Sect Year 5 · third month · day 20 · the Registry boat, open water south of Verren
The boat had been at sea for fifteen days, and Lin had slept in pieces through most of them. He lay on the settle under the afterdeck rail with his coat folded under his head and his left arm across his chest. There, the cold in it had settled and stayed. Each swell lifted the hull and set it down again with a long wooden groan. Some nights the groan woke him. Other nights it was the only sound that kept him from waking altogether. He didn’t ask the Wheel to turn. He counted the groans instead, because he counted anything that would not let him stop, and he lost the count somewhere past three hundred and started again from the beginning.
Dewe kept the Lantern’s rental book on the afterdeck. He read it by a lamp with a shutter cut to a slit. Every so often he turned a page, dipped his thin pencil, and made a small mark in a column Lin could not see from where he lay. The lamp threw a bar of yellow across the planks, and the bar moved with the boat, slid up the mast and down again, and never quite reached the settle.
