Sect Year 5 · fourth month · day 2 · Hallam Ford, the river-road inn
Lin woke on the inn cot with the window already grey. For a while he didn’t move. He lay with his eyes open and listened to the river under the floorboards, to a cart rattling over the ford road, to someone in the yard calling a horse by a name he didn’t know. The room smelled of wet wool and lamp oil. Nothing in it told him where he had been since the boat. The bar had held the Registry boat at the river mouth for most of two weeks, waiting for the sea to lie down, and the river had taken the rest.
He had no memory of the night. He had only the feeling of a basin’s cold rim under his palm, as if he had been holding it for a long time and had only now been allowed to let go.
He lifted his hands from the blanket and looked at them. The right hand lay still in the grey light, the fingers open and quiet. It had been still since he woke, and he couldn’t remember the last time it had been. The left hand closed only halfway, as it had since the cold came up into the arm. When he tried to lift the cup of water from the stool, the cup chattered against his teeth, and he set it down again. He took a sheet of paper from the…
