Sect Year 5 · first month · night of day 27 · the forty-first life: Coil Cove, her sixty-eighth year
The last of the tail ran out through her palm, and Sefa let it go.
She hadn’t known she was still holding it. Her hand came open all at once, without any permission from the one who owned it. The Ebb Wren’s bow swung off the wall. The line slipped clear of the ring into the water, and the boat drew out on the ebb.
The running line trailed across the widening water in a long dark curve. Meanwhile, the staying knot remained fast on the iron ring, bitten tight by her own hands. The boat drew out into the channel, and the staying knot held its place upon the stone. It held without her.
Thirty years old, and she stood on the wet stone with her palm stinging and watched the knot hold a salvage boat to a quay that did not want it to go.
Then the pull came back along the line to her, faint and steady, and she felt where it came from. It was in the cord. It had been in the cord, she understood, from the first moment she had put her hand on the knot and felt it slip. The one hand that had been pulling all along was not the boat’s, or the sea’s, or the master’s. It was hers. She hadn’t known her hand was still on the cord. She had…
