Sect Year 2 · fourth month · day 2 · the milestone camp above Sallow Basin
The salt-carter came up the road before the sun had cleared the hills beyond the basin. He led one grey mule with two sacks of white lashed across its back, and he didn’t hurry, because nobody on the Wastes road hurried. The distance ahead was the same distance however fast a man walked it.
He stopped at the edge of the camp and looked at the three of them the way a man looks at goods he has been told to deliver and not paid for. Then he unbuttoned his coat and took out a flat packet sealed in dark red wax.
“Post-house at the last stone,” he said. “They held it through two rest-days. They said it was for the wandering one.”
Lin took it. The wax was cracked at one corner. There, the packet had been carried against a body for a long way. On the back, in the Deacon’s blunt hand, someone had written: Lin Cang. Keep it dry, and don’t let the carter read it.
“I didn’t read it,” said the carter, who had plainly read the wax.
Su took the packet before Lin could decide whether to open it. She broke the seal with her thumb, read the single sheet once with her lips pressed flat, and then read it again aloud at the cold fire, in the level voice she kept for the record.
