Sect Year 3 · eighth month · night of day 24 · the thirtieth life: a river county beyond the Wide Sea, his sixty-first year
The county office had been rebuilt once since Imrin was turned out of it, and the builders had kept the old shape. The clerks’ hall still ran long and low, with four windows on the lane and a row of copy tables down its middle. Most of the tables were new.
The oldest stood at the far end, by the north window. There, the light was best. Its top had gone grey with use. Someone had varnished it, and the varnish had cracked, and someone had varnished it again. Under all of that lay a stain the shape of a river mouth, dark at its centre and paler toward the edges.
He had sat at a table like that at eleven, in the spring before the water came, copying tithe slips for the steward’s clerks. He had made the stain himself. He had knocked over a cup of ink while reaching for a slip. The senior clerk had made him wipe it with his sleeve, and the ink had gone into the grain and stayed there, as ink does. He hadn’t sat at a county table since the captain’s men marched him out of the lane.
