Sleet ticked against Pei Jing’s writing board. Shen’s runner was gone. There was nobody else on the plateau to hear the sound.
The first notebook had begun on the backs of warehouse slips. Seven coppers left. Three owed to the baker. In the second, he found his account of the raid at Mist Peak in Practice Year 18. In the third he had written what happened there in Year 80.
Cheng Shan buried under the old pine. Slate and two bearded hatchets on the grave. Debt cleared. Balance zero.
He had left the girl fifty silver coins and a letter asking the magistrate to help her reach the weaving guild, if she wanted to go. Cheng Shan had pushed the pill back across the table. Pei Jing remembered the glass stopping against his fingers.
Don’t send an old dog out after rabbits again just because you have medicine in your pocket.
Pei Jing had written balance zero because there was nothing more he could do for Cheng. He would have dug the same grave again to spend another evening beside that stove.
He put the notebooks away. Down in the shelter, there were families who would be looking for names on a new list. He wrote Ke’s name on an empty slip before he could forget which wagon his mother had been on. Then he set his heel into the seam and listened.
