Sect Year 5 · third month · night of day 4 · the forty-sixth life: old Sarn quay, his fifteenth year
“Blow one bowl that holds water.”
“Long Look.”
The brick above the fire door had split down its face the length of a hand. Ketil had watched that crack for three winters. It had opened when he was twelve, with a noise like a rafter giving, and he had been standing in this same doorway with ash on his arms when it happened. Something in him had woken at the sound. He couldn’t have said afterward what it showed him, only that he had known the noise before it finished.
He swept the floor now, the way he had swept it for two winters. The glass-house was a litter of green and brown shards, a few blue ones, and the thick pale stubs of the failed bowls that the master threw into the bin without looking. Ketil swept them up with the short broom, one stroke and then another, and tipped them into the cullet bin where they chimed against each other.
He wasn’t allowed the pipe. Aske Rund said a boy’s wrists were too quick for it, and he said so kindly, which was harder to hear than if he had shouted.
