Sect Year 6 · fourth month · night of day 7 · the sixty-first life: the gate, his seventy-seventh year
Idun was old, and his breath came short in the cold. He held the bar in both hands, the way his master had shown him in the first winter, with the grey cloth wound round the iron. The cloth had gone soft and dark where his palms rested on it. His hands were steady. They had always been steady, which was the one thing about his body he had never had to argue for. Beyond the wall the water lay flat under a sky with no moon in it, and it had lain that way for longer than the marks on the wall could tell.
The upper marks had been there before his master came to the gate. His master had cut a few of the rest, and Idun had cut the others, one finger lower each decade, and the newest sat a finger’s width above the water. Below it was an older mark, lower than any of theirs, that neither of them had cut. He had never touched it. He didn’t look at it now, because he had grown tired of looking at things that did not move.
