The Mason’s Yard had a tithe-barn at its back that had been built, Sella suspected, by someone who expected to store a great deal of grain and had been disappointed by the harvest. It was long and low and smelled of old straw and older mice. Harrow had set new flags in its floor the winter before, and Pell had hung hams from its beams, and Sella had moved in with her bone-ledger, her splints, forty folded blankets and a pot of carbolic-smelling vinegar that the Kitchen did not know she had stolen from the Forge.
On the twenty-eighth day she was laying out the beds.
She laid them in two rows along the barn’s north wall, with a narrow aisle between them, and she counted each bed as she set it down. Thirty-one. She counted the splints. Forty-four, of three lengths, in a bundle under the eaves. She counted the blankets. Forty, and two that she had kept back for herself, since she had found, on the morning of her first waking in the Hold, that a bonesetter who did not sleep in her own infirmary was a bonesetter who did not know what her patients were going to need.
