Korrin did not like fairs. He did not like the striped awnings, which flapped and gave the wind a place to hide, or the lantern-strings, which had been hung on the causeway’s rail by people who did not know how much a glass globe weighed, or the song-seller, who sang the same ferryman up and down the stone from dawn to the candle-clock until Korrin wanted to put the ferryman in the marsh himself. He liked the stone. He liked the causeway’s dry-laid blocks, which fitted one against the next without mortar and had been fitted by a man who expected to be checked. He liked the weir below the ford, where the water came down in a brown shelf over the Lamentine’s grey rock and the fish came up against it in a wet silver knot.
He liked the fisher’s face least of all, and so he watched it.
It stood at the weir’s edge in the morning light, mending a net across the rail. The real fisher sat on the bank above it with his back against a willow, paid in bread, and watched his own net being mended by a thing that had his hands. The hands were thick and red across the knuckles and very quick, and the face above them had the fisher’s salt-cracked jaw and a squint from thirty years of looking into the glare off the water. It did not turn when Korrin came down the bank. It went on knotting. Its fingers…
