Sect Year 4 · fifth month · day 18 · Ketch Shoal, the well tower, the same morning
Vosk waited. She didn’t hurry him. She stood with her hand on the frame and her grey coat buttoned to the throat. She watched him the way a clerk watches a column that has been added once already and has come out wrong. Her eyes held no warmth and no cruelty. Lin had the feeling she would wait out the whole of the low water and then ask him again on the turn.
The gallery smelled of wet oak and old bronze. Below, the tide had stopped going out. Lin could see it in the channels, each one lying still under its skin of sky, and he understood that the low water had only a little left in it.
“You are counting, Registry,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You are. You have stopped twice in the form, and both times you were holding something back.” She didn’t look away from him. “The Bell can hear that too.”
He took a breath, and it went all the way down, and he began again. He made his voice flat, as hers was flat, and he set each word square against the one before it, as the form asked. “I will remember that I promised.”
