Sect Year 2 · seventh month · day 5 · Tenwell, on the Qingliu road, at dusk
The water at the Tenwell ford went down at last, as the keeper had promised it would. The road came up out of the flood on the far bank with a skin of silt over every stone. Lin walked it with his hands loose at his sides and his boots filling slowly with mud. The fields on either hand were green in a way he hadn’t seen since the spring at Azure Stream.
Rice stood in standing water, each paddy holding a small piece of sky, and the cut stalks along the dykes had been bundled and set out to dry. A woman in a straw hat knelt in one of the rows. She straightened as they passed, looked at Pei’s pack and then at Lin’s face, and bent back to her seedlings without a word.
Tenwell was a village of forty houses at a crossroads, with a square of packed earth at its centre and ten wells set around the square. Pei counted them as they came in. She couldn’t help it, and Lin had stopped asking her to.
“Ten,” she said. “Seven with buckets. Three with boards nailed across.”
