Sect Year 7 · eleventh month · night of day 9 · the sixty-fifth life: Oster Bend, his thirty-eighth year
Benn married Pilar at the close of the spring wool fair, in the year he turned thirty-eight. She was a weaver from the seventh house on the south side of the cloth row, a tall woman with indigo stained to the wrist and a laugh that reached the lane before she did. Her father had kept his loom for forty years and had never let another pair of hands sit at it. Pilar had inherited the loom and the habit together, and she didn’t apologise for either.
They were married in her father’s yard under a line of dyed cloth, with the vats steaming on the river behind the wall. The dyer’s wife came with a jug of sour cherry wine and a speech she had clearly been rehearsing since the winter. She told the yard that she had known the joiner’s boy would end up hanging doors in someone’s house. That she had been right about it since the day he had made her gate stop squeaking. Everyone laughed except Benn, who was thinking about a widow’s door on the north side, and the frame it hung in.
