Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 21 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
The woodshed smelled of split pine and damp sacking, and of the cold that came up through the packed floor no matter how many sacks were laid over it. There was no lamp lit. Moonlight came through the gap at the door’s hinge in a thin grey bar and lay across the boards. The draught came in with it and set the bar trembling every time the wind moved the roof edges outside. Across the yard the kitchen bell rang the second watch, one flat stroke and then nothing, and the cooks’ voices went on under it for a while before they stopped.
Lin sat on the edge of the cot with his boots off and his bare feet on the floor. The cloth bundle with the cracked jade in it lay under the pillow, where it always lay now. He didn’t take it out. The halves were cold when he touched them, and they stayed silent, which was as much as he had asked of them for a year.
He couldn’t see the post from where he sat. He knew where it stood, beside the door on the outside, and he knew how many cuts it held. The twenty-first had gone in at first light with his blunt knife, one stroke, before the kitchen fires were lit. Nine remained, and then the post would be full, and the thirty days would be spent one way or another. He didn’t need the notches now. He looked toward the door anyway.
On the nail inside the door hung the short hammer. He had taken it off the stable peg again that week without asking, and he hadn’t yet taken it back. The stable hand would have something to say about that. Lin lifted his right hand into the moonlight and turned it over slowly. The calluses across the heel and along the first two fingers were paler than the skin around them, and in that light they had the same pale edge as the cuts on the post outside. He let the hand fall back onto his knee.
Outside, a dog barked twice at the kitchen gate and then gave up.
Pei came round the woodpile a little after that, with a lamp in one hand and a cup in the other and her shawl pulled tight over her head. She pushed the door wider with her hip and set the lamp down on the upturned bucket. Light spread across the room, yellow and warm, and it showed him the bare walls and the notched post through the crack, and her face, which was scowling.
“It’s boiled,” she said, and put the cup on the stool beside the cot. “I did it myself. The cook can’t say I didn’t.”
Lin reached for it and tasted it before he drank. The water was flat and clean, with only a faint scorch from the pot. He swallowed and set the cup down.
Pei watched him do it. “It’s boiled, Lin. It’s fine.”
“I know.”
“Then why taste it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and found that he didn’t.
She sat down on the bucket with her knees together and the lamp at her feet, so that her face was lit from below. “Everybody’s saying Gao Wen’s voice went up like a goose’s. In the kitchen. Cook did the voice. It was very bad.”
“He wasn’t wrong to be angry.”
“He was wrong to make a ring.” She picked at a splinter on the bucket’s rim. “The cook says somebody has to sweep the chalk off the yard in the morning. He says it’ll be you, because you’re the one who walked across it.”
“I didn’t walk across it. I stepped over the line.”
“That’s the same thing if you’re the cook.”
He almost smiled. It didn’t quite get out.
Pei looked at him for a long moment. “You walked away from Gao Wen,” she said. “He’s been waiting three years for you to hit him. He practised the whole thing in the mirror of the washing trough. You know he did.”
“I didn’t want to hit him.”
“That’s new.”
“Yes,” said Lin. “It is.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it.”
He didn’t much like it himself. The thing in his chest that had wanted to hit Gao Wen had been quiet all afternoon. He couldn’t tell whether that was because it had grown up or because it had been put away somewhere he would have to go looking for it later. He thought it was the second. A thing a man put aside for years tended to come out at the worst possible hour, and usually with a poor sense of timing.
She pulled the shawl down off her head and let it sit on her shoulders. Her hair was coming loose from its tie. She pushed it back with the heel of one hand, the way she did when she was about to say something she had decided on earlier, in the kitchen, in front of the pots. “I think you’re going to be someone else by spring,” she said. “I think you’ll walk into the Inner Court and come out in a different coat and not look back at the woodshed at all.”
“I don’t feel different.”
“You don’t sound like you anymore.”
“I know.”
“Good,” said Pei. “You used to sound like a stool.”
He laughed then, a short surprised sound that hurt his chest a little, the way a laugh does when it has been kept back too long. Pei looked pleased with herself and tried not to show it, and failed.
Then her face changed. She pulled one knee up to her chin and rested her cheek on it, and when she spoke again her voice had gone quieter, the way it did when she was passing on something she hadn’t been meant to hear. “They say Elder Xu’s grandson is dying.”
Lin waited.
“The boy’s nine. The alchemists made a pill for his lungs. They made it too strong, and now his channels are full up to the chest and empty below it. Nothing draws back, the kitchen says. They’ve given him up. The mother’s been crying in the garden for two days.” She swallowed. “The Inner Court has said no Outer student may go near the house. Not the gate. Not the wall. Hou Meng had a runner come down to tell the kitchen twice.”
“Then somebody should ask,” said Lin.
“Ask what?”
“Whether anyone’s been allowed to try.”
He thought of the grey-robed clerks who had copied his name onto the roll, and of the Elders who had walked past him on the terrace stairs without turning their heads. None of them had ever needed a cup of water from him. None of them had asked for anything. The boy in the Xu house was nine years old, though, and he hadn’t written anything on any roll, and nobody had asked him whether he wanted to be given up.
Pei stared at him over her knee. “You can’t go in there. You’re an Outer student with a fourth layer that only came out at dusk. Gao Shun’s men will have you on the stairs before you’re halfway up.”
“Then I’ll be on the stairs,” said Lin. He hadn’t decided anything yet about the stairs. He had only decided about the boy, and that seemed enough to be going on with.
She didn’t argue. She only looked at him, and then at the cup of boiled water on the stool, and then at the hammer on its nail. “Tomorrow,” she said, “keep the water boiling. Early. Before the fires are lit.”
“Yes.”
“It’s already boiling,” said Pei, getting to her feet and shaking out the shawl. “It always is. Don’t tell me it isn’t.” She picked up the lamp, then set it back down again, having decided it wasn’t yet time to go. She began to hum the tune from the woodshed nights, the one she had picked up from him over the pots without his ever teaching it to her on purpose. Halfway through the second line she stopped and frowned, as though she had caught a wrong note somewhere in it and could not find where.
The Wheel did not stir. Lin noticed that it didn’t. There was no pull under his ribs, no cold running up his arm from the palm, no voice. He sat on the cot and listened to the quiet of it, and to the girl humming badly in the lamplight, and to the wind working at the roof edges.
Somebody knocked at the outer gate.
The knock was nothing like the gate-watch’s, the one with the tired rhythm that Ruan Tiao gave the oak when he had been awake too long. It was two flat strikes, hard and evenly spaced, the knock of someone who expected to be answered before they had finished knocking. Pei was on her feet before the second one landed. She went to the door and pulled it open wide, and cold air came in around her, and the lamp flame bent over sideways and then straightened.
A lantern came round the woodpile, swinging on a pole. Behind it walked a servant of the Inner Court in grey and green, with his sleeves pinned back and no breath to spare on greetings. He stopped at the threshold and looked past Pei, past the lamp and the bucket and the cup, to the cot where Lin sat with his bare feet on the boards.
“The Elder asks for the student who counted his fourth layer,” the servant said. “His grandson can’t breathe.”
Lin stood up. He didn’t look at Pei, because he knew what her face would be doing. He crossed the room, took the short hammer down from its nail by the door, and weighed it once in his hand. It was cold and heavy in his hand, the way it had felt all autumn.
Then he went out after the lantern, into the dark between the woodpile and the gate.