Chapter 27: Entered

Two rest days went by. Kael fetched water, emptied the slop pail and walked past the places where Valcrest might have been waiting, and said nothing to anyone. The right arm lay strapped across his chest in fresh linen and a new pair of laths, and the last two fingers of the hand stayed dead on the thirty-ninth and dead on the fortieth. On the forty-first, the day before the final, at the eighth bell, he stood at the Veyran door in the smell of boiling barley from every door on the stair, and a woman started up from the foot with a case at her hip. The stone was wet. It was always wet at the eighth bell, from the wash-house runoff down the middle of the steps, and she took them one at a time, with her weight on the right leg. A man at the stair-foot who…