Gaunt was carried in from the marsh road on a cart at dusk, with Rook’s men walking beside it and the sluice’s water still standing in his boots. Sella heard the cart before she saw it. She knew the sound of the Hold’s wheels on the Kitchen cobbles, and this was not a sound she had ever heard them make at that speed.
She was in the infirmary off the Kitchen, in the chair by the warm wall, with a blanket over her knees and her ledger in her lap. Pell had left a basin of hot water on the table by the cot and a bowl of broth beside it, cold already, and a roll of clean linen, and a board of ash that the Forge’s boy had planed that afternoon without being asked. Sella had asked for the board. She had known, from Rook’s first runner, what the Smith’s arm would need.
They laid him on the table. He did not cry out. He had been silent since the sluice, except for one thing, which Rook’s men repeated to her in low voices at the door: that the Smith had said the bar was his iron, and that the iron was good, and that his arm was not.
