Sect Year 4 · third month · night of day 26 to dawn · the thirty-fifth life: Ketch Shoal, her fifty-ninth year, then her seventy-first
The far stilts were lower than the birth-house and older, and the tide had already found their feet. Tovra felt the water in the boards before she reached the top of the ladder. Maro had leaned the pole against a stilt at the foot of the ladder and gone up ahead of her, and she heard him say something sharp and low to someone inside. Then she was climbing, one hand on each rung, with the wind beating at the reed walls behind her and the lamp swinging on its hook.
The mother lay on a pallet by the hearth with her knees drawn up and a bundle of wet cloth pressed against her thighs. Her face was grey. Her hair was stuck to her forehead in dark strands, and the fever had put a shine on her skin that the lamp made worse.
Her man knelt at her head with both hands wrapped round one of hers. When he saw Tovra he didn’t stand, because he couldn’t stand and keep hold of her, but he moved aside to let her by, and his eyes said what his mouth did not.
