Soren did not think. Thinking is a luxury for men standing on solid ground. He turned on the ladder, braced his own feet on two rungs that he knew were sound, reached up with both arms, and caught her as she fell.
She was lighter than he expected, and heavier too, the way a falling person always is. The force of her drove him back against the rails, and the ladder shuddered, and for a terrible second he thought the whole thing would go, and they would both fall to the stone floor below. But the rails held, and his feet held, and he held her, with her head against his shoulder and her arms around his neck, and her breath coming fast against his collar, and his own heart hammering so hard he was certain she could feel it through his shirt.
"Do not move," he said, and his voice was steadier than he felt. "I have you. Do not move until I say."
She did not move. She lay still in his arms, breathing, and after a moment she said, very quietly, "My wrist."
He looked down, carefully, without shifting his hold. Her right hand was twisted at an angle it should not have been, and her face, when he looked at it, was white, though she was not crying, and he thought that not crying was worse, in a way, because it meant she was holding herself together by will alone, and will, like a cracked rung, can only bear so much.
"Can you hold the rail with your left hand?" he asked.
"I can," she said.
"Then hold it, and I will get us down, one rung at a time, and I will not let go of you until your feet are on stone."
It was the longest descent of his life. He went down backward, one rung at a time, with one arm around her and the other feeling for the rails, and she clung to the rail with her left hand and to him with her good arm, and neither of them spoke, because speaking took breath, and breath was needed for balance. When they reached the floor, he set her down gently on the bottom step, and she sat there, cradling her right wrist, and he knelt beside her, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, because there was nothing to say that would make the moment smaller or safer than it was.
Then Maren laughed, a short, shaky sound. "You warned me," she said. "You warned the council three times, and you warned me, and I climbed anyway, because I wanted the measurements. That is a kind of pride, I think. The kind my father warned me about, the kind that says a job is more important than the hands that do it."
"It is not pride," Soren said. "It is a clockmaker wanting her measurements. I understand it. But the ladder is done now. It is not to be climbed again, by anyone, until the new one is up, and I will nail the door shut myself if I must."
He looked up then, at the broken rung, which had fallen to the floor beside them, and he picked it up, because a carpenter picks up broken wood the way other men pick up coins, to examine it. The rung was dark and rotted at one end, as he had expected. But at the other end, where it had broken, the wood was not rotted at all. It was pale, and the break was clean in a way that puzzled him, because rot does not usually break clean. He turned it over in his hands, frowning, and could not quite say what was wrong with it, only that something was, and that a man who throws away a broken thing before he understands it is a man who will never understand anything.
He did not say this to Maren. Not yet. She was hurt, and pale, and holding her wrist, and there are times to speak and times to be silent, and this was a time to be silent and to act. He put the rung carefully into his tool bag, where it would not be lost or thrown away, and he helped her to her feet, and he walked her, slowly, across the square to the doctor's house, where the doctor, a brisk man with kind eyes, examined her wrist and told her it was sprained, not broken, and bound it tightly, and told her she must not do fine work with it for weeks, and must not climb ladders, advice Maren received with a look that said she had already learned that lesson.