Sect Year 1 · third month · night of day 12 · the fourth life: the bell-hall on the Cold Tooth, his thirty-eighth year
Daelen came from the next fold in the spring Tesh turned twenty-two. She had a red cord in her hair and a laugh that carried over the wet pasture. She was the first person in the valley who called him quiet as though it were a fault she had decided to forgive. “You count everything,” she said on the first evening, when he had counted the lambs in the pen twice and got a different answer each time. “I can see your mouth going.”
“It’s a habit.”
“It’s a nuisance. I’ll break you of it.”
She never did. She married him, and for fifteen years she kept the fold’s accounts in a book with a green cover. She let him do his counting out in the barn, where his mouth could move as it liked.
Once, in a winter when the snow lay to the sills, she asked him what the bell was like up close. He told her about the bronze, dull and cold to the touch, and the rope worn bright where the hands went. She listened with her chin on her knees by the fire, and when he had finished she said somebody ought to go up there and ring it for the ones who never came down.
