Sect Year 1 · fifth month · night of day 19 · the ninth life: Greywater, his seventieth year. Dawn of day 20
The yard was quieter at seventy. The boys came less often and stayed less long, and the ones who did come were sent up the hill afterward, to Edric’s porch, to be put right. Dagan taught the morning class now, down at the landing where the crossings were called. He sent the youngest children up the lane with their wooden swords tied across their backs and a note folded in each small fist, in his big square hand: Show him the cut. Don’t let him say it’s good.
Edric laughed the first time he read one. He hadn’t thought he had any laughter left for notes.
He had taught for more than forty years. He had watched boys come up that lane as children with their wooden swords across their backs, and go down it again as men with ferry-ropes on their shoulders. Some of them came back up the hill years later to show him a cut they had made their own. He had never once been sorry to be corrected by them.
The cracked sword still hung on the wall by the door, its grip rebound three times over the years with cord that had never matched. Nobody had ever asked him who had cracked it. He had stopped wondering, long ago, and found he preferred it that way. The rack in the yard he…
