Three Weeks Is How Long Agata Pern’s Fingers Took to Decide

I found her at her own sill this morning, not mine, because she will not come to the Guild Hall for something she insists is only cold. Two fingers of her left hand, warmed in my own grip for a full count of forty before either regained color past the first knuckle. Three weeks ago I warned her against exactly this and let her keep her own arithmetic anyway, which is a kind of agreement I do not often extend to patients who ask for it.

The skin is unbroken. No blister, no blackening at the tips, nothing the Guild would enter as frostbite proper. What I found instead: a slowness that has not worsened since the twenty-first and has not improved either, a hand that answers cold the way a door answers a swollen frame — later than it should, every time, by the same measured delay. I pressed a pin’s point against the pad of each finger in turn. She felt it on the right hand at once. On the left, a half-breath behind, both times.

I told her this is not frostbite and I told her it is not nothing. The nerve has been asked a question for three weeks running and has not yet finished answering it. I wrapped the hand loosely — not the moss she is tempted toward, which only adds a second cold dressed as care, a finding of my own she has evidently discussed with half the Lane by now — and told her the eight fingers she has left to spend are no longer eight if she keeps paying from the same two.

She asked, packing her sill’s gap closed for the night against a wind that has no gap to answer, whether the Yelin room would have killed her too, sealed the way she seals nothing. I said I could not test a question about a room I never stood in while it still had air in it. She said that was not a no. It was not. I did not correct her.