Sect Year 7 · tenth month · night of day 3 · the sixty-fourth life: Tavrin, his forty-first year
The rain had been falling up the valley for nine days before it reached the yard. Coll watched the river from the drying-shed door each morning. Each morning it had climbed a finger higher on the stakes, brown and quick, carrying branches and once the roof-tile of a house he didn’t know. He thought about the wheels, and the stock on the racks, and the price of the new clay. He didn’t think about the water.
The image had come to him in the spring, as it came every year. The Thread of Fate never gave more than one picture at a time, and never a plan. It gave a shape seen through wet glass. Brown water over the yard, the back shelf lifting from its posts, the cracked bowls knocking together, and a pale line on the north wall higher than a man could reach. He hadn’t known whose water it was. He had told no one, because there was no one to tell who would not ask what it meant, and he hadn’t known what it meant. He had thought it was about the wheels.
