Sella stayed in the gate-seat after the Chamber had gone up, because somebody had to count the gate-hand’s pulse, and nobody else in the Hold would do it without sighing.
She sat on the bottom step with her back to the cold wall and her bad shoulder held against her side, and she took Brannoc’s wrist in her good hand. The skin was cold, colder than the stone, and it smelled of the cistern and of old oak. She could feel the blood in the wrist, but it came up slowly, the way water comes up a sluice that has been half shut for too long. She counted it against the drain’s sound. Forty-four beats in the count of a hundred and eleven breaths of the drain. She wrote the figure on her cuff, and then, because her cuff was not the bone-ledger and never would be, she took the stub of pencil from her coat and wrote it again on the back of her hand.
“You are counting me,” said Brannoc.
“I am counting the drain. You are a part of it.”
“That is a lie, Sella.”
“It is a diagnosis,” said Sella. “I do not lie in the gate-seat. The damp would spoil the ink.”
