Sect Year 2 · eleventh month · day 17 · the stable loft over the carriers’ straw, night
The lamp hung from a nail in the rafter, and its flame leaned toward the hatch every time someone started up the ladder. Pei had hung it there herself at dusk. She hadn’t asked whether she should. She had only looked at the nail, and then at Lin, and he had understood that she meant to hold the light for as long as the night needed it.
The loft ran the length of the stable above the stalls. Bundles of blankets lay in rows across the straw, each with a shape asleep inside it, and everyone could feel the wet wool and horse and the sour smell of the stove the post-house kept going below. A shutter at the far end let in a thread of cold. Frost had grown on the inside of the glass in the shape of ferns, and where the lamplight touched them they shone.
Tian Mao lay on a folded blanket beside that shutter. There, the draught came in around the frame. His mother sat at his head with her back against a roof-beam and his hand held in both of hers. The cough had gone bad since the wind came round to the north over the fork. It no longer sounded like a cough. Each breath dragged down into the boy’s chest with a wet catch at the top, then came up thin and quick, and…
