Sect Year 5 · third month · night of day 3 · the forty-fifth life: Tallow Hill, her forty-first year
The lantern stopped at the gate, and for a long moment it didn’t move. Orla watched it from the step with her arms folded against the cold. Its light showed a grey coat with a wet collar, and the lower half of a man’s face, set in the patient look she had learned to expect from men who sold things door to door. Over one shoulder he carried a coil of cord, new and pale and stiff, the kind the Loom sold by the arm’s length. In his other hand was a flat tin.
She knew him before he spoke. He had come up the lane in the spring with that same tin under his arm. He had knocked at every door on the hill, hers too, and she had sent him away with the words she had given him that afternoon. The hill had lost enough men to the water without tying the rest down to the stones.
He had taken it well, that spring. He had bowed, and said the Loom understood a widow’s pride, and gone on to the Sallow house. She had heard afterward that the Greave house bought two cords. That the man had sold a cord to nearly every family on the lane before he went down the hill that spring for the last time. Torren had told her that over the wall, in…
