The cellar beneath Maud Venn’s western throwing shed smelled of cold clay slip, wet river gravel. The bitter lime wash her mother brushed onto the foundation stones every spring to hold back mold.
Kezra Venn sat on an overturned firing crate, her palms resting flat against the knees of her coarse wool trousers. Six paces away, where a slit in the dry-stone wall admitted a finger of grey morning light, Paxa Sel unrolled a strip of oiled goatskin across the head of an empty slip barrel. The traveling healer didn’t hurry. Her broad, sun-darkened fingers moved with the unrushed care of a surgeon who had cleaned gravel out of caravan wagon drivers’ joints across three provinces. From the leather pockets she drew three tuned iron tuning rods, each cold from the cellar floor and stamped with the maker’s hallmark near the balance point.
“Left ear only on the second pass, Venn,” Paxa said without looking up. Her voice was level, pitched in the dry, conversational register she used when setting splints or telling a carrier that his mule needed three days off the trace. “Keep your eyes on the lime mortar seam beside the door. Don’t guess what I’m striking. Don’t nod because you think forty heartbeats have elapsed. If the stone stays dead, say the stone is dead.”
