The morning of the forty-seventh day arrived with the smell of boiled beans, salt-cured greens, and the bitter steam of chicory roots roasting over dry greasewood coals.
Under the mess awning of the expedition camp, Kezra Venn sat on an overturned grain tub. She watched Paxa Sel across the battered pine camp table.
The healer had not touched her morning gruel. In front of her, laid open between a tin mug of hot water and a horn spoon, lay her personal ledger: a long, narrow volume bound in stiff black oilcloth, its margins filled with neat columns of copper-plate figures, dates, and apothecary symbols.
“Twenty-one hours left on the Reach lock,” Kezra said, breaking the silence as she dipped her spoon into the bean pot. “The tremor in my hands is fully gone this morning. I walked fifty paces down the wash before dawn and didn’t feel a twinge in my ankles.”
Paxa didn’t look up from her columns. She dipped a bone ruling pen into a small horn bottle of black dark oak-ink. Then she drew a neat, level line across the bottom of the page.
“Your tendon reflexes are normal, Kezra,” Paxa said in her level, measured voice. “Your pulse is seventy-two at rest. The swelling in your left tympanic canal has resolved to a stable scar margin. As your attending physician for the Kilnstep-to-Saltglass circuit, I have entered those observations in the town record.”
