Sect Year 4 · third month · night of day 26 · the thirty-fifth life: Ketch Shoal, her twenty-sixth year
The mist came in over the flats so thick that the stakes rose out of it one at a time, like men who had not yet decided to come closer. Tovra heard the shout from the birth-house steps. It carried over the mud from the south channel, high and cracked, and before she could make out a word she knew it was a woman’s voice and that the woman was not walking.
She had the pole in one hand and a plank under her other arm before her feet found the first stake. The planks were kept in the net-loft between the cork floats and the old sail. This one was grey, split along the grain, and it smelled of tar and weed. Her husband had told her twice to replace it. She had told him she would when the sea let her keep anything for more than a season.
The sledge had stopped between the fourth stake and the fifth. There, the ground turned to black paste under a skin of grey. It sat on its runners with the mud up to the wood. Two men were bent over the back of it. One was Seane’s husband, thin, with his sleeves rolled past the elbow. The other was a neighbour from the far stilts with a bad knee, who had gone down on the mud and was holding the…
