Sect Year 3 · third month · day 8 · Azure Stream Sect, the record room
The runner who brought Su’s letter did not take it to the gate. He came up the Inner Court stair with mud to the thigh, went past the Elders’ hall with its doors shut against the spring damp, and stopped at the record room because the cover told him to. Lin was sitting inside at the lamp-end table, where he had been since the morning porridge.
The shelves of old sect ledgers rose on three sides of him to the beams, and the room smelled of damp paper and lamp oil and the cold stone that never quite dried. The record-room keeper took the letter from the boy’s hand and turned it over before he passed it on.
“She writes to the room,” the keeper said. He was an old man with two pairs of glasses pushed up one above the other, and he read the cover again as though it might have changed. “Not to a student. Not to the gate. To the room.” He sniffed. “I’ve had letters addressed to a water tank before. They never came.”
He gave the letter to Lin. It was a single sheet folded in three, sealed with plain wax and a thumbprint pressed into it. Lin turned it over twice before he broke the seal with his thumb.
