Chapter 7: Forty Clocks

The clock room smelled of oil and brass and a fire that had been lit for no one.

Liora found him there at dusk, sitting on the floor with his back against a clockcase and his sleeve rolled up.

Most of the forty clocks around him stood stopped.

"Let me see that arm," she said.

"It's fine."

"It's open to the bone."

"It's open to the skin."

She knelt beside him with a basin of hot water and a bottle of spirits Isaure had pressed on her, and she got to work.

He bore it in silence, with his jaw set, while she cleaned the long cut and bound it in clean linen.

When she tied the knot his shoulders came down.

"You did that very well," he said.

"I grew up in a barony with no physician. I've sewn up a cow."

"A cow."

"A very brave cow."

The corner of his mouth moved, and it was a good thing to watch.

She sat back on her heels, and her eyes went to the small brass clock on the low table by the fire.

It was the one she had seen on his desk.

Its back plate was off, and its works lay in pieces on a cloth.

"That one's different," she said.

He was quiet for a while.

"My father carried it in his coat," he said. "Twelve years ago, on the Frost Bridge."

"My father and my mother and forty guards were crossing for the Oath."

Liora went very still.

"Raiders came out of the gorge in the snow. I was nineteen and standing at the rear with the horses."

"A guard threw me over the parapet into the drift on the far bank."

His voice was perfectly even.

"By the time I climbed back up, they were all dead, and the clock had stopped. I took it from my father's coat."

"Bastien."

"The guard who threw me was thirty. He had a daughter."

He looked at his hands.

"I told the barons that day I would never have another man stand in front of me."

"That's why you don't take a guard."

"That's why."

She understood a great many things at once.

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