That evening, as the mild spring twilight settled over the wheelwright’s timber yard and the frogs in the roadside ditches began their first hesitant chorus of the thaw, Seyun lit his brass oil lamp. Then he sat down before the two books on his writing table.
On his left lay the old Account Book.
Its calfskin cover was scuffed grey at the corners, stained along the bottom edge by marsh water from the ferry landing, scorched in one spot by a stray cinder from Osen Tal’s fire bowl during that earlier ordeal. Then he mended along the spine with three stitches of Mina’s razor-sharp silk. When he had carried it out through Ash Reed’s outer gate in the rain ten months ago—after handing the gate steward a decoy empty binding during that earlier ordeal—it had started as a junior student’s storehouse tally book, meant only to prove that he hadn’t stolen the sect’s herbs and that the check fire had spiked before the seventh breath.
Slowly, Seyun turned through the filled pages from front to back.
Here on Page 1 was the inventory of the twelve taken away herb jars and the fire heat numbers that had cost him his sect home. Five pages later sat the cramped, hurried transcription of Master Uren’s rules from the cracked limestone tablet beneath the Abbey of the Last Question. On the ninth leaf was the first honest failure entry Mina had forced him to write after he inflamed his chest beneath the ferry…
