The Gatehouse clinic was two rooms and a stove, and Sella kept it the way she kept everything, which was tidily and with a little contempt for the people who came through its door. The lower room held a table, a basin, a shelf of brown bottles that did nothing except make the lodgers feel they were being looked after, and a narrow bench under the window where she laid out the hurt. The upper room held her ledgers and her needles and the three bone-saws she had brought up from the Undercroft in the winter, which she had not used since the Crown but would not let anyone else touch. The stove in the lower room was lit. It was the only warm thing in the place, and she kept it lit because a patient who was cold would not hold still.
Idrin Saelmar sat on the bench under the window in his shirt with his coat folded beside him and the lamp lit, and he held still, because he had been told to.
“You are not ill,” said Sella. “I will say that first, Highness, so that you are not frightened by the rest of it. You are not dying of anything. You are paying.”
