Sect Year 1 · twelfth month · night of day 8 · the twenty-second life: the tea-stall at the Wastes-road gate, Bram’s fifty-eighth year
“Pour one cup for the one who waits at the gate.”
“Iron Constitution.”
The gate stood where the salt road gave up and turned into dust. It had two posts of grey wood, a bar that nobody lowered, and a bench built against the wall of the guardhouse. There, the wind came round the corner and did not stop. Bram set his stall up in the lee of that bench on the first morning of the dry season, with a fire bowl, a kettle with a dented lid. A clay pot of leaves that smelled of smoke and sour plums. He had bought the pot from a widow in the last town for the price of a good knife, and he had carried it the rest of the way on his hip. He was wrapped in his spare shirt.
The first morning he poured a cup for the old man on the bench.
The old man sat with his back against the guardhouse wall and his hands in his lap, one over the other. His brown coat was patched at both elbows. His eyes were on the road. There, the dust lay pale and still until a cart or a string of mules came over the rise and set it moving. He didn’t look up when Bram came down the length of the stall with the…
