Sect Year 7 · first month · day 3 · the Reserve, the far shallows
Lin kept to the pace of a ploughman. He didn’t decide to. It rose into his legs from a life lent to him on a riverbank, long before any Hall stood there, a life spent walking behind an old ox through ground that was not yet ready. The ox had never hurried. The plough had never made the field ready any faster for being pushed, and the man at the handles had learned that only by waiting for the rain. At the end of each row the old ox stopped and turned its head to look back along the furrow, as if it wanted to be told whether the ground was ready. Nobody told it. The man stood beside it until the soil gave under his feet, and then they went on. Lin set each foot down, let the weight settle over it, and lifted the next. The water took his steps and said nothing about them.
One other life came up in him as he walked. It was a ford, and a lamp lit before its time. He knew the cold of that ford as plainly as he knew his own hands, close and clear. He didn’t take its pace. It had been voided. A voided life gave nothing back, and all he had from it was the knowing of it.
