Sect Year 2 · seventh month · night of day 12 · the twenty-fourth life: the granary on the Ardun plain, Edrin’s twelfth year
“Feed the one who asks for nothing.”
“Perfect Recall.”
Edrin was twelve years old, and the ladle was heavier than it looked. It was iron, with a short handle wrapped in strips of old sacking so the hand would not slip. Its bowl had a dent low on one side where some keeper long dead had struck it against the lip of a grain barrel. Haskel had shown him the dent on the first morning.
“That’s the measure,” the old man had said. “Everyone who has held this ladle has hit it at least once. Don’t make the dent any deeper. It’s the one thing in here that doesn’t lie.”
The granary stood at the top of the Ardun plain. There, the road gave out in the dust. It was a squat house of grey stone with walls two men thick and a single oak door bound in iron. The rains had not reached the plain for three years.
Below the granary the land fell away in folds of pale grit, and the wells in the folds had gone to brown mud. The goats had been sold, then the cart, then the good pots. The families who stayed had walked up the road one by one, because the granary was the only building left on the plain that still had a door.
