Sect Year 4 · eleventh month · day 3 · the coast road out of Serai, from the salt wharf to the post-house at the delta’s edge
Before light Lin left the inn by the salt wharf with his pack on his shoulder. He stood a moment in the doorway and took the weight of it in both hands, the way a carter tests a load before he trusts it to a hill. The straps were sound. The twine was knotted. He counted the things in the pack one by one, found each where he had put it, and went out into the dark.
The twist of cloth with the Ketch Shoal wages lay inside his coat, and the few coppers he had kept back for the packet fare were knotted in a rag beside it. There, his fingers could find them.
Count what you can carry. The Wheel had given him that line at the end of a life he could still feel the length of, a ferryman’s life on a river he would never see again. He had thought it a small line when it came. On a road out of a city of cords it seemed to him exactly the right size.
