Sect Year 6 · fourth month · day 1 · the Reaches, the reading hall
Lin woke on the cot behind the lower stacks with the window still in his eyes.
For a while there was nothing else. He saw the bend in the road, the snow lying along the verge like a sheet drawn up to the chin, and one lamp a long way down that did not move. Then the lamp went out of him. He was looking at the reading hall of the Hanging Reaches, at the high window full of grey daylight, at the Ledger open on its frame and the lamps that had never once warmed a finger in all his months on the stair.
He breathed. The breath came slowly and went all the way down, and it didn’t catch at the top the way it had on the stair. He laid his right hand flat on the blanket and asked his heart to slow. He didn’t need to ask twice. The beat dropped under his ribs and eased and held. The steadiness settled in his chest like a tool someone had left for him on a bench, with no word about how it was to be used. He had been given rungs and margins and one grey coat. He hadn’t been given a tool in a long time. He didn’t yet know what it was for.
