Sect Year 2 · third month · dusk of day 10 · the twenty-first life: the Dunmere flats, his eleventh year
“Carry the lamp across the flats before dark.”
“Iron Constitution.”
The stone at his back went out from under him, and the road went with it.
Jorin was eleven, and his feet were sore before he had left the yard. The post house stood where the last green stopped and the flats began, a low house of mud brick under a roof of salt-grass, with a pen of goats that took no interest in anyone. Inside, the hearth was banked and smelled of dung-cake. A woman with flour to her elbows slid a heel of bread into his hand without looking at him, the way she did with every boy who went out on the flats, and said, “Eat it on the far side. Not here.”
“And come home by the road,” said the post master’s wife, when Jorin turned at the gate. “Not by the flats. The flats keep what they like.”
The post master was a thin man with a grey plait and a cough he didn’t apologise for. He came out of the house with a lamp in a wire cage, the cage still warm from the hearth. He slipped the carrying cord over the boy’s head so that the cage hung at his hip.
