Sect Year 4 · fourth month · day 2 · the Qerrin flats, the spring low
Lin woke with his fingers curled against the blanket, feeling for a notch in a cedar post that was not there.
The grey morning came through the shutter chink. The room in the inn above the salt-pans smelled of salt water and old bread. Under his ribs the Wheel was cool and still, its spokes settled in the dark, and the grade it had given at dawn hung in his head like the ring of iron on an anvil:
honest
Then the insight came behind it, slow and plain, as though someone had laid a smooth river stone into his palm:
“Name the limit. Then keep it.”
Lin sat up on the mattress and let the breath go out of him. His hands were still marked with the red lines where the sheet had torn his skin on the junk, but the skin was closed. The sea road was behind him. For a long while he sat with his boots between his feet and held those five words against the cold until they were warm.
He had waited six days at the inn above the salt-pans. Six mornings he had watched the grey water draw back from the wall below the window, and six evenings he had listened to the Bell come across the flats from the well tower at the turn of the tide. It was a single long note, and it went…
