Sect Year 2 · second month · day 1 · the capital, the lodging-house by the canal
The canal had let go of its ice in the night. Lin lay on the bed under the low tiles and listened to it break up in the dark below the window. A long grinding, a crack like a bough giving way, then the small knock of floes against each other as they drifted down toward the locks. The room was cold. The stove had gone out sometime after the landlady’s last round, and the air carried the thin, clean smell of a fire that had been left to die by itself.
His left hand hurt. He lifted it off the blanket and turned it over in the grey light. It lay open with the fingers curled, the way a hand lies after a long night of writing, though he couldn’t remember writing anything. He closed it and opened it again. The cramp did not ease. It sat in the heel of the palm and ran up the outside of the forearm, a tightness with a knot in the middle of it. It stayed there whether he attended to it or not.
He had turned twenty-one in the first month. He knew that from the record, not from any feeling about it. The weeks after the Hall had gone by in what Su called, in her book, the long quiet. Days when he slept past the morning bells, ate little, answered questions in…
