Sect Year 6 · third month · night of day 29 · the fifty-eighth life: the schoolhouse, his forty-fourth year
The boy came up the steps at dusk with the letter already open in his hand. He had read it at the foot of the road. There, the last cart of the winter had put him down. Ren Zhuo could tell from the soft crease down the middle of the sheet and the way the boy held his mouth that he had read it more than once. He was seventeen now. He stood nearly a head taller than Ren Zhuo had stood at that age. The coat he wore had been let out at the shoulders by a widow in the lower village who would not take a copper for the work.
“It’s from the lowland house,” Bai Tong said. “They’ve taken me for the spring session.”
“I can see the crane on the seal,” said Ren Zhuo.
The seal was the check house’s, a crane with its wings half open in red wax. He knew it from the posts at the foot of the road. There, the test judges pinned their notices for the valley to read, and he had never once seen it come up the hill. It looked smaller in the boy’s hand than it had looked on the posts. Everything did, once it was carried.
