Sect Year 5 · fourth month · night of day 1 · the forty-seventh life: Hallam Ford, her thirty-first year
Lin lay down on the inn cot at Hallam Ford, calm and willing.
“One night. One life. Will you turn?”
“Yes.”
“Sit with the one who dies alone.”
“Plain Ear.”
The women’s ward of the Hallam Ford sisterhouse was long and low and smelled of lye, boiled linen and the river damp that crept up through the floorboards and never went away. Nesa Brand had worked in it for three winters, and she still counted the beds whenever she came through the door, the way other women touched a doorpost for luck. Twenty-two beds stood along the walls by day. The fever beds were nearest the stove. There, the heat could reach them, and the sisters moved between them with their sleeves pushed back. Past the fever beds, at the back of the room where the lamps did not reach until someone carried one there, stood twelve more. They were narrow and iron-framed, with the bedding folded square at their feet and nobody’s name on the chart.
Nesa stood at the foot of the first of them with the ward key on its cord around her neck and her hands tucked into her apron. The key was warm from her skin. Outside the shutters the river ran high and loud, like a crowd that had not yet decided whether to leave the square.
