Sect Year 4 · fourth month · night of day 3 · the thirty-sixth life: Wrack Ledge, her thirty-first year
By the next season the stern was closed, and the planking ran along both sides of the hull nearly to the midships frame. Ilke worked from the frame stand bridge in the mornings, when the wind came off the Reach cold and the light lay flat on the water. In the afternoons she worked from the stilts, when the mud was too soft to stand on for long.
Yevra worked beside her. The girl had learned to set a strake without marking it twice, and she had learned to bend a plank over the steam-box without scorching the grain. She didn’t talk while she worked. She had never needed to.
The steam-box stood at the landward end of the yard, a long trough of planking hung over a fire bowl that Yevra kept fed with driftwood. A plank had soaked there long enough. Then, the two of them carried it hot and dripping to the frame stands and bent it round the frames with ropes and wedges, fast, before it cooled and set.
Yevra had learned to judge the moment by the sound the wood made as it softened. Ilke had learned the same thing from her father, and had never once explained it to anyone. It was simpler to watch the girl do it.
