Sect Year 1 · eleventh month · night of day 12 · the eighteenth life: the rope over the Hannet gorge, her sixty-first year
At forty Idra walked the Hannet rope for the last time. The fair had moved to a bridge-town upriver, and the painted towers had been repainted twice since her childhood, but the rope was the same rope. Her father had laid it. She had oiled it every autumn for twenty years, and she knew its hum through the soles of her feet before she was out over the water.
The drums stopped. In the quiet she heard the rope speak. Most of it sang the one clean note it always sang. Under the far tower, where one strand ran into the iron, there was a second note, thin and sour. It was the sound a lie makes when a man tells a crowd that the rope was tested that morning.
She stopped in the middle of the gorge. Below, the crowd made a noise like a breath drawn through the teeth. Someone called her name from the near bank, and she didn’t answer. She didn’t look down at the brown water either. She looked at the far post. There, the wrong note came from, and she stood with her weight on the good strands until the rope settled under her.
