Sect Year 5 · first month · night of day 27 · the forty-first life: Coil Cove, her seventeenth year
Berit Lowe took her back into the shed on the first frost of the year, and she set one condition before she gave Sefa her stool again.
“You’ll stop talking to that cord.”
Sefa had not known anyone was listening. She stood in the doorway with the rain dripping off her hood and felt her face go hot. “I don’t talk to it.”
“You talk to it from the top step every evening when you think nobody’s on the stones. The whole cove can hear you, love. Half of it has heard you since you were eleven.” Berit did not look up from the bench. She was a short, wide woman with forearms like hawsers and grey hair cropped as close as a boy’s, and she had mended the cove’s nets for thirty years and said so to anyone who asked. “I can’t teach a girl who talks to rope. Stop it, or go home.”
Sefa stopped it. She had been talking to the cord since she was eleven, mostly at dusk, in a voice she used for nothing else. She had told it the news of the cove, and the weights of the catch, and the names of the boys who looked at her across the quay.
