Sect Year 5 · fifth month · day 2 · the shelf road, in rain
A taste of cold ash was in Lin’s mouth when he opened his eyes on the cot at Kettle Bend, and for a moment he had no idea what town he was in. The room was low and whitewashed, with a crack in the plaster above the door that someone had smoothed over with a wet thumb. Rain tapped on the roof tiles. Beyond the shutter the inn yard was grey, and the bell over the stable arch rang the morning watch. Lin counted the strokes without meaning to. Seven. He stopped there, because the number felt like something he had been told rather than something he had seen.
Pei was asleep in the chair beside the cot. She had pulled her coat over her knees and tucked her hands into its sleeves, and her head had slipped sideways against the wall. Her own book lay on the floor, face down, where it had slid from her lap. Lin did not reach for it. He lay still and looked at the crack in the plaster and tried to remember the night.
There was very little. A window. A stranger’s grief, heavy in the chest, the kind that did not lift when a hand was laid on it. A cold basin under someone’s palm. He hadn’t looked up. He didn’t know whose window it was, or who the grief belonged to, only that it had been…
