Sect Year 3 · eleventh month · day 12 · the Drum of Hesk, the hill above Ammel Gorge
Lin woke to the cold of the felt through his blanket and grey light at the edge of the tent flap. He had gone to sleep with his right hand open on the felt. It was closed now. He lay still and looked at it, the fingers curled over the palm the way a child holds a stone it means to keep, and for a while he didn’t want to open it.
Then he opened it.
A chip of stone lay in the middle of his palm. It was the size of a thumbnail, grey-white, with one sharp edge and a face that no one had ever polished. It was cold. He turned it with his thumb and it didn’t warm. He didn’t remember picking it up, and he couldn’t remember closing his hand around it in the night, though the tendons in his fingers ached from a long grip.
Rewards stay. Loans go back. He had been taught that at the first life, and the Wheel had never once broken it. A boon was only ever lent, and went back with the life it came from. This was not a boon. It was the inheritance of a life that had ended with the stone in its fist, and so it had come across to him with the rest of that life’s reward.
