Sect Year 2 · seventh month · night of day 14 · the inn yard at Sallen Bend
The inn at Sallen Bend had four rooms, a kitchen with a broken shutter, and a yard that smelled of wet nets and river mud. The innkeeper’s wife gave them the room above the stable. There, the warmth of the horses came up through the boards. She didn’t ask for a name. She asked whether they wanted hot water, and when Pei said yes she brought it herself, in a copper pot with a cracked handle. Then she looked at the wax tablet on Pei’s knee for a moment before she went out again.
Pei read by a single candle with the tablet tilted toward the flame. She had read the fragment so often in the past weeks that she no longer needed to see the wax to say it. She read it aloud anyway, slowly, in the flat voice she used for things she wasn’t yet sure she believed.
“‘The third Wheel was never lost.’” She turned the tablet a little. “‘It was cut, and sewn into ordinary people. Each piece sleeps until it is counted.’” She tapped the wax. “That’s my copy. The voice at the rim said called.”
