Sect Year 0 · tenth month · night of day 21 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
Pei had kept a bowl of millet warm on the back of the range under a cloth, and when he came in through the kitchen door she lifted the cloth with the air of a steward unveiling a gift. There were two bowls, not one. Beside them lay a square of folded paper, and on the paper a row of pear sweets in pale sugar, each one smaller than the top joint of a finger.
“From the Elder’s household,” she said. “The steward’s boy gave them to me at the back gate. He said they were for the Outer student who counted his fourth layer.”
“Did he say that?”
“He said it like he was reading it off a list. I told him I was the Outer student who counts the pots.” She ate one sweet before Lin could reach for it. “Those are mine. I was owed them for carrying the wrong bucket to the wrong door.”
The kitchen was almost empty at this hour. The fires were banked to a red line under the iron, the cook had gone to bed with a jug of rice wine and a grievance. The long table had been scrubbed so hard that the grain stood up in the wood. Liu Mai, the kitchen girl, was at the far sink scouring the big pots with sand and a rag. She was thirteen or fourteen, thin in the arms, with the habit of talking to whatever she was working on. She was talking to the pots now.
Lin sat down and ate the millet. It was warm and a little burnt on the bottom, which was how the cook made it when he was in a temper. The bowl steadied his hands. He hadn’t known until he sat down how much they had been shaking. Through the high window the yard was black, and the well bucket hung on its hook by the door, dripping at a steady pace onto the flags. Somebody would have to mop that up before morning, and it would be him, because it always was.
“How is the boy?” Pei asked, settling on the bench across from him.
“He woke once. He asked for his grandfather.”
“They always ask for the grandfather. Nobody ever asks for the cook.” She pushed the paper of sweets a finger’s breadth toward him, which was as close as she came to apologising for eating his share. “The sallow clerk came down before the cook had the second fire lit. Gao’s clerk. He wanted to know what the Outer Court is served at supper. He wrote the answer down while I was still saying it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Millet. Cabbage. Whatever the cook doesn’t want.” She shrugged. “He wrote down the cabbage twice.”
“And the water?”
“Boiled. The cook boiled the whole jug and grumbled the whole time, as he does when somebody else has had the good idea.” Pei dipped her spoon into the millet and considered it. “Then the Deacon came down to see what the fuss was. He tasted a cup, said it was a fuss, and asked for a second cup. He looked at the jug afterwards as if it had said something rude about his mother.”
“Did he say he would stop it?”
“He said the cook could boil what he liked, so long as it never turned up in the ledger.” She licked a crumb of sugar from her thumb. “The cook says that’s the Deacon saying yes. I think it’s the Deacon saying he hasn’t decided.”
“They call it the Cold Ash Palm,” said Liu Mai, to the pots. “The men at the lower gate. Gao Wen’s men. They say it like it’s a dish you order.” She scrubbed at a black ring. “It leaves a grey thread under the skin for a day after. You can see it if you hold your arm up to the lamp. Like a vein that’s gone the wrong way.”
She stopped scrubbing and turned round, and held out her own wrist across the pot to show him. It was a thin girl’s wrist with a white scar from a hot ladle, and it was clean.
“Where did you hear the name?” Lin asked.
“The cook’s brother drinks at the lower gate. He hears things and tells the cook. The cook tells everybody, because he can’t stand to be the only one who knows a thing.” She went back to the ring. “And it’s not a grip, you know. Everybody says it’s a grip, like you’re holding somebody’s arm till it goes numb. It’s more like a river that’s been turned off at the bend.”
Lin noticed that she had the shape of it wrong, and that she had it wrong as people get a thing wrong when they have only ever watched it from a distance. He didn’t correct her. A kitchen girl with the name of a poison is harmless enough. The man who gave her the name was another matter, and Lin did not want to be the one who told her so.
“Does it hurt?” Liu Mai asked him, without looking up. “When it’s cold, I mean. The cook says it does.”
“Yes.”
“Mine’s never hurt once.”
“That’s because nobody has broken it yet,” said Lin, and was surprised to hear how much he meant it.
Liu Mai turned round properly then, with the rag still in her fist. “What was it like? Being broken.”
Lin thought about it. “Like being told the road has a hole in it, and that you’ll have to walk it anyway.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Less than the cook.”
She laughed at that, and then looked as if she wished she hadn’t, and turned back to her pots.
“You’ve stopped chewing,” said Pei across the table.
He looked up. She was sitting with her chin propped on one fist, her shawl drawn up over her shoulders and a sweet between her teeth.
“Somebody has a name for what broke me,” he said.
“Everybody in this kitchen has a name for something.” Pei took the sweet out of her mouth and examined it. “Most of the names are for the cook.”
A door banged at the far end of the passage. The cook came through it in a nightshirt, a lamp in one hand and the rice wine jug in the other, and looked at the table, the bowls and the scattered paper and the pears, with the face of a woman who has been asleep since the last watch and has woken to find her own kitchen full of visitors.
“Whose sweets are those?” she said.
“The Elder’s household,” said Pei.
“Hm.” She came over, took one from the paper without asking, bit it, and chewed with deep suspicion. “Too sweet for a woman the Deacon has insulted twice since the bell,” she said. She took a second one and went back down the passage with both hands full.
Liu Mai laughed without turning round, a short bright sound, and then said the name again to the pot, as if the pot might answer her.
Lin got up and went to the nearest iron pot. Its handle was black and cold and pitted with years of use. He took hold of it, tapped it once with his knuckle, and listened. It rang low and clean, the note the gate pins gave and the bronze rim of the basin had given on the first night he was read.
Behind him Pei began to hum. It was the tune she had picked up from him over the autumn, without the words. She hummed it the way she always did, a little under her breath and a little behind the beat, as if the tune were a dog she was trying not to wake. He let her go on. He didn’t turn round.
He remembered the duel the way a man remembers a fall down stairs. Not the blow itself, but the moment after, when his arm had stopped answering and he had watched his own fingers try to close and fail. The palm had been cold. It had struck open against his chest and driven down into the spirit veins, and when he tried afterward to find the place where it had stopped, there had been no place. Only the cold, and the sound of the duel-master’s bell, and Gao Wen’s face above him, faintly pleased.
He thought of the grave beside the spring, the grey stone with moss in its letters, and the place by the water where the jade slip had cracked across his palm. Shen Mo had been in that ground for a long time before anyone in the Outer Court thought to ask how he had got there. Lin had been told it was a wasting of the lungs, and he had believed it, as he believed the notices nailed to doors. He had never once thought to ask who nailed them.
“The Cold Ash Palm,” said Liu Mai again, very quietly now, and scrubbed the ring off the pot at last.
“You’ve got your face on,” said Pei.
“Which one?”
“The one where you’re deciding whether to be stupid.” She got up and took his empty bowl, and her thumb pressed the warm rim of it as she turned away. “You’ve been deciding all week. Decide faster. The cook sleeps badly and I want the pots done before he wakes.”
She set the bowl on the rack and was quiet for a moment, which was rare. “Did anyone from the Elder’s house say something to you on the way back?”
“No.”
“You say no the way the cook says the Deacon is fine.” She let the silence sit. “I’ll let it go. Once.”
Lin said nothing about the lane, or the grille, or the voice that had said stop it. He took the girl’s rag from the edge of the sink and began on the second pot. Pei stood at the door and watched him pick up the rag, and she saw that he wasn’t going to say it. For once she didn’t make him.