Sect Year 3 · seventh month · night of day 9 · Azure Stream Sect, the east road, then the twenty-eighth life: Duanwei, his first year
The light came into the cave through a slit cut above the spring, and each morning for two months it fell on the same thing. Su’s letter lay on the table beside the lamp, where Lin had set it on the night the runner brought it up the slope. The wax faced the wall. The paper had not been opened and had not been moved, and every dawn he woke on the cot and looked at the back of it before he looked at anything else.
Not yet, he thought, every dawn. Then he got up and went down the slope to the spring.
The water came out of the hill under a flat stone and ran over a gap in the rock. It was loud enough to hear from the cot and quiet enough that a man kneeling beside it had to lean in to catch what it was saying. Lin knelt there each morning with his right palm in the cold and tried to be calm.
The Wheel could not be forced. He had known that since the first night of the first life. At the gate the Abbot had granted him the time he asked for, in his plain voice, as though calm were a term of trade. The Wheel would not turn for a man who was afraid.
