Sect Year 7 · tenth month · night of day 3 · the sixty-fourth life: Tavrin, his seventy-second year
The kiln had been cold for a season, and Coll had let it stay cold. He sat on a stool beside its mouth in the grey afternoon, with a blanket across his knees and his hands open in his lap, and listened to the yard. Someone was sweeping the far end, slowly, the way old men sweep. The river ran past the ferry at its usual pace, neither high nor low. In all the years since the flood, it had come near the gold line twice and had not touched it.
Mird came along the path with a crate of the last firing on his back. He was grey now. His hair had gone the colour of ash, and his shoulders bent at the top of every step, as an old potter’s shoulders do after half a life at the wheel. He set the crate down on the boards by the shelf with the care of a man who knew exactly how much a crate could hurt.
“Last of it,” said Mird.
“Last of it,” Coll agreed.
The shelf ran the length of the drying-shed wall. It held forty bowls, and every one of them had been mended. The seams showed on each, and gold ran along the cracks, not hidden under the glaze but laid in plain sight where the light from the door could find it. There were tea…
