Sect Year 5 · second month · day 5 · Ninth Knot Point, Verren; the Loom’s guest room
Lin woke with the bell-cord wound twice around his right wrist, and the knot in it was one he didn’t remember tying.
He lay still and looked at it. The guest room was grey with the first light off the Point, a narrow room with lime on the walls and a bed built into the corner. The light came through the shutters in bars that lay across the blanket. They had come up the Point four days before, in the Loom’s boat from Sarn, and he still woke some nights listening for the tide under the Sarn quay.
The cord ran from his wrist up to the iron ring by the door. There, the bell hung on its hook. It had been wound tight, and the knot sat hard against the bone, a bowline with its tail tucked back under itself. Anyone could have tied it. Nobody had. He had.
He turned his head. The shutter line, which had been coiled on the doorstep when he went to sleep, was tied in a row of small knots along its length, each one pulled firm. His pack sat on the chair, and its lashing had been drawn through its own eyes and made fast in a hitch that would hold a boat to a quay. Every rope within reach of the bed had been tied. He could see the marks where the hemp…
