Sect Year 9 · third month · day 2 · Azure Stream Sect, the record room
The question came at the edge of sleep, after the lamp had been trimmed and the shutters drawn against the cold that came down off the cliff.
“One night. One life. Will you turn?”
“Not tonight,” Lin said into the dark.
He said it aloud. In the first weeks after the spring he had only thought the answer, and the Wheel had seemed to wait for more, the way a clerk waits at a window with the stamp already inked. So he began to speak it each night in an ordinary voice, and each night the question went away without argument. Then he slept as himself. That was the whole of the arrangement, and he had kept to it for a year.
He didn’t refuse because he was afraid of a life. He had learned in the silent life that a life could be lived for its own sake, and he had learned it too late to feel proud of it. He didn’t know whether a man could learn a thing twice. He wasn’t going to test it on a stranger’s night.
The question came the next night, and the night after that, and on every night since. He answered it every time.
