Sefra of the Thousand Hides had worn so many shapes that she could no longer say which pronoun belonged to her, and so she had come to the causeway’s far end without any shape at all.
She wore the Hasp valley’s plain grey cloak, the one the emptied women had been given at the river crossing in the year of the burning, and under it she wore nothing she had chosen. Her hands were her own. She had checked them in the dark, the night before, by feeling each finger and naming it, and they had answered her, one by one, in the same voice. That was all she had. A cloak, a pair of hands, and the knowledge that the people behind her on the Caul road were waiting for her to say which of the many faces they had followed west was the one she meant to keep.
She stood at the Choir’s edge, where the sound came up through the causeway’s joints, and she waited.
She had been waiting for a long time. She had waited at the Sallow Ford, and under the Hold’s gate, and in the cistern beneath the Hold when she had told the Regent that the Choir sounded only for those who had once been doors. She had told him that without knowing whether it was true. She had heard it from a woman in the emptied valley, long before the Corvanne clerks came with their lists, and she had kept it the…
