Sella worked in the bone-room with the lamp turned low, because the light hurt her eyes at this hour and because she had long ago decided that a bonesetter ought to see her skeletons by the same light a dying woman would.
They lay in their rows along the slope of the room, on boards of pale ash that the Lowgate carpenters had planed and set on trestles for her in the first winter. Each skeleton had its own board and its own card, and each card carried a number that matched a line in the bone-ledger on her knees. There were nine hundred and ninety-nine lines in all, if she counted the blank one at the bottom, and she did not count it. She counted the lines that were filled, which was the only count that gave her any satisfaction. A jaw that had been broken and set crooked. A pelvis with a notch where a fall had gone in. A pair of shins with the same hairline crack, which she had matched, in the autumn, to a Hand who had carried a load of wet stone up the north stair for a fortnight without once stopping for water.
