Sect Year 9 · third month · day 22, morning · Azure Stream Sect, the record room
Lin woke before the first bell, in the grey light above the Outer Court, with the window a pale square on the wall and the lane still quiet below it. The question had come again in the night. It had come at the edge of sleep, low and formal and without any hurry in it, as it had come every night since the Silent Life. He had answered it as he always did. He lay still now and said the answer once more to the dark, so that it would be said in daylight as well. “Not tonight.”
He didn’t get up at once. He turned his head on the folded coat and looked inward. The life he had kept was where he had left it. It didn’t come at him in pieces, as the old lives had, with cold rails and strange beds and faces rising out of the dark. It was whole, and he could walk into it. He found Anwen first, with a market basket on her arm and a square of cloth tucked over the bread, going down the terrace road ahead of him in the early light. He found the clay yard on the third terrace, the hives on their ledges above the river, their lids gone grey with weather. He found the smell of wax on his hands, which had not been near a comb in more…
