Sect Year 6 · second month · day 10 · the Hanging Reaches, the reading hall
Pei kept the count on the rail of the stool. Each morning of the silence she pressed her thumbnail into the worn wood beneath the seat, one small notch at a time, and each morning Lin watched her do it and said nothing. By the seventh morning there were seven notches in a neat row. The wood between them had gone pale where her nail had gone in, and the grain had lifted a little at the end of the row, like the corner of a page someone had turned too often.
He had spent the rest-days on the stool. He hadn’t gone down to the tables, and no clerk had come up to ask him to. He had sat with his back to the cold wall and said the first eight entries over to himself, slowly, from the beginning. Tirrel Tane. The salt house that bought a woman two ages early. The Court factor and the weaver’s son drawn from the flats. He said each name in the same low voice he had used at the table, and at the end of each entry he stopped and waited the length of one breath before he went on. The reading had taught him that the waiting was part of the count.
