Sect Year 6 · fourth month · day 3 · the Reaches, the reading hall
“You said nine,” Pei said. “Three times. Then you said it was a bad count and asked for the lamp.”
Lin lifted his head off the desk. The reading hall was still grey, the way it always was before the lamps were trimmed, a long cold room of slanted tables with the stools pushed in square. His neck had set in the night. His right hand had gone to sleep on the open page of the ox’s leaf, and when he bent it the blood came back in needles.
“I was counting faces,” he said.
“Whose?”
“A girl’s. She was at a river market, and a man kept changing his face under a lamp. She counted them.” He pressed his right palm flat on the wood. “She got nine. She was right about the number. I don’t think she was right about anything else.”
Pei sat on the stool beside his, her book open on her knee and her pencil already between her fingers. She had kept her own book since she was twelve. She wrote in it the way Su wrote in the record, small and without adjectives. “What else did I hear?”
