Location:Seven Peaks — The Boy's Room; The Medicine Hall
Date/Time:TC1858.02.26 – TC1858.02.28
The night-lamp made the room smaller than it was.
That was the first thing Hesper Ashby had noticed, weeks ago now, and she noticed it again tonight, coming in with the book under her arm and the door easing shut behind her. By day it was a plain room with a high window and a bed and a shelf and a chair. By the night-lamp, turned low on its hook beside the door and shaded away from the bed, it was a small circle of yellow around the chair, with the boy at the soft far edge of it and everything past him gone brown and far away.
The chair was by the door. It had been somebody else's before it was hers. She knew whose; she'd been told the name and the one sentence that went with it, and nothing else, and she had decided on the first night that nothing else was what she'd been given and that it would do.
