The boy began to cough in the middle of the night, and Ysra carried him down to the infirmary herself, counting the steps aloud all the way, because she had been told he would be frightened of the dark and she did not trust anyone else to say the numbers properly.
Sella heard them coming from the far end of the ward. She heard the Watch-woman’s voice first, flat and steady, going up the stair from the Kitchen passage in the rhythm of a count: eleven, twelve, the turn, the landing, fourteen. Then the cough. It was a small dry sound, like a dog barking in a barn, and it stopped and started and stopped again, and each time it came Sella felt her own shoulder answer it with a pain so sharp she had to set down the basin she was holding.
She set it down. She picked up the lamp instead. She went to the door.
Ysra came through it with the boy in her arms. He was a thin, long-limbed child, too big to be carried and too frightened to be put down, and he had his face pressed into the Watch-woman’s shoulder and his small fists knotted in her coat. His hair was black with soot. His lips were grey. When he lifted his head to look for the light, his eyes were red and watering, and the cough came out of him in a rattle that sounded, Sella thought, like a bucket dragged over a…
