The window on a crush was four hours, and Dait’s people had spent six of them deciding whether it was worth the fee.
Su’inn knew this because they told her. They told her while they were carrying him in, all four of them talking at once, laying out the deliberation in detail, as though the reasoning had been sound and she would want to hear it. There had been a vote. Someone said the boy was only twenty-two. Someone knew a woman in Ellersgate who did the same work for a third of the fee. Someone else had said, and they repeated this twice, that these things often came right on their own.
“They do,” Su’inn said. “Put him on the table.”
Only one of them was not talking. He was older than the others and he had the same jaw as the boy they were carrying, and he had his hands under his brother’s shoulders and his eyes on the floor, and he had not said one word since the stairs.
The mill hand was twenty-two and grey as a fish. His right arm ended in something that was still, technically, a hand. The sorting drum had taken it against the frame and held it there for the length of time it took four men to find the brake, which was longer than any of them would ever admit out loud.
She got her left forearm across his shoulder and put her weight on it. That was the anchor. It had been her palm once. Now it was her forearm and most of her upper body, and it worked, and she had stopped noticing the difference around the same time she had stopped expecting anyone else to.
“Ferrow.”
“Here.”
“His feet. He is going to buck.”
“He always bucks,” Ferrow said, taking the ankles. “They always buck.”
Su’inn set her right hand into the ruin and found the wrist.
The trade had eleven forms and she could do all eleven of them, which was eleven more than the men standing in her doorway with their hats in their hands, and it was going to be enough for about a third of what was on the table.
She ran the stay first, because he was losing blood at a rate that made everything else theoretical. The stay was the easiest of the eleven and the only one she could still do with either hand, and it went in clean and closed the bleeders one after another like shutters coming down a street.
Then the seat, for the bones, and the seat was where the trouble started.
The seat needed two hands. Not two hands the way lifting a crate needed two hands. Two hands the way a knot needed two hands, one holding the shape while the other made the shape true, and her holding hand had been a fist of scar tissue for twenty years and could not feel what it was holding.
She braced her elbow against the table and used the heel of the ruined palm and made the shape true anyway. It took her about four times as long as it should have, and it hurt her shoulder in the specific place it always hurt her shoulder, and the young man on the table screamed twice and then went somewhere quieter, which was fine. She preferred them quiet. Quiet was structurally easier.
The bones seated. Three of the four.
The fourth had been gone before it arrived. She could feel where the window had shut on it, hours ago, in the yard, while a man she had never met explained to three other men that these things often came right on their own.
She stopped.
“Keep going,” said one of the hats.
“No.”
“You have not finished.”
“I have finished,” Su’inn said.
“What does it cost.”
That was the brother. It was the first thing he had said, and he said it to the wall rather than to her.
“It costs what it costs.”
“No.” He looked up. “You said the cart. You keep saying the cart. There is no cart at the mill, there is a cart at the mill office, and the office is locked at the sixth bell, and the man with the key lives in Two Bridges.” He said all of this evenly, like a man reading out a list he had already read to himself several times on the stairs. “And your fee is nine days of his wage. Which he does not have, and I do not have, and none of us have, and so what happened in the yard was four men doing arithmetic. That is all it was. You can call it a vote if it makes it easier.”
Su’inn looked at him for a moment.
“Then it costs six,” she said.
“That is not the point I was making.”
“I know what point you were making. It costs six.” She turned back to the table. “You are still going to hear the rest of it. You are looking at a hand. What I am looking at is four hours ago, and I cannot get there from here. Nobody can get there from here. That is the entire trade. You either arrive inside the window or you arrive after it, and there is no third thing, and I am very tired of explaining the difference to people who had the option of a cart.”
The hat opened his mouth.
“He keeps the arm,” she said. “He keeps the wrist. He keeps three fingers with feeling in them and one without, and the last one is going to go dark in about a week and then it is going to come off, and you can bring him back for that or you can find the woman in Ellersgate. He will not sort. He can gate, he can drive, he can count, and if the mill has a foreman with a conscience, and I have heard rumors that such things exist, he can stand at the drum and tell the next twenty-two-year-old to keep his sleeve out of it.”
She wiped her right hand on the cloth at her belt.
“Six hours,” she said. “You are welcome.”
They paid the six without argument, and then the brother counted out three more on top of it and set them on the table and would not look at her while he did it, and went out after the others.
Which was worse. She would have preferred the haggling.
She did the last of it alone after they carried him out, which was the part nobody paid for and nobody watched. The slow, over the fingers he was keeping, to buy the tissue time to decide what it wanted to be. The close, twice, on the two worst tears. Then the long boring business of cleaning a table.
Ferrow came back in with a bucket and started on the floor.
“You were kind to them,” Ferrow said.
“I was not.”
“You told them he could count. You did not have to tell them he could count.”
“He can count. It is a fact about him. I am full of facts.” Su’inn straightened and put her hand into the small of her back and pressed, and something in there let go with a noise. “Gods. I am forty-one.”
“You are forty-three.”
“I am forty-one when I am tired.” She turned her left arm over and looked at it without appearing to, which was a skill she had, and flexed the fingers, and the fingers did what they always did, which was most of it. “How is your mother?”
“Complaining.”
“Good sign.”
“She says the ointment smells like a stable.”
“It does smell like a stable. It has been a stable for nine hundred years and it is going to keep being a stable, and in three weeks she is going to walk to the well without stopping halfway, and she is going to tell everyone she got better on her own.” Su’inn dropped the cloth in the bucket. “They always do. It is my favorite part.”
Ferrow worked the mop for a while.
“You braced on the elbow again,” she said.
“I brace on the elbow.”
“You could have had me on the wrist and gone in over the top. It would have been faster.”
“It would have been faster and it would have been wrong.”
“How.”
Su’inn did not answer that, which was itself an answer, and both of them knew which one.
Ferrow put the mop in the bucket and left it there.
“I have been in this room four years,” she said. “I know what the stay looks like from the outside. I know when you are running it and I know when you have stopped and I know when it has not taken. I do not know one single thing about how it is done, because you have never once said a word about how it is done, and I have stopped waiting for you to.”
“Ferrow.”
“The woman in Ellersgate takes students.”
“The woman in Ellersgate is selling the stay to people who cannot run it and killing them in threes.”
“That is Fennering. That is a different woman, in a different town, and you know it is, and you say it anyway because it is easier.” Ferrow picked the mop back up. “She trained at the low house. Same as you. Nine years after you.”
Su’inn said nothing at all.
“Anyway,” Ferrow said, after a moment, in a different voice. “The new lad asked about your arm.”
“Mm.”
“I told him not to ask.”
“He can ask. It is a fair thing to look at.” Su’inn reached up with her right hand and pushed the loose hair back off her forehead, tucking it into the tie at the nape of her neck, where she kept it and had kept it for two decades because hair in the work was hair in the wound. Light brown, going pale at the temple in a way she had decided to find distinguished. “Spell misfire. Years ago. I was young and I was showing off and I was standing too close to my own work.”
She said it the way she said the price of the ointment.
“That is what I told him,” Ferrow said.
“Then you were right and he was informed, and everyone has had a productive afternoon.”
Ferrow finished the floor and took the bucket down to the yard, and she did not say goodnight, and Su’inn noticed that and did not go after her, and told herself she would take it up in the morning.
The clerk came at the fourth bell, which was how Su’inn learned that the ward had a clerk.
He was a small tidy man in a good coat with ink on two fingers, and he stood in her doorway and looked at the room the way clerks look at rooms, taking an inventory that was not going to be written down anywhere she could see.
“Practitioner,” he said. “This is a practice?”
“This is a room. Sometimes there are people in it and afterwards they are better. What that is called depends on who is asking and what the fee is.”
“The ward is compiling a register.” He produced the book. It was a beautiful book. It had a spine like a hymnal and the ward’s seal blind-stamped into the corner, and it had been paid for out of money that could have bought a cart. “All practitioners of the healing trades within the ward boundary. Name, discipline, house of training, and residence.”
“Why.”
“So that the ward knows.”
“That is not a reason. That is a description of a book.”
The clerk smiled, and it was not an unkind smile, and that was the thing she would think about later. He was not unkind. He was a man doing a small job well, in a good coat, with a good book, and he had ink on his fingers because he had already been to eleven other doors that day and would go to nine more before the light went.
“There has been trouble in Fennering,” he said. “Practitioners without training. A woman selling the stay who could not run the stay. Three deaths that the province called avoidable. The council would like to be able to say, when it is asked, that it knows who is working in the ward and where they learned it.” He turned the book toward her. “It is not an examination. I am not qualified to examine you. I am qualified to write down what you tell me.”
Which was, she would think later, the most honest thing anyone said to her that year.
“Discipline,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Ulmatine.”
He wrote it. He did not ask her to spell it, which meant she was not the first Ulmatine in the book, which meant there was at least one other in the ward, and she decided to be irritated about that later, when she had the time to do it properly.
“House of training.”
“Ulmatis, the low house. Not the one on the hill. The one behind it.”
He wrote that too. His hand was very fast and very small and it did not stop.
“Residence.”
“You are standing in it.”
“Kettle Ward, Cooper’s Row, above the dye works.” He wrote. “Name.”
“Su’inn.”
The pen stopped.
It stopped for no time at all. Less than a breath. If she had blinked she would have missed it, and she did not miss it, because she had spent twenty years being the sort of person who did not miss it.
“Su’inn,” he said pleasantly, “and.”
“And nothing.”
“The register takes two names.”
“Then the register is going to be disappointed. I have the one. My people were not the sort to keep a second one lying around.”
“Practitioner.” He was still pleasant. That was the thing. He had not changed at all. “Every entry in this book has two names. If I write one, the clerk above me sends it back, and I come here again, and we have this same conversation on a colder day, and neither of us will enjoy it more the second time. It is not a test of your family. It is a column. The column is a certain width.”
She looked at the book.
She thought about the cart.
She thought about a young man on her table with three fingers he was going to keep and one he was not, and about how long it would take to find another room above another dye works in another ward where the drums did not have brakes and the foremen did not have consciences, and about the sixteen people currently walking around Kettle Ward on joints she had personally put back together, none of whom would ever know what a window was.
Six weeks, she thought. Give it six weeks and go quietly in the spring, and let the column be whatever width it likes.
“Ulmat,” she said.
The pen moved. “Su’inn Ulmat.”
“That is what I said.”
“After the house?”
“After the house.”
He blew on the ink, and closed the beautiful book, and tucked it under his arm. “Thank you, practitioner. You have been more cooperative than most.”
“I am a delight.”
“You are the fourth person today to make me stand in a doorway.” He was already turning. “Good evening. The ward is grateful for your service.”
She listened to him go down the stairs. Nine steps and the turn, and then four more, and then the street.
Then she stood in her room for a while with her hand flat on the table where the mill hand had been, and she thought about how a lie that small has to be true in only one place to work, and how the place it has to be true is a book, and how there is no way at all to know how many books there are.
She stayed. Of course she stayed.
There was a woman on Fisher’s Lane with a knee, and a child in the almshouse with a burn that was going to need the slow run over it every third day for a month, and one of the mill hand’s fingers to take off cleanly before it took itself off badly. Six weeks became eight. Eight became the summer.
By the time they came for her the register had been copied twice: once for the ward, and once for the diocesan clerk, who forwarded a fair copy to the provincial office, where it was bound with eleven other wards and shelved.
Two names in a column of a certain width.
That was all it ever took.