Sect Year 3 · twelfth month · night of day 2 · the thirty-fourth life: the Tolu uplands, his seventy-fourth year
The valley road ran down from the high grass between stone walls, past the cairns, and the flock went down it in the grey morning with the snow lying thin on the verges. The snow had stopped in the night. The sky had lifted, low and white, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and wet wool and the iron cold of the frost.
Edrik took the back of the line. He kept the lame ewe at his heel and the young ones close, and he didn’t let a single one of them stray into the ditch. There, the grass was deep and the snow deeper. His feet were numb in his boots. His hands ached with the cold at every step, and he let them ache.
Smoke was rising from the bakehouse at the foot of the valley, and somewhere a woman was singing over a washtub, the same three notes again and again. The tune came up the road on the wind with the smell of bread. Edrik had never learned the song, and he let it come and go without trying to hold on to it.
