Sect Year 4 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the thirty-eighth life: the Vault quarter, his tenth year
At ten Jorn worked the bench alone for the first time. Heddan stood at the window with his back to the room, which was how he watched. The knife in Jorn’s hand was his father’s cutting knife, its bone grip worn to the shape of a thumb that was not yet Jorn’s. Shavings of pale wood lay in drifts at his feet. A bowl of wax simmered at the edge of the lamp and gave the room its smell.
He learned the stroke again. A short pull from the wrist, not the elbow, and the blade turning on the last of the grain. His first cut came out ragged. His second came out true. By the fifth his hand knew the stroke before he did.
His mother came to the bench door at midday with a heel of bread wrapped in a cloth. Her hands were red from the coins, and there was a faint white ring of salt on one wrist from the sheds. “Eat,” she said. He ate it standing, and she watched his hands on the knife and not his face. “You don’t have to keep the numbers for us,” she said at last. “Your father keeps them.” Then she went back inside before he could answer, and he heard her begin counting again, low, from the beginning.
