Sect Year 2 · ninth month · night of day 14 · the twenty-fifth life: the valley under Silent Terrace, Ah Dong’s ninth year
No rain came in the autumn, and none came in the winter. By the time the frost went out of the ground, the bean terraces had cracked into grey plates that lifted at the edges. The stream beneath the forge had shrunk to a thread that ran between stones nobody had seen before. The old men gathered at the bridge each morning to look at the river. They didn’t say much about it. They looked, and then they went back up the valley to their own terraces, and the looking seemed to do them some good.
Ah Dong went down with Fen on the morning the bucket broke. They had been sent for water. The bucket had split a stave against a rock on the path, and Fen would not go home without it. Her mother had sent her out with a bucket, and a bucket was what she had to bring back.
“You can’t carry water in that,” Ah Dong said.
“I can carry it in a bucket somebody has mended.”
“Mended by who?”
“By you,” said Fen. “You’re the forge-boy. Everything you touch comes back whole.”
