Sect Year 1 · sixth month · day 27 · Azure Stream Sect, Inner Court practice yard
Su had asked for the bout herself. She went to the Cloud Breath master before the morning bell and wrote out the request in her square, unrushed hand, then left a copy with the gatekeeper so that nobody could say afterward that the Foundation man had come looking for her. Master Feng Qiao read the paper twice. She said “Impossible” in the tone of a woman who has been told the moon will be late, and then she sent a junior for the chalk.
She had argued for him once, in the Deacon’s hall, and won him thirty days, and she had never said why. He had never asked her. It seemed to him that they had both been content with that arrangement for a long time.
By the late bell the yard was full. The juniors stood in rows along the eastern wall. There, the shade came first. The Core students had taken the gallery steps at the back and sat with their knees drawn up, like men who had paid for the good seats and meant to get the full value of them. Lin stood in the open sun at the centre of the chalk ring. He kept his feet apart and his left arm loose at his side. The cold in that arm had crept up to the elbow in the spring and had not gone back. The heat made…
