Sect Year 1 · ninth month · night of day 9 · the fourteenth life: Brack Quay, his seventeenth year
He was seventeen the spring Ebbe stopped watching his hands.
For years every jar that came off the bench had passed through the old man’s fingers first. Ebbe turned it, tapped it, and set it down. Ardon had learned to read the set-down the way the net-wives read a sky, by the angle of it and the small sound it made on the wood. Then one morning the stool stayed empty until the tide had turned. When Ebbe came up the quay with his bad leg swinging, he sat down without looking at the bench at all. He let the work go past him. Ardon understood that this was a kind of trust, though nobody had said so, and he didn’t ask about it, because asking would have turned it into something that had been said.
“Mend it so it can be dropped on stone,” Ebbe said. It was the only rule he ever gave out loud. “Not so it looks mended. So it can be dropped.”
Ardon wired three jars that week and tested them as he had been shown. He carried each one to the stone edge at the end of the quay, held it at the height of his own chest, and let go. The first split along its old seam, a grey crack that opened like a mouth. The second held. The third broke in a…
