Sect Year 9 · third month · day 4, midday · Azure Stream Sect, the spring
The first warm light of the spring reached the basin at midday and lay across the open water. Lin felt it on the back of his neck, through the thin cloth of his shirt, and he didn’t move out of it. The stone under the mat had warmed a little at its centre. The water was still cold to the hand.
Su had turned the record a little toward the light, so that the second page lay clear of the shadow of her own hand. She looked at the second line, which was written in the same brown ink as the first, and which had been copied from his mouth in the same winter.
“Heal the city that drowned you,” Lin said.
His voice wandered on the last word. Drowned went thin in his mouth, and while it hung there he heard the water running under the stone, a sound that had been in the basin the whole morning and that he hadn’t once heard. He stopped. The silence after the word was long enough for the wren to come back to the rim and go away again, and he couldn’t find the line in himself.
