Sect Year 3 · eighth month · day 25 · the north ridge above Azure Stream Sect, at dawn
The grade came first, in the dark, the way the Wheel always gave it. There was no voice to it and no sound. There was only the word, set down on a line of its own, and the weight of it settling into the place where the life had been.
honest
Lin woke on the cave floor of the north ridge with the cold lying across his chest. It had lain on that side for longer than he liked to count, from the shoulder over the collarbone and down into the ribs, heavy and patient, as though someone had put a sleeping animal there and asked it not to move.
His left hand was closed about halfway, though the wrist under it was steady. He opened the hand one finger at a time. The fingers did what he asked, a little late, as they always did before the morning had warmed them.
In the palm there was nothing. In the fingers there was the stroke. The short curved hook a clerk makes at the end of a struck line, the return that runs back under the cut so that the cut can still be read. The hand knew it. He hadn’t known that a thing like that could live in a hand. He couldn’t say it aloud as a sentence, or copy it out as a figure for someone else to…
