Sect Year 3 · eleventh month · night of day 11 · the thirty-third life: Ammel Gorge, her twenty-second year
By the time Ysha was twenty-two, the toll-bar had her hands on it more often than her father’s. Ivo sat on the toll-house steps most days now, with a rug across his knees in the cold months and his back against the door frame in the warm ones. He watched the path below him the way a man watches a field he has stopped expecting to plant.
Garrec kept the book, the key and the switch. Ysha kept the bar. Nobody had said so aloud. The valley agreed most things that way, by letting the work go to whoever could lift it.
She lifted it every morning for the carts and every afternoon for the goats. She knew the sound a coin made when it fell on the others in the cup. She knew which herders paid in full, which paid half and argued the rest, and which paid nothing and were struck for it. She had been struck for it herself, at nine, and a pale line still ran across her left shoulder blade where the switch had caught her. It had faded to the colour of old milk. She could feel it in cold weather.
