Sect Year 5 · fourth month · night of day 1 · the forty-seventh life: Hallam Ford, her thirty-first year
Emrys Lusk lay in the bed by the window. There, the light from the river came in grey through the bars of the shutters. He was a carter by trade, forty or a little past it, with a long face burned brown by weather and a voice that had been used for shouting at horses for most of his life. The leg had been set on the riverbank by a man who had been drinking. It had been braced with two planks and a strip of sacking, and the sacking had grown stiff with what it soaked up. By the second morning the smell had filled the corner of the ward.
Nesa had changed the dressing twice. The second time, Emrys gripped the bedrail with both hands and made no sound at all, and when it was over he let go and laughed at himself for having held on so hard.
“Sister.” He turned his head on the folded coat that served him as a pillow. It was his brother’s coat, a heavy canvas thing with brass buttons, and it smelled of horse and rain. “I’ve a mare on the road below the ford. Tansy. Nobody’s feeding her. Can you send word?”
