Paxa Sel’s intervention arrived with the instant, unhesitating care of a clinician who had spent fifteen seasons anticipating the violent, sudden collapse of overtaxed human frames. Her right hand clamped like a forged cooper’s clamp beneath Kezra’s canvas elbow, while her left forearm drove hard under Davren’s ribs, arresting their joint downward driving force barely two inches before their kneecaps struck the sharp dark grey rock gravel of the terrace yard.
“Steady,” Paxa commanded. Her voice dropped into the low, even register she used when setting compound fractures in mountain snow. “Breathe through your teeth, both of you. Kezra, plant your heels into the soil. Davren, lock your sound right hip. Don’t let that iron hinge twist sideways under you again. If you tear the medial callus loose after eleven months of knobby knitting, you’ll spend your sister’s arrival screaming on a straw tick while I fetch a bone saw.”
For ten long, painful heartbeats, the four of them remained locked together in an awkward, straining knot in the center of the terrace yard. The cold mountain wind blew hard off the western rim. It whipped loose strands of dark hair across Kezra’s face. Then it carried the sharp, bitter-salt smell of the lower mine dumps and damp turnip compost. Slowly, shuddering with the severe body aftermath of the last day’s two-hundred-and-fifty-six-pace Quarter exchange, Kezra found her balance, shifting her weight back onto her own trembling thigh muscles. Davren, his face grey with the sudden shock of pain that had…
