Sect Year 9 · fourth month · dawn of day 3 · Azure Stream Sect, lodging and Outer Court
The window had gone pale before he was properly awake, and the light lay on the bare floor in a thin, cold square. Lin lay still and checked. He went looking without expecting to find anything there, and without wanting to stop searching. No purpose sat in him. No boon waited. No memory had come loose in the night and stood up in the dark to say its piece. No line of any kind came up from the place under his breastbone, and there was nothing to listen for but the room and the window.
Dawn had come with no other life attached to it. He had been ready for something else. He had lain down on the second night with the old readiness still in his chest, the readiness that had waited through every morning since the Wheel first spoke to him at the Azure spring. He had half expected to wake into someone else’s grey light, a stranger’s room, a bell he didn’t know. He had woken into his own. The window showed him the roof of the record room and the drying lines, empty now, and beyond them the cliff, going pink at the top where the sun had reached it.
