Sella kept the chapel infirmary the way she kept her bone-ledger, which was to say with a cold eye on every line and no sentimentality about the margins. It had five cots along the north wall under the high windows, a brazier at the far end that she lit at the first frost and let go out at the first thaw, and a shelf of brown glass bottles that had been labelled by three different people over two hundred years and that she had re-labelled, after a long argument with herself, in her own square capitals. Horehound was on the second shelf. Willow-bark was on the third. Hot honey and wine lived on the table by the door, in a crock with a wooden lid, because in her experience nothing a frightened man could be given was so effective as a cup he could hold in both hands.
Benedek Sly came in at the candle-clock with his hands shaking so hard that he could not hold the bottle of horehound.
He had tried. She had watched him try from the door. He had taken the bottle off the shelf and then, halfway to his mouth, the bottle had begun to chatter against his teeth, and he had put it down on the nearest cot with a clatter and stood looking at his own fingers as if they belonged to a stranger at a fair. He was in his good coat, which was too warm for the infirmary, and his hair…
