Sect Year 4 · third month · night of day 26 · the thirty-fifth life: Ketch Shoal, her eighteenth year
Winter came to Ketch Shoal all at once in the night, and then it didn’t leave. By the third week the reed walls had frost on their inner faces, and the water beneath the stilts ran so cold that the boards rang when the tide drew back. Tovra had stopped hearing the ring. She heard the woman on the mat instead, who had been labouring since the grey before dawn and had nothing left in her voice but the shape of a word.
The woman was from the far stilts. Tovra had known her since they were both small enough to share a bench at the naming feast, and she had lost two children in her first years and buried a husband in the spring. She lay with her knees up and her hands locked on the rope that hung from the roof beam.
Her hair was soaked flat to her skull. Every time the pain came she pulled on the rope until the beam creaked overhead. Every time it went she lay back and stared at the reed above her with her mouth open, breathing like a net dragged over stones.
