Mandala design with petals and swirls

The wheel went up over the east gate on Tuesday, and I have spent three days on a ladder with a pot of lamp-black, trying to keep my hands from shaking. Master Corrin says the eight petals are the eight provinces of Oswen, each one curled with the rivers that feed it, and the arrows along the rim are for the couriers who carry the sun's word outward every dawn. Nobody has asked me what the blank circle in the middle is for. I suspect they think it is for the moon.

I asked anyway, on the scaffold, and Corrin laughed until he coughed. The circle is kept empty, he said, because the first mason who drew it was told to leave room for whatever the kingdom loses. He pointed at the hatching on the inner ring, where the old king's seal is hidden in the lines, and then at the small spirals in the eastern petal, which are the names of the drowned fishing villages, copied in a child's careful hand from the parish rolls. I found mine in the south petal, under a swirl that looks like nothing at all.

So this morning I climbed up before the bells and took the lamp-black from my satchel. I did not draw in the circle. I made one dot on the rim, the smallest I could manage, and then I came down before anyone could tell me it was not my place. Write back and tell me whether Mother still leaves the blue shutters open at night, because from the top of the ladder I could see the lamps in the harbour, and I thought of her counting them.