A held Hand could not take a cup. Pell had asked Sella about it on the first morning, with her arms folded and her chin up, and Sella had said that a held Hand did not swallow in the ordinary way, since the sleep took the throat’s muscles as well as the voice, and that the only thing to be done was to feed him slowly and wait. So Pell fed him slowly, and waited, and called him boy the whole time, since it was the only word she had for a man who would not answer back.
She sat on the infirmary’s back-room stool, with a bowl of broth on her knee and a horn spoon in her hand, and Korrin lay on the narrow cot with his face turned to the wall and his mouth a little open, as a child’s mouth goes when it has been crying and then fallen asleep. His breath came in and out, short and even, like a clock with a cracked spring that kept on ticking anyway.
“Here, boy,” said Pell, and touched the spoon to his lip.
The broth went in. Some of it ran out again at the corner of his mouth, and she wiped it with the cloth from her shoulder, and then she tried again, with less broth on the spoon and a firmer hand under his jaw. He swallowed. She heard it, a small dry sound, and she let out a breath she had not known she…
