Sect Year 4 · third month · night of day 26 · the thirty-fifth life: Ketch Shoal, her thirty-eighth year
The salt-fever came up the stilts from the flats quietly and from underneath. It began in the cutters’ houses on the south row. There, the old wells had silted and the families had drunk from the water tank pans. By the time Tovra heard of it, three of those houses had their shutters nailed shut and a strip of red cloth tied to the door-pole. The children who had been playing on the ladders had been called in by mothers who did not explain why.
She went from one shut door to the next with a jug of boiled water on her hip and a bundle of clean cloth under her arm. She didn’t knock. The families had been told not to open to anyone, and she didn’t blame them. She set the jug on the doorstep and called through the gap in the shutters what the water was for and how much of it to give. She said her name, so they would know whose voice it was, and then she went on to the next door.
At the grandmother’s house the old woman had died in the afternoon, before anyone thought to send for Tovra. Her daughter sat by the bed with her hands in her lap. The lamp had burned down to a blue bead, and the room smelled of boiled water and something sourer underneath, like…
