Script quote on upper chest

One wet spring a carter called Torrin came in with mud to his knees and asked her to write to a woman in the upriver village of Sallow. He wanted fine words, the kind that sounded like a lord's. He gave her a sky full of stars, a heart like a bell, and eyes like the lamps of a festival barge. Ebbe kept her reed still on the clay. "Tell me one true thing about yourself," she said.

Torrin scratched his jaw for a long while. "She likes me when I am quiet," he said at last, "and she likes me when I am a fool, which is more often. I want her to love the fool as well." Ebbe wrote it out in her leaning hand, sloping each letter down the clay toward the water: Love me for who I am. Then she sealed it and sent it up on the grain barge.

The answer came back before the barley was cut. It was a single line in another hand, and Torrin carried it in his fist to Ebbe's door without wiping the mud from his face. "Then come up the river," it read, "and say it to me yourself." Ebbe read it twice and handed it back. He was already running, and she heard his boots splash all the way to the landing. She kept his first reed in the jar by the door, the one with the clean tip he had never used, and she wrote his true line on the wall above her table so that every man who came in asking for stars would have to read it first.