Sect Year 1 · seventh month · day 5 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court kitchen
The pots went up on the rack after supper, one at a time, the way they always had. Lin had been given the job of hanging them since the spring, because he was the only one in the kitchen who never dropped a lid. He didn’t mind it. The iron was still warm from the coppers, and the rack had a rhythm to it: a pot lifted, a hook found, a tap on the rim to make certain the pot sat true. He tapped each one without thinking about the tapping. The habit was older than thinking, and it had come up the ridge with him. He had scrubbed these coppers for most of his first year in the sect, on his knees in the steam, and he still knew every dent in them. Some of the dents were his. He had put them there with a ladle in a temper he no longer remembered.
That was how the count began. One pot, tap. Two, tap. He was counting without meaning to, the way a man counts the steps of a stair he has climbed a thousand times, and the counting felt harmless until his heart ran on ahead of the number. The gap between the taps stretched and shrank and stretched again. He lost the eleventh and found it again as the twelfth. By the twentieth he couldn’t have said whether it was…
