“Four,” she said. “You’ve forgotten the Mantle.”
“The Mantle is not a living thing.”
“It’s the only thing in this Hold I can’t match to a bone,” said Sella, “and I’ve been looking for one since the morning I woke. It’s counted, Highness. Every day. In the ledger, in its own line, at the very bottom of the page, where I’ve left a space I’ll never fill.” She picked up the black book again and tucked it under her arm. “I count it. It doesn’t know I do. That’s the comfort I can give it, and I’ll keep giving it.”