Sect Year 3 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the twenty-eighth life: Duanwei, the river quarter, his thirty-fifth year
The invitation came up the bank the spring after the men left their roll on the table. It was a folded sheet in a clerk’s hand, four words long: Come up. The cloth is clean. Ning read it twice by the schoolhouse lamp and handed it to Hu Wanqing, who read it once and gave it back.
“He’s never asked us to dinner,” she said.
“He’s never asked me to anything.”
“Then go and see what it costs.” She turned back to the rice ledger. “Go on foot. I’ll wait at the gate with Bo Xi. She’s been asking to be carried up that hill since the autumn, and I’m not carrying her up it for the prefect.”
The prefect’s house stood at the top of the hill above the river. There, the old prefect had lived before the tax men moved him out. It was the only house in Duanwei with a well that tasted of nothing. Ning drank a cup at the gate and could not tell what he was drinking, which was a strange thing to be grateful for.
