In the morning Mara reached for the cup with the wrong hand.
She had slept in the back room of the yard office, on the cot, under two blankets and Tavin’s old coat. When she woke the light through the small window was red. It was neither the red of evening nor of a forge. It was the red Hearth had been since the halfway pulse: a deep steady glow, like coals banked under ash, that lay over everything in the yard and made the frost on the window look like rust.
The cup was on the stool beside the cot. Tin, with water in it. Someone had left it there in the night.
She reached for it with her left hand, because that was the hand she always reached with. And stopped. Her left forearm lay across her chest in the sling, wrapped from the elbow to the wrist in white gauze, and when she moved it the pain came up through the dressing, dull and hot, a long ache with something sharper underneath where the frame’s edge had been.
She looked at the dressing a while. Then she reached across with her right hand and picked up the cup.
