Chapter 3

Everyone's Morning

The Daykeepers made the greatest promise of all: a day when every wait would be unbound at once, "Everyone's Morning." The whole world laid its heart on that date. People fired dishes, launched ships, and put the children to bed early.

That promise was strained from the start. For ages the Daykeepers had taken a handful of Unbound Light at every Drop as a light-tithe and stored it in the Light Granary beneath Daycrest: the first hand to hold on to a light that was meant to scatter.

Meanwhile people had begun to bring waits that had no date at all: that the departed would return, that an illness with no cure would mend. The Daykeepers could not turn them away, and they believed that if they released the whole granary at once, they could build a true morning that would answer every one of those waits.

At dawn on that day they opened the granary, and the light they had gathered had gone dim. Unbound Light is not a light that can be kept. The morning was not ready.

There was a second bell, for promises that could not be kept: the Calling-Off Bell, which says on the very day, "it is not coming." When it rings, a wait is unbound in tears instead of light. It hurts, but it does come undone. The twelve Month Wardens did not ring it. Instead they secretly slipped one more day into the calendar. "One day more." The night those words were first spoken is called the First Night of Delay.

And the next day, and the day after that, one day at a time. Seven days were slipped in, false days with no bell and no dawn. On the eighth night the Great Calendar could not bear their weight and tore down the middle. People call that night the Torn Night, and the piece that fell away the Torn Leaf.

All the world's waiting, with nowhere left to be unbound, fell that night as black rain and returned to each of its owners. The bell rang no more. The Daykeepers scattered, and people grew afraid to speak a date aloud. So began the Stale Years.

End of chapter 3

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