Sect Year 7 · tenth month · night of day 3 · the sixty-fourth life: Tavrin, his thirty-first year
The old flood line sat on the north wall of the kiln yard, higher than any man could reach from the cobbles. Coll had first stood under it at nineteen, with his father’s lamp held up beside him and the pale stripe lying along the stone. He had stopped seeing it years ago, the way a man stops seeing a crack in a ceiling he has slept under all his life. He saw it that morning, because the coast wagon had been squealing on the ferry road since first light, and a wagon that sounded like that was carrying money.
His father stood at the front shelf with his hands folded in his apron. Hod had kept the glaze shelf for thirty years and had never once hurried toward a door. He hurried now. “Stand by the samples,” he said. “Let him see the cups first.”
The samples were four bowls on a plank of plain wood. Coll had thrown them in the spring. They were the best work the yard had sent out that year, with walls as thin as a fingernail and a glaze the blue of a pond in shade. He knew every one. He knew where his thumb had pressed the rim and where the wire had lifted the foot, and he had held each one to the lamp before the kiln took it and found nothing…
