Sect Year 2 · eighth month · day 22 · the Qingliu fork, the post-house yard
The clerk came up the south road at noon on a grey horse that had been groomed that morning and nowhere else. He wore a dark coat buttoned to the collar and carried a locked box strapped to his saddle, a plain thing of black wood with brass corners and a brass keyhole. He didn’t hurry. He rode into the fork at a walk, looked at the milestones on both sides, and then turned in at the post-house gate as if it had been waiting for him.
Lin was in the yard with a hammer and a length of new rail, fitting it to the broken end of the stable fence. He put the hammer down. Pei, on the step with the tablet on her knees, closed the wax and did not get up. Gu Lanying in the kitchen doorway went very still with the sand-rag in her hand.
The clerk dismounted and tied his horse to the gatepost, beside the chalk ledger that no one had wiped. Then he turned, and Lin saw the mark on his left wrist. It had been stitched into the cuff of his sleeve in grey thread, a small square ledger with a line beneath it, neat and careful, the way a tailor would sew a monogram.
