Sect Year 3 · third month · day 13 · Azure Stream Sect, the Elders’ hall and the Deacon’s office
The Elders sat at the morning session in the old hall, with the light coming in grey through the high windows and lying in long bars across the floor. Sect Master Gao Tingjun presided from the chair at the head of the hall. The reformists sat on the right under Elder Xu Bairen.
The conservatives sat on the left under Han Qiwen, a narrow man with a soft voice and an ink-stained thumb that he kept rubbing along the edge of his bench. Lin stood at the foot of the hall, where a Core student stood when he had been asked to speak and had not yet been told he might sit.
He hadn’t been asked to speak. He had asked.
“I want leave to go down the road,” he said. “With a blade.”
Gao Tingjun looked at him for a long moment before he answered. He was a heavy man with a scholar’s stoop and a face that had been tired for years, and his voice was patient in the way of a man who had already decided. “No,” he said. “The cage took them out of the arch. It will take the next one who walks into its shadow. I will not spend a Core student to learn that twice.”
