Sect Year 6 · third month · night of day 29 · the fifty-eighth life: a schoolhouse above a road bend, across the sea, the boy’s eighth year
Lin lay down on his cot behind the lower stacks of the reading hall, calm and willing, with his hands open on the blanket. The Wheel asked its question in the dark.
“One night. One life. Will you turn?”
“Yes,” Lin said, to no one in the room.
“Wait for the student who will remember you.”
“Plain Ear.”
Ren Zhuo was eight years old when the village sent him up the road with a bundle of rice on his back and a slate under his arm. The road went up from the valley in long loops, between banks of old snow gone grey and hard in the sun. His aunt had walked him to the first bend and no further. She had pressed a cloth bag of rice into his hands and said that the master up there would take him for nothing, provided he didn’t argue. Ren Zhuo had nodded. He hadn’t understood what there was to argue about. He had only understood that the road was long, that his feet hurt. That he wasn’t going to cry in front of the mule-wagon drivers, who were watching from the lower bend with their pipes in their teeth.
