Sect Year 4 · fourth month · night of day 3 · the thirty-sixth life: Wrack Ledge, her thirtieth year
“Finish the hull you started.”
“Thread of Fate.”
Ilke laid the keel on the frame stands before the ebb had finished leaving the mud. The oak had come round from the Reach on a barge with a split sail, eleven lengths of it, salt-dried for three summers in the open sheds at the north end of the village. When she laid her palm on the first length it was cool all the way through, and the grain ran tight and grey under her fingers.
It smelled of salt water and old resin, and of nothing else she could name. She had come to think that was the smell of good wood.
The yard stood on stilts above the flats. Its boards were laid across the mud, and its frame stands were sunk into the grey where the water had left them. From the edge of the planking she could see the whole shoal at low water. The stakes running out in a line toward the Reach, the net-loft on its legs with the shutters propped open, the smoke from the salt-pans going straight up in the still air.
