Sect Year 7 · ninth month · day 24 · Azure Stream Sect, Outer Court
Twenty days at home had made a rule. He slept on the lodging floor with his coat folded under his head, and he didn’t count what came through the window. The Wheel had not spoken since the Reserve. For the first week he had lain awake listening for it, and it hadn’t come. By the third week he had stopped listening and begun to sleep the way the Outer Court’s boys slept, flat and sudden, with one hand laid over his chest.
The Outer Court woke as it always had, in pieces. First came the water carriers on the lower path, their yokes creaking under full buckets. Then the wooden swords began to slap on the practice ground behind the kitchens, and then Hou Meng’s voice called the first roll from the top step. Lin lay with his eyes shut and let each sound come in and find its place. In his first year every one of these sounds had been something he could hear and could not reach. Now he could reach them, and he lay a while longer anyway, because reaching for a thing was not the same as being sure of it.
