Sect Year 1 · eighth month · day 23 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
Lin came in through the kitchen door with his Inner Court pass held out in front of him, as though it might be questioned, and stopped on the threshold. The room was hot and loud, and its smell hit him all at once. Steam rose off the big pots. Somebody was scraping a grill with a flat iron. The bread trays were stacked against the wall. The bench where he used to sit with his back to the stove still carried a scorch mark where a dropped coal had once burned through the wood.
He breathed in for four lid-taps and out for four. The cook was tapping the lids of the rice pots with a ladle, one, two, three, four, in a rhythm that kept the grain from catching, and Lin had found himself keeping time to it without meaning to.
“You’re counting your breaths again,” said Pei from the pots. “I can hear you from here.”
She had her sleeves pushed past the elbows and a scrap of cloth tied over her hair against the steam. She was thirteen this month. She had grown since the autumn, not a great deal, but enough that the cuffs of her grey coat rode up over her wrists when she reached for a pot. She looked at him over the rim with the same measuring stare she had given the expulsion notice on the woodshed door.
