Pell carried broth to the screen by the infirmary’s warm wall every candle-clock, because it was the one thing in the Hold she knew how to do without thinking, and because the two people behind the screen needed it more than they needed her thoughts.
The screen was an old Kitchen partition, a set of oak panels on iron hinges that had once divided the bread-room from the flour-store. Pell had dragged it into the infirmary in the first winter when the fever came up the Lowgate lanes, and it had stood by the warm wall ever since, with its panels scarred and its paint worn to the grain. Behind it were two cots. In one of them, under two blankets, Sella lay with her face to the wall and her bone-ledger on the chair beside her, closed. Sella had asked that no one open it while she was in the bed, and Pell had promised, and had not yet had cause to break the promise.
In the other cot Gaunt sat upright against his pillows, with his arm in its ash board across his chest and his good hand on the blanket. He was eating his bread in silence. They had agreed on the silence between them after the sluice. Pell had not been there when they agreed it, but she had seen them both come out of the infirmary that afternoon with the same stiff, careful faces, the faces of two people who had decided not to say…
