Sect Year 3 · eighth month · day 2 · Azure Stream Sect, the cave residence on the spring slope
His left hand had closed on something in the night, and Lin knew before he knew anything else that the hand was not empty. Something lay inside the fingers. It had weight, and it didn’t shift when he moved, and it was warm, as a stone grows warm only after it has been held a long time in someone else’s palm.
The cave was grey. Light came through the slit window above the cot in a thin blade and lay across the blanket, the wall and the back of his right wrist. He let his eyes learn the room again. Rafters black with lamp smoke. The clay jar of oil on the shelf. Under everything, the water running beneath the flat stone outside, steady and near, the one sound on the slope that never stopped.
He tried to sit up. His right arm pushed, and the room tipped toward the window and came back, and his legs did not come with him at all. They lay on the blanket like two sacks someone had set down and forgotten to lift. He had woken on the morning of the tenth with the shard already cold and hard in his fingers. Then the soul strain of what he had carried through the turn had taken him down again into fever.
