Piers woke in the middle of a stroke.
He was halfway through lifting a block of quarry stone. He knew it at once, before he knew anything else, because the weight was already in his arms and his back was already bent to take it, and the Form’s two hands were closing on the grey stone with a grip he had not chosen. His own mind sat behind the Form’s eyes like a clerk at a window, watching the cutting through a lattice of slits, and it was not certain, for a long breath, which of the hands on the stone was his.
The sleep had been strange. He had not slept since the Charter. It had come on him in the Hold’s yard, in the lantern-light, with the Form’s cold weft closing over his shoulders, and it had been a long grey sea with no shore, and in the sea he had heard a voice counting, far away and very patiently, as a man counts stones on a wall. He had not been able to find where the counting came from. He had followed it for hours. He had not found it. And then he had woken, here, in a stone cutting above Thornwick, with a block in his arms and his own voice saying a word in the Form’s grammar.
