Sect Year 1 · fifth month · day 21 · Azure Stream Sect, Inner Court
Later that grey morning Lin sat up on the cot. The seal under his ribs, the closed gate he had pushed at since the spring, gave a sound like a pin going home, small and final, and then there was nothing. He kept still with his hands on his knees and waited for his breath to come back in its own order. It came in pieces at first, and then in a line.
The cave was cut into the ridge, and the ridge carried everything. Somewhere below in the Inner Court’s lower yard a student drawing water must have heard the sound, or felt it through the stone, because a bucket hit the flags and went rolling. Then the yard went quiet, in the way a yard goes quiet when everyone in it has agreed not to look up.
Lin dressed by feel. The cold in his left arm lay where it always lay, and he worked the fingers until they answered him. He didn’t go back over the night. Something had been in it, and it had been taken from him or set down in him, and he hadn’t been asked which. He knew only that the thing which had sat under his ribs since the spring, closed and heavy as a gate, had moved. He had pushed at that gate for months the way he pushed at a basin’s needle, and it had…
