Lowgate’s supper went up the hill in a stack of wooden trays, four trays high, carried on a yoke across Wren’s shoulders. She had carried it every evening since the thaw of the autumn, because she was the only one in Lowgate who could carry a yoke and not spill the broth, and because she was the only lodger in the Hold who would walk past the Form in the Mason’s Yard without staring at it.
The shoulder ached under the yoke. It always did in the cold. The scar on her left side, where the Lantern Ford causeway had opened her in the spring of the Lessary wars, pulled whenever she lifted anything heavier than a bucket, and the marsh-women in Lowgate said that a scar which pulled was a scar that remembered the water. Wren had decided long ago that the marsh-women were right and that she did not need to hear it from them again.
She came up the last rise to the Mason’s Yard with the trays steaming and the light going blue over the marsh. The Yard was quieter than usual. The lift had stopped. The stones were stacked along the curtain-course in neat grey ranks, and the Mason’s copy stood at the end of them with its grey hands folded at its waist, not moving, as a stone does not move.
