Chapter 9: The Winter Ritual

Snow lay on the Hall's courtyard on the morning of the Winter Ritual, and six hundred people stood in it.

The two hundred Qi Hall disciples had come down from the terraces in lines of blue.

They stood apart from the forty Medicine Brothers in their white-grey sashes.

The two halls had never learned to stand close together.

On a low dais at the north end sat the Council.

Six Seats of the seven were filled.

The seventh chair, the Hall's, stood empty at the end with a layer of old snow that nobody had swept.

The Abbot sat in the middle.

Su Jingzhi was a hundred and fifty-two and looked seventy, thin and straight, with a short white beard and a plain wooden sword at his belt.

He sat with his eyes half closed, and he looked bored.

Beside him sat the Gate Seat, a broad man with a scar that ran from his ear to the point of his chin.

Cen Yu knew him by reputation only.

Every vessel in the Long Shed knew the Gate Seat, who had once written a petition to burn the Hall's Insect House to the ground.

"The Council will vote after the proof," the Elder said, from the Hall steps.

His voice carried to the back of the crowd.

"Four of six Seats may cut the Hall's share of rice and roof by half. The Hall asks only that you watch, and judge."

"Bring the volunteer."

A young Qi Hall disciple stepped out of the blue ranks, and he walked across the snow with his chin up.

He was perhaps twenty-two, broad in the shoulder, with the clean, scrubbed look of someone who had never been sick.

"He is the Gate Seat's own student," the Elder said gently. "He has asked to be the one."

The Gate Seat did not look at him, and his scarred jaw was tight.

A brother brought a cup of black liquid on a tray.

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