Sella measured the bloom in each Hand, one by one, as they came into the infirmary complaining of the same hurt in different limbs, and she did it in the order she always used, which was the diagnosis first and the comfort second.
The infirmary was a low room cut into the Hold’s north wall, behind the Kitchen’s bake-house, where the stone stayed cool in summer and the bone-ledger’s racks could be kept dry. It had six cots, a table of scrubbed pine, a bucket of clean water, and a brazier that Sella lit only when a Hand needed warming, which was rarely, because the Hands did not feel the cold the way the living did. They felt other things. Sella had spent the better part of two seasons learning what those things were, and she had written them all down, in the margins of the bone-ledger, in her own small dry hand, with a line for each Hand and a second line for the Hand’s joints.
Harrow came in first, with his count-cord in his fist and his right hand held very carefully against his chest.
“Sit,” said Sella.
“I am sitting.”
“Then sit lower. Your hand is a diagnosis. Let me see it.” She took the hand in both of hers and turned it over, slowly, and pressed her thumbs along the knuckles one by one, as she would have pressed the bones of a builder’s arm in the Undercroft to find where the break had set. Harrow…
