Sect Year 6 · first month · night of day 1 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
The light came first. Lin saw it on the floor of the reading hall before he saw anyone behind it, a small yellow square that slid across the flat stone slabs and stopped at the threshold. The Court’s lamps never warmed the room, but this one had been lit in a runner’s hand and carried up the stair through the cold, and it threw enough colour to make the stone look wet.
Su stood in the doorway in her plain grey coat, buttoned to the throat. She didn’t come in. Her face was grey from the climb, and her hair had come loose at one side and been pushed back with a hand that had not stopped to look for a pin. She had the record under her left arm, wrapped in its grey cloth, held the way a person holds a thing that someone might try to take. She was twenty-seven. She had plainly counted every one of the steps and had not once let herself stop on one.
Lin stood up from the stool. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. Su waited. She held the lamp low with her weight on both feet, as if a sentence had been left unfinished somewhere on the stair and she meant to stand there until it was finished.
