The chalk mark Fellis had drawn across the hard speckled granite table remained stark and white in the grey morning light. Outside, the wind rattled a loose slate shingle against the high low roof wall of the Needlehouse, a sharp, rhythmic clack that sounded like an iron chisel tapping stone.
Kezra turned her attention to the second seat on the left. “Paxa. Your turn.”
Paxa Sel didn’t right away answer. She picked up her brass ear-trumpet, turned it slowly between her calloused palms. Then she examined the flared bell as though checking for fresh dents. Her face was set in the dry, unbending lines of a woman who had spent forty years stitching deep cuts, reducing out-of-joint shoulders, and certifying dead bodies for parish registers. When she spoke, her voice had the crisp, flat delivery of an apothecary reading an inventory of dried bark.
“I’m an apothecary and a bone-setter, not a priest,” Paxa said. She set the trumpet back on the table with a dull metal click. “I leave the measurement of human guilt to the judges and the gods, both of whom have far more leisure for philosophical hair-splitting than someone holding a blood tourniquet. My concern is strictly body. When people get frightened, they hurry. When soldiers get frightened, they invent military necessities to justify running human bodies past their physical endurance.”
