The wooden barrel in the northwest corner of the third storage vault had once held eighty pounds of fine sifted wheat flour from the southern lowlands.
Now it held a grown man who was attempting, with wild and total dedication, to compress his spine into the dimensions of a badger.
The barrel lid was not on straight. It sat at a crooked twenty-degree tilt, held down from within by two trembling, soot-stained hands whose callused knuckles were white with strain. Through the three-inch bung-hole near the middle hoop, a steady, rhythmic wheezing was puffing out tiny clouds of fine white flour into the dim lantern light. It settled over the sawdust floor like premature snow.
Mira Vale stood four paces away, a shallow wicker basket resting against her left hip.
She wore her charcoal wool shawl, the fabric dusted with lime powder from the drainage chimney pipe. In the basket lay two dozen neatly rolled bandages torn from clean packaging linen, three wooden splints smoothed with animal fat, and a small clay pot jar of sheep-grease salve. Her left hand held the wicker handle with quiet, practiced ease.
Her right arm hung by her side. In the shadowy vault, the smoky, many-sided quartz of her crystal-hardened forearm caught the yellow flicker of the wall sconce, refracting the light into cold, oily violet sharp-angled planes that shifted across the oak floorboards.
