Sect Year 1 · sixth month · day 18 · Azure Stream Sect, Inner Court north ridge
“Sit on the step with the lamp,” Lin said. “Please.”
Su looked up from the table, where she had been copying the morning roll into the Inner Court’s fair book, and her pen stopped above the page. Two names on the roll were not on it the day before. One was a Core student from the western barracks, who had been sent down the mountain on an errand. The other was a boy from the lower terraces who had been ill, and whose name Su wrote with a small, neat question mark beside it, as though she couldn’t decide whether he was dead or only absent.
“You want company for your sleep,” she said.
“I’d rather not be alone with it.”
She regarded him for a while. Then she took the lamp from the shelf and carried it out onto the step, set it on the flat stone, and sat down beside it with the black book on her knee. She didn’t argue, and she didn’t ask why. Her pen lay across the cover, waiting.
“The clerk in grey was at the roll this morning,” she said, to the dark. “The sallow one. He wrote your name, and then he wrote mine, and then he simply looked at the two of them.”
