Korrin woke at the first grey light with the postern still in his ears and his right hand closed on nothing, and the first thing he did was count.
“Bread,” he said. It came out as a croak. He tried again, louder. “Stair. Postern. Count.”
The voice was his, but it arrived late, like a bell that had been struck under water and was only now surfacing. He lay on the cot in the infirmary’s back room with his face to a whitewashed wall and listened to it come back to him, one word after another, as a man hears the rain before he feels it on his skin. The room smelled of vinegar and broth. Somewhere beyond the door a bucket was being set down, hard, by someone who did not care who heard.
“Bread,” said Pell, from the doorway, in her loudest Kitchen voice. “You will have bread, boy, and you will eat it sitting up, and I will be standing here to see that you do.”
She came in with a plate. It was a tin plate, dented at one edge, and on it was a heel of the Kitchen’s grey loaf, still warm, with a smear of drippings across the top. She set it on the stool beside the cot and stood over him with her big red hands on her hips.
