Sect Year 4 · sixth month · day 22 · Ketch Shoal, the flats below the birth-house
The tide was out when Lin went down to the new well, and the flats lay open under a low sky the colour of wet slate. The mud had crusted grey along its edges and stayed soft in the middle, so every step on it had to decide whether to hold.
Gao Wen had dug the well by hand over the better part of the sixth month. He had used a short spade, a length of rope and a bucket he had mended with copper tacks, and he hadn’t let anyone else take the rope. The first bucket had come up brown. By the third it had run clear, and in the days since, the birth-house keeper had sent a jug up the stilts for her own kettle. It she wouldn’t have done for a well she didn’t trust.
Above them, in the well tower, the Bell hung cracked along its lip. It hadn’t sounded since the sold oaths came home. Its silence reached across the mud the way a missing tooth had altered a familiar face. Nobody could say at first what was different, only that something was.
