Sect Year 5 · second month · night of day 2 · the forty-second life: Pallow, her forty-fourth year
“Let the net go where it will.”
“Long Look.”
The lane down to the point at Pallow ran between drying racks hung with salt cod and grey netting, and the smell of both came up off it in the cold, thick enough to taste. Jenne Abbs walked down it at the head of the hamlet’s families with her hands pushed into the pockets of her oilskin.
The sky above the racks had the thin white look it took before snow, though none had fallen on Pallow in her lifetime. The children ran ahead and were called back. The women came after with coils of spare line over their shoulders, as though a coil of line might settle what the men were going to say.
She knew every face on the lane. She had known most of them since they were small enough to be lifted over the wall of the drying yard by the scruff of their jerkins. She was the one they fetched when a child ran a fever, and the one who sat up with the old ones when the cold came in off the water. Pallow had no healer and no priest.
