Sect Year 1 · tenth month · day 12 · Farrow Post
The runner from Azure Stream had come up the south road in the rain, and he wasn’t inclined to be pleasant about it. He stood in the post-house yard with his cloak steaming and a packet in oilcloth held flat against his chest. When the post-master’s wife offered him a stool, he said he had been sitting since the last ford and would stand until someone took the packet off him.
Lin took it. He signed the tally with his right hand and gave back the runner’s pen, and the runner grunted, shook the water off his hat, and went to stand under the roof edges with the mules.
Farrow Post sat at the foot of a long grey slope. It was a yard with a well in the middle, a stable with three stalls, and a common room whose only window looked out on the road. The post-master’s wife kept a lamp burning in that window. She had lit it at dusk on the first evening and again on the second, and she hadn’t once asked anybody why a lamp should be needed in a place where every traveler could see the road for himself. Lin had noticed it the first night. He hadn’t looked at it for long since. A lamp in a window was an easy thing to be given and a hard thing to watch.
