The clinic niche smelled of dried comfrey, boiled linen, and the faint, chalky scent of lime dust that drifted off Sergeant Berr whenever he moved his shoulders.
Fen knelt on the braided rush mat beside the low bench, his healer’s box open at his knee and his hands held half an inch above the dead sergeant’s left wrist. Outside in the main hall, Tessa Dene had taken a hand-lantern down the dark cart track toward Mere to pass word to the woodcutters and weavers before dawn, and Hobb was banked down behind the kitchen screen snoring softly into his flour sack. Only Sella Rusk remained awake by the hearth table, sharpening a boot knife with long, even strokes against an oilstone while Noll Vey kept the room’s heat steady in the floor flags.
“Hold your thumb toward the light, Sergeant,” Fen whispered.
Berr obeyed, resting his elbow on his iron knee-guard and turning the pale, half-transparent bone of his left hand palm-up toward the tallow dip. Through the wrist bones—the scaphoid and lunate that Fen had memorized from an apothecary’s chart in his first year as a shrine novice—the weave of the rush mat below was clearly visible, like pebbles seen through brook water.
