Paxa Sel didn’t linger in the territory of moral rebuke. Once the truth had been spoken, weighed, and acknowledged, her mind shifted instantly to the clockwork problem lying on the floor between them. Two curved strips of ore-cart iron, five worn brass buckles. A young man who needed to walk without grinding his thigh bone into his shin bone.
She rose from the earthen floor, wiped her salve-stained fingers on a clean linen rag. Then she walked to the doorway. “Fellis!” she called into the sunlit yard. “Bring your measuring tongs and that ball of waxed sail-twine. I need a rigger who understands load lines and lever arms, not an amateur blacksmith who hammers cold iron.”
Fellis Dain stepped through the threshold a moment later, ducking his head beneath the low larch top door beam. His left arm was held securely across his chest in its cedar splint, the linen bandages grey with mountain dust. But his good right hand carried a small wooden box containing brass measuring tongs, a hardened steel rigger’s awl. A coil of heavy waxed hemp twine.
“What are we rebuilding?” Fellis asked, his keen grey eyes dropping right away to Davren’s exposed leg and the disassembled iron straps on the workbench.
