Sect Year 8 · first month · day 2 · Azure Stream Sect, record room
Lin turned twenty-seven at the first bell of the first month, and he didn’t mark it. The day came up over the terraces with the mist lying low in the valley, and he watched it from the record-room window while the kettle on the doorstep took its time to boil. He hadn’t turned the Wheel since the mat. He had slept, eaten what Pei brought up the path without a word about it, and sat at the record desk with his left hand in his lap and his right hand resting on a page he wasn’t writing on. The silent week was quiet in him, the way a field lies quiet after the plough has gone through, and he didn’t yet know what would come up out of it.
“You’re twenty-seven,” Su said, without looking up from her page.
“Yes.”
“I’m twenty-nine as of the bell this morning. Don’t make a fuss about it.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.” She turned a leaf and smoothed it flat with two fingers. “Neither of us is going to make a fuss.”
The Court courier came up the valley road from Qingliu at the middle bell. He was a thin young man in dun wool, with the Court’s stamp on his satchel strap and the grey dust of the county road still caked on his boots. He had ridden hard, and he looked as though he hadn’t yet…
