Sect Year 0 · tenth month · day 21 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
The woodshed post held twenty-one notches, and above them nine bare places, one for each morning still to come. Lin looked at the bare wood for a moment before he went out. He didn’t need to count the places. He counted them anyway.
The yard was still dim when he reached the well. He took the rooted stance with his feet set wide and his weight low and his palms turned down, as though he were holding a board steady against a wind that had not yet arrived. The three channels answered him.
In the first week the stone had seemed to sit on his chest while he held the stance, and now the three held a little longer each morning, and the ache that came after was smaller. Under them, deeper, he could feel the fourth channel, a door he hadn’t learned to open. He didn’t push at it. Pushing at things had cost him a great deal once, and he remembered the price.
When the sun cleared the east wall he let the stance go, shook out his hands, and went into the kitchen.
The kitchen was loud and warm with steam. Millet porridge bubbled in the big pot, and the cook, a broad woman with forearms like cured ham, was splitting kindling with a cleaver that was too heavy for the job. Pei stood on an upturned crate at the hearth, stirring with a paddle that was taller than she was. She had grown a little since the summer. Her hair was tied back with a strip of grey cloth, and there was flour on her chin that she didn’t know about.
She hummed while she worked, a market tune about a fishwife who could never collect what she was owed. It rose in the middle and fell in the wrong place, and she sang the wrong words to it on purpose, and the girl from the Outer Court scrubbing the bench giggled into her rag.
She climbed down off the crate without being asked, filled a clay cup from the water jug, and held it out to him without looking up from the pot.
Lin took the cup. He smelled the water first, as he had learned to do, and then he tasted it. It was cool, but a grit sat at the back of his tongue, stone and sharp, and under the grit lay a dead flatness.
Pei was watching him over the rim of the pot. “Are you the kitchen’s poison-taster now?”
“Silt.”
“It’s the well.” She turned back to the porridge. “Everything in the yard comes from the well. It’s always been like that.”
“Not like this.”
He set the cup down on the table and went back out into the yard. There, the bucket hung on its rope beside the well-head. He let it down and drew it up again, and he tasted the water from the bucket’s rim the way he had tasted the cup.
Grit, and iron, and the flat dull edge of stale water. The taste was not one he had learned in this sect. He had learned it in a river city, with a cup in one hand and a warning in the other, and the memory came up now unbidden and stood in his mouth like a bad tooth.
He carried the bucket back into the kitchen and set it down on the cook’s table.
“Boil it,” he said.
The cook looked at the bucket, then at him. She had a burn scar across the back of one hand that she had never explained to anyone. “The Deacon will call it a fuss.”
“Then let him taste it.”
“The Deacon has never tasted anything in his life that he didn’t send back to the kitchen.”
“Then he’ll have one more thing to send back.” Lin pulled the bucket across to the hearth. “Boil it hard, and boil it twice. Don’t let anyone drink from the jug until it’s done.”
The cook’s mouth moved as if she wanted to argue. Then she shrugged, jerked her head at a hand by the door, and the hand went off with the bucket.
Lin stayed by the hearth while the water came up to the boil. He watched the bubbles form along the bottom of the pot, small and bright, and he counted them as they broke. He reached sixty before the first hard roll ran across the surface. A boiled thing was simple, he thought. It didn’t ask what the water had been, only that it be made hot enough and left alone long enough. He hadn’t always been able to say that about people.
Pei had come round the table with her paddle still in her fist. She stood by his elbow and looked at him with the particular stillness she used. Just then, she was about to say something that would be annoying and also true.
“You’ve been like that since the Elder’s carriage came to the gate,” she said.
“I was like this before.”
“No, you weren’t.”
He didn’t answer. He was thinking of the Elder’s visit to the gate on the ninth day of the thirty, and of what Elder Xu Bairen had wanted, which nobody in the Outer Court had been able to say.
He took the cup from the table and turned it in his fingers. Pei watched him do it. She had a way of seeing what he was going to do before he did it, and it had annoyed him since she was nine. She still had it now.
“You do the thing with your jaw,” she said. “The one where you count something without saying what it is.”
“I’m not counting anything.”
“You are. I can see you.” She turned the paddle over in her hands. “Nine?”
He looked at her. She looked back, and did not smile, and then she did, very briefly, the way she did when she had won a point she hadn’t expected to win.
“Nine,” he said.
He didn’t know what the float would say. He knew the basin would be cold, the way the stone always was before a reading. That the cold would climb through the seat of his trousers and settle in the small bones of his back. He knew he would have to sit still in it while a terrace full of people watched him try not to move.
He had sat still in worse places. That was not the hard part. The hard part was that he wanted the float to rise, and he had learned, the hard way, to distrust what he wanted.
The kitchen door banged open, and a runner came in with his cap crushed in one hand. He wore the sect’s grey, and he hadn’t stopped running when he reached the threshold, so he had to put a hand against the doorframe to halt himself. He was out of breath and pleased with himself for being out of breath.
“The monthly reading,” he said. “Called for noon at the basin. Hou Meng says the gallery is full, the Inner students are coming down, and the Elders’ servants have brought their own stools. And there’s a clerk in Gao grey who has asked for a seat above the float.”
“A clerk,” said Pei. “Whose clerk?”
“Gao’s. Sallow, with ink on his fingers. He says he has been sent to see that the count is honest.”
“Gao’s clerk.” Pei sniffed, and turned back to the pot. “They always count with their mouths shut, so nobody hears what they’re adding.”
“The Deacon says to tell you the cautionary tale is expected on time,” the runner said to Lin.
“I’m always on time.”
“That’s not what the Deacon says.”
“Tell him I can count,” said Lin, and the runner grinned. “And tell him to wear his own robe to the basin. The Elders’ servants will think he’s come to be weighed.”
The runner laughed out loud, and then remembered he was on an errand and turned it into a cough. He went off again at a run, his cap still in his hand.
Lin sat down on the bench by the wall. He didn’t hurry. Outside the sun had cleared the roof of the storehouse, and a pale stripe of light crossed the kitchen floor. The porridge had begun to thicken and smell of nutmeg. The cook had gone to the back to fetch more millet. A girl from the Outer Court was scrubbing the far bench with a rag, and the two of them talked about the reading in low, quick voices, and neither of them said the name Gao Wen.
Pei came back with the pot-holder over one hand and a second clay cup, and filled it at the boiling kettle that the cook had left on the back of the hearth. The steam rose up in a thin white thread. She set the cup in front of him.
“Careful,” she said. “It’s hot.”
“I know.”
“You never know. You always touch the cup first and then you swear.”
He reached for it anyway, and he touched it, and he didn’t swear, and Pei looked disappointed in a way that he found almost comforting.
Then the kitchen door opened again, slowly this time, and three young men in the grey of the Outer Court stood on the threshold. The one in the middle wore his sleeves rolled to the elbow, the way a man does when he wants people to notice the forearms. His face was pale and bright at once, and he was smiling. Gao Wen had come to see the day for himself. He had been moved down into that grey since the board went up, after a quarrel in the Inner Court that the kitchen was still talking about.
“They say the cautionary tale floats today,” Gao Wen said, loudly enough for the whole kitchen to hear. He looked past Pei at Lin, and his smile did not change. “Let’s see him float.”