The infirmary was a stone room at the back of the Mason’s yard, with a north window, a long bench for the injured and a shorter one for the bone-ledger, and a smell of lime-wash and dried willow-bark that never quite went away. Sella had kept it for two hundred years, in one form or another. She had kept it when the Hold had no roof and she had set Idrin’s burned hand on a flat stone by the gate. She had kept it when the first Writ came and the first wall went up. She had kept it through the Hunger of the Articles, and through the siege, and through the long grey afternoon when a Hand’s own bone had cracked in the Undercroft and nobody had known how to tell the Chamber. She knew the room as a Hand knows its own trade, by the weight of each stool and the cold of each shelf.
At the end of midsummer she measured every Hand’s joints, one by one, against the bone-ledger.
The ledger was a long book bound in dark leather, and it was the only record in the Hold that was entirely honest about pain. Every entry in it was a bone, or a joint, or a line of the body where the weft had given way under a weight. Every Hand’s injuries were there, matched to the skeleton in the Undercroft that they came from, so that when a Hand’s left wrist ached Sella could turn…
