Sect Year 6 · twelfth month · night of day 29 · the Ledger gallery, and the Reserve’s edge below it
Pei kept her count in the margin of her book, in fives, the way the outer court’s cooks kept their tally of rice sacks. By the gallery lamp on the last night of the year she had filled most of a page. Each mark stood for one day they had gone down the gravel slope to the water, and she made every one with the same short stroke, pressing so hard that the nib caught in the paper.
“Two hundred and eleven,” she said, without looking up.
“You had two hundred and nine last week.”
“I counted two more. You weren’t watching me count them.” She blew on the page, though the ink had been dry for weeks. “That’s the trouble with counting. It goes on whether anyone is looking or not.”
Lin sat on the rail beside the lamp with his back against the cold stone. The lamp gave light and nothing else. He had stopped expecting it to give anything else months ago. He held his left hand on his knee, where it lay half open, as it always lay now, and he wrote with his right on the Court’s plain paper.
