Sect Year 6 · fourth month · night of day 2 · the fifty-ninth life: a river port market across the sea, the girl’s sixth year
On the next night Lin lay down on his cot, calm and willing, and let his breath go long.
“Give back the face you borrowed.”
“Quick Count.”
The fish lane at the river port smelled of salt water and charcoal and the warm, sweet rot of weed left too long in the sun. Nim had her mother’s hand in one of hers and her mother’s coins in the pocket of her apron. She could feel every one of them through the cloth: five small rounds of bronze with holes punched through their middles, strung on a wire that bit when she pressed. The houses on either side of the lane were built of river clay baked pale, and their doors had been painted the red of old wine. The whole lane looked, in the afternoon light, like a row of open mouths. Above the roofs the stone arch carried its gate-tower across the brown water, and the gulls wheeled round the tower and screamed about the fish.
Nim liked the bridge. Her mother said it had been standing longer than anyone’s grandmother, and that its stones had come from a quarry upriver where the rock was grey instead of white. Nim did not know what white rock looked like. She had never been far enough up the river to see it.
