Sect Year 3 · eighth month · day 14 · the Azure Stream spring, above the Outer Court
The runner came up the terraces when the sun had cleared the pines. He carried his sandals in one hand, because the stones were slick with the night’s damp. He took the last of the walled steps barefoot, with the care of someone who had been warned the path was steeper than it looked.
He was one of the Deacon’s boys, thin and sunburnt, in a coat let out at the seams for a broader man. At the top he stopped and looked at the grave. Then at Lin, and then back at the grave, as though he had been sent to check both and had not been told which one would answer.
Lin sat with his back against the spring stones and did not get up. The stones had taken the early light and held it. The water came out of the rock at his shoulder and ran over the gravel in its narrow channel. Its sound filled the hollow under the two old pines so fully that a man could hear nothing else unless he went looking for it.
Lin had been going looking for five days. The Wheel had spoken its line at dusk on the twelfth day, the one about the account, and it had said nothing since. Every morning he listened for it the way a man listens for a step on a stair he is sure…
