Sect Year 4 · third month · night of day 26 · the thirty-fifth life: Ketch Shoal, her twelfth year
The spring low came in the grey before dawn, and the children of the stilts were already waiting at the foot of the ladder with their baskets and their bare feet. There were nine of them. The smallest was six, with a cough and a red nose. The eldest was Tovra, who was twelve and had been leading them out onto the mud since the spring she could first carry a basket.
“Heads,” she said, and counted them twice, as she always did. Nine. Nine was right. “Stay on the line. Stay behind the stake I’m standing at, and when I say go, you go to the next one and not sideways.”
“Sideways is faster,” said Hebb. He was eight and had two front teeth missing, and he wanted to be first to every stake. “The salt-greens are sideways.”
“The salt-greens will still be there when the tide’s gone past them. Stay on the line.”
They went out. The mud took their feet with a soft, sucking reluctance, and let go again with a little sigh that Tovra had heard so often she no longer noticed it. The stakes marched away from the stilts in their long black row, each one a little further than the last, and the water had drawn back so far that the flats ran out grey and shining to the edge of the sky.
