Sect Year 1 · eleventh month · day 5 · Qingliu dry hills, Mother Rusk’s inn
The rain stopped before the sun was up. By the time the light reached the yard, the only thing that had changed was the mud. It lay in a brown skin across the stones and filled the ruts the carts had cut in the lane. It smelled of wet clay and of something older underneath, the sour breath of a cellar opened after a long winter. Mother Rusk had set every pot she owned along the gutter under the roof edges to catch the run-off. Then she had gone out into the wet and stood among them. She looked up at the grey sky as though it owed her an explanation.
Lin stood under the roof edges with his cup and looked at the well.
It was a plain stone ring, waist-high, with a wooden hood gone grey and a crank that had not turned since the autumn. Someone had laid a flat stone across the top, and someone else had moved it. The rope hung down the inside, dry as a bootlace and nearly as stiff. He could see perhaps a yard into the dark, and then there was nothing to see at all.
