The four wounded men from the outer ward came into the tithe-barn on a hurdle, two to a side, and Sella had them on the beds before the Watch’s lad had finished telling her which was which.
She went down the row with her lamp in her good hand. The first was a ladder-fall. He had come off the second rung of a Corvanne ladder when the rung cracked under his boot, and he had landed on his right shoulder in the wet grass at the foot of the wall, and he was white and breathing shallow, with a shoulder that sat too low. She put her palm on the joint, lightly, and felt the bone move under the skin like a stone under water, and said to him, “Dislocated, and it will go back, and you will scream, and then it will not hurt for a week.” Then she told the Watch’s lad to hold his elbow, and she pulled the arm straight with one clean motion that ended on a crack like a dry stick, and the man screamed, as she had said he would.
“Now it will not hurt,” said Sella, and wrote the line in the bone-ledger in the square hand she used for everyone.
