Sect Year 9 · third month · day 7, morning · Azure Stream Sect, the spring
The morning was pale and wet. Mist lay on the water in a low white skin that thinned as the light reached it, and by the time the sun touched the rim of the basin the skin had gone to beads on the fern fronds and to a faint steam off the flat stone. The top notch stood where it had stood all week. Lin had checked it on the climb, as he had checked each terrace, and it hadn’t moved a finger’s width.
Su had the lamp lit before he reached the rim. She had brought it up wrapped in a cloth against the damp, and its flame was low and clean. She knelt beside the record with her hair tied back and her coat drawn close at the throat, and when he sat down on the mat she shifted the book toward him, as if to make room for it on a table he couldn’t see.
Her hand came out and rested on the cuff of his left sleeve. Her fingers found the place where her knot sat under the cloth, a single hard point the size of a seed, and stayed there. She didn’t pull. She had never pulled it, not once since the Loom, and he didn’t think she meant to start on the flat stone at first light.
