Chapter 11: Bed Seven

"Noon," I said.

Sander went back up to the Silvers' bench, and the hall went back to its business.

Griet caught my sleeve on the way out.

"Infirmary," she said. "Now."

The guild infirmary is a long whitewashed room off the side of the hall.

It has twelve beds in a row and a stove at one end.

Its windows look down on the yard where hunters train.

The yard was paved over the old siege cistern, from the years when the city kept water for wars.

If you drop a coin through the drain in the middle, you can hear it fall for a long time.

"Sit," Griet said, and pointed at a bed.

"The House says nobody's to mend me."

"Then it's a good thing I'm only going to look at you."

She peered at my shoulder through her spectacles.

"Crossbows."

"Can you take a bolt and mend it?"

"If it isn't in my eye."

"Then keep your eyes shut," she said, which was the closest Griet came to a joke.

She sat down on the bed across from me.

Then she looked down at the bed she was sitting on, and I saw her face change.

"That's bed seven," she said.

I waited.

"You've heard about Joris's sister," Griet said. "Everyone has."

"I heard she came up from six with a grey hand and died that night."

"She came up from six with a cut thigh and two cracked ribs," Griet said. "I was the night healer."

She put her small hand flat on the blanket of bed seven.

"I closed the thigh myself at midnight," she said. "Then the ribs. It took me an hour, and she talked the whole time."