The Moss Kept the Windows Warm. It Did Not Keep Her Hands.

Agata Pern came to the Guild Hall this morning not for herself — for a woman two doors down whose knee has swollen since the rains — and only showed me her own hands because I asked, the way I ask anyone whose fingers I watch curl slower than they should when they reach for a latch.

Eight fingers answered warm within the usual count after I held them. Two did not — the first and second of her right hand, the ones she has been using to pack moss into window-gaps for three weeks running, by her own account, bare-handed, in water drawn straight from the Karvel’s bank. Dusky at the first joint, cool past where the others had already warmed, the skin cracked shallow at both tips and weeping a little at the edge of the crack. No blister. No hardness under the skin, no white wax-look that would have told me the tissue had actually frozen rather than only chilled, over and over, past the point her own blood could keep arguing with the cold. I have seen the frozen kind twice in my practice. This was not that. This was something slower, and in its way more honest about what it costs to do a thing three weeks running that was only ever meant to be borne once.

I warmed them slowly, against my own palms and not against the brazier, which would have hurt her more than helped. I dressed the cracks dry and told her plainly what two more weeks of the same water would likely do to those two fingers specifically, not to her hands in general — a distinction she had not been offered before and did not especially want.

She said the four windows on the river side still need their moss changed twice more before the Stilling, and that she has eight other fingers.

I did not argue the arithmetic. It is hers to keep, not mine. I wrapped the two fingers separately from the rest and asked her to dig with the other hand where she could. She said she would try to remember which hand was which.