Sect Year 4 · second month · day 9 · the new ford, first light, then the gorge road
Before the light did, the cold came up off the water. Lin sat on the stone bench with his coat buttoned to the throat and watched the grey come over the gorge rim one stripe at a time, first on the far wall, then on the broken arch in the river, then on the bench itself. Frost lay white on the rail. His breath hung in front of him and did not want to leave.
Su sat at the other end of the bench with the record open on her knee. She had waited for the light, as she had said she would, and now that it was here she didn’t hurry. She wet the pen at the small ink pot she carried in her sleeve, tapped it once on the lip, and bent her head over the page.
Lin watched her write. She didn’t look up. She set the pen under the dash on the page, under the day’s own date and the place, and she wrote the question out, word for word, as she wrote everything she meant to keep. Who else is kept from finishing? She put no mark after it. She didn’t add an adjective or a name or a note of her own in the margin. She left the rest of the line blank, all the way to the edge of the page.
