Sect Year 4 · fourth month · day 2 · Ketch Shoal, the birth-house
The birth-house keeper was a woman with a white burn scar along the inside of one wrist. She had the door open before Lin reached the top of the stilts’ ladder. She looked at the packet in his hand, and then at the mist still beaded on his coat, and said, “You’ll want to sit down.”
“I’d rather stand,” said Lin.
“Then stand by the post. Everybody who comes through that door looks at the post before they sit. It’s older than the council, and older than the book I keep.” She stepped back to let him in. “Children aren’t allowed to cut it. That’s the one rule in this house I’ve never had to argue over.”
The house was one long room of reed walls and grey boards, with the shutters propped open to the flats and the tide working at the stilts. A hearth glowed at one end. A bench stood under the window, and a keeper’s table stood beside it, bare except for a cup and a ledger she closed the moment he looked at it. In the middle of the room a cradle rocked a little on its wooden rockers, though nobody had touched it. A child slept in it, a few weeks old, with one fist up by its ear.
