Sect Year 2 · eighth month · day 11 · Sedge Well, a village on the Qingliu road
The chalk mark was on the lip of the well before Lin saw the well-keeper. It was a ring drawn in white, with spokes inside it, and every spoke had been drawn whole. Someone had gone round the rim of the stone with the chalk, counting as they went, and then had moved on to the next thing.
Beneath the ring, in a column, someone had written names. There were eleven of them in the Court’s square hand. Four had a single line drawn through them, from corner to corner. Lin looked at those four for a long time. It was the mark Pei made on the wax when a name had gone up, and he hadn’t known until that moment that anyone else made it too.
“They came on the fourth,” said the well-keeper. He was an old man with a face like a dried plum, and he held a bucket in each hand and did not set either one down. “Three of them. One had a box with a lock on it. They sat where you’re standing and asked the well for names.”
