Sect Year 1 · eleventh month · night of day 2 · the sixteenth life: Sedge Well, his forty-fourth year
At seven the memory came up through the red clay the way water rises in a dug hole, from underneath and without asking. Corran’s hands knew the spade before the boy knew his own name. He stood at the lip of the square’s well with the ash handle warm between his palms, and he understood, all at once and entirely, that the well was his to finish.
The village well had been dry for two seasons. It stood in the square at the foot of the hill, a round mouth of stone with a rope that had not come up wet in all that time. Three men had gone down before him. Each had come up grey to the eyebrows, with grit in his hair and no water in his bucket, and each had said the same thing to the square. That there was rock under the clay, and the rock was not going to move for anybody. The square had gone quiet since. The old women came out each morning with their cups and stood at the rope’s end, looking down at the dark, and went back indoors without speaking.
