Sect Year 2 · third month · night of day 10 · the twenty-first life: the Dunmere flats, his twelfth year
Twelve came in the night, the way birthdays came on the flats, with nobody there to say so.
Jorin was standing with the cage in both hands, ten steps from the far hook, when his memory opened under him like a board giving way over water. He didn’t fall. He only stopped being one thing. A name came up first, and it wasn’t his. It was Lin Cang. It was followed by a woman’s voice reading a line back to him, slowly, to check that it was right. Then by the taste of ink, and the cold weight of two halves of a jade slip in grey cloth, and a cave on a north ridge with lime-white flags in its courtyard, and a bucket set down quietly by a lower door. Then came a road of milestones with dead men standing beside each stone, their hands held out. The girl with the bruised wrist came last. Her name was Pei. He knew it the way he knew the cold in his own fingers. She had been lifted off the road by men in bronze masks, and he had been on his knees in the salt and could not get up fast enough.
