Sect Year 3 · third month · day 1 · Azure Stream Sect, the east gate, then the west gate and the Wastes road
The fords broke a little before the light, sooner than Osk had said they would. Lin knew it before any rider came up the Qingliu road, because the wardens on the east tower stopped talking all at once. In the quiet after that he could hear the river in the reeds, far off and wrong, like a crowd that has begun to shout and has not yet found the word it wants.
He had slept on a bench in the gatehouse with his coat folded under his head, and he had slept badly. He sat up. His left arm came with him slowly, cold to the collarbone, and he let it come.
By midday the wounded were coming up the Qingliu road. They came on carts with wardens walking beside them, on the backs of men who had carried a friend a mile and could not stop walking, and on their own feet with their hands clamped over their own wounds.
Lin stood in the east gate yard with the cot-lines behind him and counted the carts over the rise. Eleven. Then nine more. The Deacon’s clerk had chalked the tally on a board by the trough, and the marks ran in two columns, one for the men who bled and one for the men who did not.
