Sect Year 3 · third month · night of day 17 · the twenty-seventh life: Thrice-Bend Ford, his nineteenth year
Lin went down to the road at first light, as he had said he would, with Pei a step behind him and the wardens watching from the tower. What he did there he didn’t put into words afterward, even to himself. He came back up the wall stair before the sun was high, and he didn’t go to the gatehouse, and he didn’t go to the cookhouse.
At noon the Elders’ clerk came up the stair with a notice. The Core student had been seen on the road without the Sect Master’s seal, and the bench would take note of it when it next sat. Lin read it once and folded it into his coat.
For three days after that he kept to the wall and did not go down again. On the third dusk he climbed to the watch-room at the top of the east gate. That was because it had a bench, and because from its window he could see the cage without having to stand beside it.
The watch-room was a stone box with a shuttered window on the road side and a bench built into the wall beneath it. Tonight the shutter stood open. Beyond it the road ran pale under a thin moon. At the bottom of the road the cage stood with its forty-one, and the cage was silent, and no lantern burned near…
