Sect Year 1 · fifth month · night of day 19 · the ninth life: Greywater, his twenty-sixth year
The master’s seat stood empty above the yard. Nobody had sat in it since the guard post roll went up in the spring, and the gallery shutters had swollen in the damp until they wouldn’t close. Liang Hu had gone to his sister’s house on the coast the winter after the rains. He had left a note pinned to the gate-post, which the boys had read aloud and then argued about, and which said only: The rack is yours. Count it every morning.
Edric counted it. Twenty-two swords, and one of them cracked along the grip, which he hadn’t put there and did not know who had. He stood at the rack in the grey light of the first clear morning after the floods and held the cracked sword a while before he put it back. Then he unpinned the shutters one after another, and the yard filled with the sound of wood knocking on wood.
Nobody else would take the morning class. The older boys had gone to the guard post or the ferries or the silk-sheds in the upper town. The younger ones had been told by their mothers that the Greywater school was a thing of the past. So Edric, at twenty-six, with his shoulders set and his feet long past the age of being cheerful about a board, walked out to the middle of the yard and…
