Sect Year 2 · eleventh month · day 21 · the Qingliu fork post-house, the stable yard
Nowhere else at the fork let the carriers stretch without someone’s elbow in their ribs, so they had taken to the stable yard. The cold had settled into the flat stone slabs overnight, and the puddles by the gate had skinned over with ice that cracked under the first cart wheel.
Pei had carried a barrel lid out from the stable and set it on two upturned buckets for a table. She had weighted its corners with four stones from the well-rim, and she sat on a third bucket beside it with the notebook open and her hands tucked into her armpits. She waited for the first of the carriers to come out of the stable.
“You’ve been out here since first light,” Lin said, coming across the yard with an armful of kindling.
“Yes.” She didn’t get up. “Come and look at it.”
He set the kindling down against the stable wall, where a little sun would reach it by noon if the cloud broke, and shifted the armful so that his right hand took the weight. He didn’t need to think about it. He had carried most things with the right hand since the Cold Ash, and the left hung at his side with the fingers half curled, the way it had hung on the road south. He went to look.
