Sect Year 1 · ninth month · day 21 · Azure Stream Sect, Elders’ hall
The morning bell rang three times over the Inner Court, and Lin was halfway up the stone path before the third stroke had died away. He hadn’t slept. He had sat on the cave step with his back against the rock and the grey cloth round the jade slip across his knees until the sky over the eastern ridge went from black to the colour of wet slate. Then he had washed his face in the basin, and it had made no difference at all.
Su walked a few paces behind him with the bound book under her arm. The book was shut. She hadn’t opened it on the hill road, and she hadn’t asked him anything, not about the bowl on the gate step, not about the man who had set it there and walked back down into the dark. Her left forearm was bound in clean linen under her sleeve. She carried herself carefully, the way a person does when she has been told to keep weight off a wound and has decided to be angry about it later. When he slowed at the bend of the path, she slowed too, and neither of them remarked on it.
