Mara sat at the link desk in the yard’s back room with the fleet’s sheet count pinned to the wall beside her.
The link desk was the yard office’s old ledger table, pushed under the back room’s window and fitted with the relay console from the forge wall and a second screen Eshel had brought from Hearth. From here she could talk to the Tern, the Fallow Hand, the Bellwether, and the patrol escort, and to the guild hall and the Directorate’s Board on the other line. The doctor had allowed it. Sitting, she said. Talking. No lifting.
Her right hand lay flat on the desk. She kept it there. It wanted to move, to pick things up, to turn dials; she kept it flat, the way she had kept it on the edge of Eshel’s trace, to keep it still.
The count was in Anwen’s hand, sent over the relay at dusk and printed on the yard’s printer: the clean mirror sheets taken at Sorrel’s open face and Whitlow’s north face. Each sheet tested at thirty-one degrees. Each logged with its time. A column of entries, and a total at the bottom.
Eshel was at the end of the desk with his slate.
