Sect Year 1 · eleventh month · day 2 · the Lower Gourd inn, on the Qingliu dry hills
Mother Rusk sold water by the cup. She drew it from a barrel that had been carted up from the valley by a mule which disliked her, and she measured every cup against a notch cut in the barrel’s rim. A cup cost one copper. Half a cup cost half of one, and she would take the half in salt if you had no coppers, but she wouldn’t take anything at all in promises. She said so to Lin on the first morning, pleasantly, before he had opened his mouth to ask.
“It isn’t that I don’t believe you,” she said. “It’s that the valley doesn’t.”
She set the cup down on the barrel’s rim and looked past him at the road that wound up the hill from the valley. “Two bowls on my gatepost since the harvest,” she said. “Painted, then scraped, then painted again. The men who do it pay in good silver and never once ask for a cup.” Her eyes went over his coat and then his face, the way a woman weighs a sack before she lifts it. “You’re not one of them.”
