Sect Year 4 · third month · night of day 26 · the thirty-fifth life: Ketch Shoal, her forty-fourth year
Maro came up the stilts on the morning the spring greens were in, with a bundle on his back that was nearly as big as he was. His mother had sent him. She had seven children already and a new one at the breast. The stilt house was too small for all of them, and the birth-house was the only place on Ketch Shoal where a boy who could count might learn something that paid.
He said all of this in a rush at the foot of the ladder, with the bundle slipping off one shoulder. Then he stopped and looked up at Tovra with his jaw set, as though she might send him straight back down to the flats.
“Can you read the notches?” he said.
“Some of them.”
“I can read them with my hands,” Maro said. “I can read them before I can read the council’s letters. My mother says that’s no use to anybody, but it is.”
Tovra looked at him for a while. He was small and brown from the flats, and he had a cut across one knuckle that was already closing clean. He didn’t look away from her. “Come up,” she said. “Put your bundle down, and I’ll show you the post. If you can tell me the newest cut without looking, you can stay the week.”
