Sect Year 2 · fifth month · day 16 · the milestone camp above Sallow Basin · evening
Su read the day aloud before she let herself eat. She had done it every night since the road south began. She sat with her back to the wheel of the mule cart and the book open on her knee, and the carter had stopped pretending not to listen. The lamp was turned low so that the lines did not slide. She read the way she read a carter’s bill, flatly, giving every figure the same weight.
“‘Did not go down,’” she read. “‘Says he will go down with Pei. Pei says the names herself now.’”
“I said them sitting up,” said Pei, from the other side of the fire. She had her blanket around her shoulders and a strip of bread in one hand. “Write that I was sitting up.”
“I’ll write it.” Su did not look up. “‘Pei says she was sitting up.’ Is that accurate?”
“It’s accurate.”
Su wrote it. The pen scratched in the quiet, and the thornwood popped, and somewhere out past the milestones a dead man’s robe moved in the evening wind with a sound like a sheet on a line. Lin sat with his back against the stone and his knees drawn up. The rim’s hum had dropped since the morning, and tonight he could hear it only when he held his breath, which he was trying not to do.
