Before heading to her sleeping nook, Kezra followed the warm glow of candlelight that spilled from the low doorway of the Alderfast clinic workroom. Inside, the air was sweet with the fragrance of dried chamomile, crushed juniper berries, and the sharp, metal tang of cold copper.
At the long pine workbench, Paxa Sel and Fellis Dain were seated side by side, lit up by three beeswax candles set into wide clay pot saucers. Despite the late hour, their movements were fluid, rhythmic, and intensely focused.
Along the clinic walls hung bundles of dried healing herbs gathered during the brief alpine summer: yarrow for staunching puncture wounds, willow bark for dulling joint fevers, and mountain comfrey for knitting broken bones. On the lower shelves sat jars of clean mutton fat, pots of honey salve, and rolls of boiled linen bandages. This was a safe hall of healing built in the middle of a siege, and tonight it had become the forge where four hundred instruments of free human choice were being shaped.
Between them on the scrubbed timber lay two large wooden trays filled with coiled bundles of bright, heat-softened copper wire, each strand no thicker than a lute string and twisted into a flexible circular bracelet four inches in width. Beside the wire trays rested six large spools of raw, unwhitened, three-ply linen thread, a pair of brass snips. A wooden winding jig clamped securely to the edge of the table.
