Sect Year 3 · eighth month · day 5 · Azure Stream Sect, the east gate
On the fifth day Lin walked to the east gate on his own feet. He carried Gao Wen’s spare pole in his right hand. Gao Wen had cut it from a length of ash in the yard and leaned it against the cot without a word, and it was rough under the palm and too short by a finger’s width. The shard lay closed in his left fist.
His hand had found the shard the day before and had not let it go since, and he had stopped asking it to. It took him the time it takes a pot of tea to steep to reach the milestone. Pei walked on his left as far as the bend in the terraces. There she stopped, because he had told her to, and he heard her call something rude after him from the road.
The gate-road ran down past the cookhouse and the bow-shop, and every step went through his knees. He didn’t count the steps. He counted the terraces instead, because they were easier to keep in order. Someone had cleared the drains. The paddies had been dug out and left to stand with water in them, bright and still under the sky, and the cookhouse smoke rose straight up in the windless morning.
