Sect Year 5 · fifth month · night of day 1 · the forty-ninth life: Orrel Lane, his fifty-second year
Lin lay down on the cot in the back room at Kettle Bend, calm and willing.
“Die where your daughter can see you.”
“Thread of Fate.”
Orrel Lane ran uphill from the shelf road between two walls of black stone, and the rain came down it in a thin brown river that nobody bothered to divert. The lodge stood at the top. There, the lane gave out at a yard of wet flags and a row of stables with their doors half open. Garrow Corrie had driven a cart up that lane for thirty years and had never stopped at the lodge, because nothing inside it had ever been for sale to a carter.
Now he lay in one of its back rooms, on the bed nearest the window, with a grey blanket pulled up to his chin and a chest that had kept him from his work since the winter his wife died. His horse was in the lodge stables with the others, a grey gelding called Smoke for the colour of his coat. The room had a bare board floor, a washstand with a chipped jug, and a lamp on a hook that nobody had lit yet. Through the wall he could hear the other beds. Someone snored in one of them. Someone else was praying in a low voice that never got to the end of its…
