Sect Year 7 · eleventh month · night of day 9 · the sixty-fifth life: Oster Bend, his twenty-third year
Benn Varl walked the cloth row with his plane in a canvas roll on one shoulder and a pencil behind his ear. He walked it the way his father had taught him, looking at doors before he looked at faces. The row ran along the river, a long lane of dye-vats and drying frames, and wet wool hung from its poles in every colour a dye-house could make. The air smelled of madder and sour water. A man could tell from the far end of the lane which doors had been hung well, because those doors stood square in their frames and did not lean.
He had a journeyman’s bench now, at the back of his father’s yard, and a journeyman’s knack, which his father called fitting by weight. It meant that he didn’t measure a door so much as feel what it wanted, and then give it that. People paid him for it when they could. Most of them did not understand what they were paying for, and he had long since stopped trying to explain.
The widow’s door was the seventh on the north side. The dyer’s wife had sent word about it to his bench at dawn, with a boy who could not stop talking. The door on the north side was loud. The widow Oyla had not slept a night through since her husband died. Would…
